Abstract
The pervasiveness of international conflict makes of it one of the main topics of discussionamong IR scholars. The discipline has extensively attempted to model the conditions andsettings under which armed conflict emerges, at sometimes resorting to formal models as toolsto generate hypotheses and predictions. In this paper, I analyse two distinct approaches toformal modelling in IR: one that fits data into mathematical models and another that derivesstatistical equations directly from a model’s assumption. In doing so, I raise the followingquestion: how should maths and stats be linked in order to consistently test the validity offormal models in IR? To answer this question, I scrutinise James Fearon’s audience costsmodel and Curtis Signorino’s strategic interaction game, highlighting their mathematicalassumptions and implications to testing formal models. I argue that Signorino’s approachoffer a more consistent set of epistemological and methodological tools to model testing,for it derives statistical equations that respect a model’s assumptions, whereas the data-fitapproach tends to ignore such considerations.
Highlights
Studies of armed conflicts date back to ancient times, even when International Relations was not known as a distinct field or discipline
The final question regarding the strategic interaction game and the prospects of empirical testing comes naturally from the Carrubba-Signorino debate: how does a researcher choose between rival models? Luckily, the scholarship has recently been working on feasible tests for comparing the predictions generated by rival models
I have explored two models of international bargaining that had become important in recent literature: Fearon’s model of audience costs and Signorino’s strategic interaction game
Summary
Studies of armed conflicts date back to ancient times, even when International Relations was not known as a distinct field or discipline. Authors focused on the outcomes of the model rather than on audience costs, for the tests they had designed were based on data about phases in a crises and measures of democracy (such as Polity and Freedom House). Fearon’s model could be tested for the existence and the functional form of the audience costs relationship to time.
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