We study the factors that influence citizen support for defense spending in fourteen democracies over the period 2004-2013. We pose two research questions: First, what factors influence citizen support for war and military force? We refer to this as the acceptability of war. Second, in addition...

Gender is now recognized as an important dividing line in American political life, and scholars have accumulated evidence that national security issues are an important reason for gender differences in policy preferences. We therefore expect that the dynamics of support for defense spending...

Researchers investigating the link between trade and peace often face a severe problem of list-wise deletion from missing trade data. Attempts to mitigate this problem include assuming that most observations are zero or imputing the values of such flows. We compare two frequently used trade data...

The authors estimate a model of the job approval ratings of President George W. Bush that includes five sets of variables: a “honeymoon†effect, an autoregressive function that tracks a decline in approval, measures of economic performance, measures of important “rally...

The most widely used theoretical framework in international relations is realism. Realism takes many forms, and there have been hundreds of writings on the topic. In the United States, the two most popular exemplars of realism are Morgenthau (Morgenthau & Thompson, 1985; original 1948) and Waltz...

Over the past few years, there has been an increasing focus on the connection at the dyadic level between democracy, interdependence, and international conflict. This has led to some contention, with scholars taking different positions on both substantive and methodological matters. This article...

A new approach to address oversights in the traditional arms race literature is presented. It involves five factors that have not been previously applied to arms races. The focus of military capability is not expenditures but weapons counts. The entire set of major powers is modeled as a system....

The empirical literature on arms races has often failed to find strong evidence of the existence of arms races among “obvious†dyads. In this article it is argued that if we assume that decision makers use simple rules and concentrate on the weapons stock of their rivals, we can...