Major Powers and Militarized Conflict

(co-authored with William Reed and Daina Chiba)

Abstract

When scholars make a decision about the unit at which they will conduct a study, they are in a way selecting on the value of an independent variable. This paper focuses on the consequences of using major power status as a decision rule for selecting cases to analyze. In particular, we ask the question of how generalizable are the results that we derive from a study of major powers to sets of non-major powers. We answer this question by exploring whether major powers are behaviorally different from minor powers, or whether a minor power, given the same capabilities as a major power, would behave in the same way. In our analysis we compare the observable differences between major and minor powers between 1870 and 2003 as well as their behavior in a model of conflict initiation. Finally, we use a decomposition model to determine how much of the major powers’ war proneness can be attributed to differences in observable variables and how much to their different behavior. From our results we conclude that most of the variation in conflict propensity of major powers can be attributed to observable characteristics, and not their behavior. We discuss the implications of these results on the study of major powers and on the generalizability of conclusions drawn from major power studies.