Empirical Support for Systemic and Dyadic Explanations of International Conflict

Abstract

Systemic theorists emphasize the interplay of the distribution of power, the number of poles, and their tightness in predicting the occurrence of major-power war. The authors link individual-level incentives to these systemic constraints as factors that might affect the likelihood of war. They believe that their model specification is more comprehensive than any prior effort to evaluate the impact of structural attributes on the risk of major-power war. Empirical results from the individual-level prespective are encouraging when one examines European crises from 1816 to 1965, but there is no evidence that decision makers were significantly constrained by variations in the structural attributes. Neither the distribution of power nor the number or tightness of poles appears to influence the risk of war.