Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My goal in this research is to continue development of a fuzzy systems model that focuses on the connections between international conflict, democratization, and arms transfers. I presented a paper on this subject at ISA-Hawaii. The work consisted of a two-equation model and concentrated on developments within the India-Pakistan dyad during the 1950-2000 period. Equation 1?a system transformation equation?considered the impact of democratization (or autocratization) on India-Pakistan relations; equation 2?an output function?explored the link between dyadic democratization (or autocratization) and the rivals' arms transfer behavior. For ISA-San Diego, I plan on adding a third equation that takes into account third-party influences (notably, those of China) on the rivalry dyad. Were India's relations with Pakistan affected by the sometimes conflictual state of affairs between India and China? Did China's armament programs influence the arms trade choices of either India or Pakistan? As before, empirical work will be conducted through use of several data sets: COPDAB, WEIS and IDEA events data, SIPRI arms trade and expenditure data, and POLITY democratization/autocratization data.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This article evaluates the relative strengths and weaknesses of fuzzy-set methods and additive linear statistical methods for explaining the “great reversal” in Spanish America. From 1750 to 1900, the most marginal colonial territories often became the region’s wealthiest countries, whereas the most central colonial territories often became the region’s poorest countries. To explain this reversal, five competing hypotheses are tested using both statistical and fuzzy-set methods. The fuzzy-set analysis reaches substantively important conclusions, finding that strong liberal factions are probabilistically necessary for economic development and dense indigenous populations are probabilistically necessary for social underdevelopment. By contrast, the statistical analysis generates findings that are not meaningful. These contrasting results are traced to differences in how the methodologies construct populations, formulate hypotheses, understand causation, and measure variables. The article concludes that fuzzy-set analysis and statistical analysis operate in different “causal universes,” and that greater attention should be granted to the causal universe occupied by fuzzy-set analysis.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Despite the longstanding efforts of leading scholars to standardize usage of the term “democracy” in scholarly practice on the basis of precise operational definitions (or perhaps resulting from them?), David Collier and Steven Levitsky found a proliferation of subtypes, a phenomenon they refer to as “democracy with adjectives.” Efforts to define democracy in terms of a “procedural minimum” or those conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a democracy have not produced the intended uniformity of usage and high degrees of inter-coder reliability, but rather led to the identification of hundreds of subtypes, of which “authoritarian democracy,” “neopatrimonial democracy,” “military-dominated democracy,” and “protodemocracy,” are a few.
In this paper I assert that the concept of Democracy is best conceived as a “fuzzy” concept and that data sets of democracies are created by the assimilation of observations based on judgements of similarity vis-à-vis a prototype. Moreover, a close analysis of scholarly practice in research programs in which “democracy” is an important variable reveals the coding processes of scholars to be marked by such processes.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Countries that share rivers have a higher risk of initiating international militarized disputes, over and above being neighbors. They also have slightly higher levels of cooperation. Controlling for the length of the land boundary has shown that the shared river variable is not just a proxy for a higher degree of interaction opportunity. A weakness of earlier work is that the existing shared rivers data do not allow us to distinguish properly between dyads where the rivers run mainly across the boundary and dyads where the shared river runs along the boundary. Dyads with rivers running across the boundary should be expected to give rise to the traditional upstream-downstream scenario in the 'water wars' literature. Dyads where the river forms the boundary might be expected to be conflict-prone for a very different reason, because rivers boundaries are fluid and fuzzy. While the upstream-downstream type of shared river fits into to the neomalthusian resource scarcity scenario, the fuzzy boundary type does not. We test this with a new and improved dataset on shared rivers.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Scholars have long studied the conditions under which the cabinet making process will result in minority, surplus majority, or minimum-winning governing coalitions in parliamentary systems. Among formal approaches, Laver and Shepsle's portfolio allocation model, argues that parties centrally located in policy space have a greater potential for being part of any governing coalition. Further, parties at the median in all directions have a high likelihood of forming a minority government. However, the model predicts that surplus majority coalitions will only form when the number of salient policy dimensions in the political system is greater than two. We incorporate fuzzy set logic in the portfolio allocation model to account for ambiguity in parties' policy preferences. The reformulated model accounts for the formation of surplus majority coalitions in two-dimensional policy space. We illustrate the model's conclusions with a case study of the 1996 surplus majority in the Lithuanian Seimas.