William J. Dixon’s research while affiliated with University of Arizona and other places

The research reported here develops an explanation for the often-noted absence of international war between democratic states. This explanation is derived from a theoretical rationale centered on universal democratic norms for reconciling competing values and interests. I argue that democratic states locked in disputes are better equipped than others with the means for diffusing conflict situations at an early stage before they have an opportunity to escalate to military violence. Not only is this explanatory logic consistent with the published findings on democracy and war, but it also entails the novel empirical proposition that disputes between democracies are more amenable than are other disputes to peaceful settlements, the hypothesis I examine here. Analyses of contemporary interstate disputes reveal that even when potentially confounding factors are controlled, democratic opponents are significantly more likely to reach peaceful settlements than other types of disputants.

In their 1987 article in this Review, Muller and Seligson used logged ordinary least-squares (LOLS) to estimate the effect of income inequality on cross-national levels of deaths by political violence. T. Y. Wang challenges the robustness of the main conclusion and argues for the application of a maximum likelihood approach—the exponential Poisson regression (EPR) model—rather than LOLS. He concludes that the widely used LOLS approach yields misleading conclusions when applied to event count data. Dixon, Muller, and Seligson replicate previous work using both LOLS and EPR approaches and conclude that in most—but not all—respects the two approaches yield similar results, supporting the effect of inequality when the specifications are identical. They also argue (in response to concerns expressed by Brockett 1992) that the inequality results are robust when account is taken systematically of the best information on underreporting of deaths.

The research reported here extends investigation of the democracy-war hypothesis by focusing on the norms of dispute resolution integral to the democratic process. If we extend these norms to the international arena, then it becomes reasonable to expect democratic states to adopt compromise solutions to international problems. One implication of this logic is that democracies are likely to be more amenable than others to efforts of third parties to resolve or ameliorate interstate disputes. This hypothesis is examined in the present study. A sample of strictly interstate disputes acquired from the Alker-Sherman disaggregated conflict set provide the basis for this inquiry. Democracy is assessed for each disputant party with the composite index from the Polity II data collection. In order to control for extraneous effects on the probability of management, the author develops a baseline model consisting of prior management activity, the costs of conflict, and the power of the disputants. Because the dependent variable in this analysis is a binary indicator, the author employs probit regression to estimate the effects of democracy while partialling out the controls. The empirical results show that democracy does carry the systematic positive influence on the probability of conflict management expected of it.

International economic flows have become an increasingly prominent component of both international relations and domestic politics over the last two decades. Even though politically motivated governments have played a growing role in shaping these transactions, empirical studies have largely ignored the political determinants of international trade patterns. This study addresses that important gap in our understanding of the international political economy with particular reference to United States trade. We theorize that two aspects of the relations between nations should predict enhanced trade levels: similarity in political system and similarity in foreign policy orientation. We test this proposition for U.S. exports to 76 importing nations over an 18-year period in a pooled time- series design that controls for known influences on trade flows. Our results suggest that these two political factors have a substantial and predictable impact on U.S. export patterns. We consider some possible criticisms of our results along with some suggestions for future research.

Can nations achieve both growth and equity or must one value be sacrificed to attain the other? The controversy over trade-offs between aggregate economic performance and social welfare lies at the heart of recent debates on development policy. This study reviews these debates, identifies the specific forms of likely trade-offs, and examines the evidence over a twenty-five-year period for a sample of 104 nations. We employ a cross-national panel design to ask two questions: (1) Does basic needs achievement compromise future growth? (2) Does rapid growth undermine future needs achievement? We find no evidence for the orthodox view that basic needs fulfillment or improvement compromise growth. To the contrary, we find that basic needs attainment facilitates long-term economic growth. The evidence is somewhat less clear regarding the second question, although it appears that rapid growth does not produce substantial basic needs improvements.

This study examines the effects of presidential succession on selected patterns of American foreign policy behavior. Our empirical test case consists of the principal foreign policy preoccupation of the last eight presidencies—diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. This examination is conducted in the context of a partial theory of dynamic foreign policy interaction which serves as a kind of theoretical template through which the potentially varying effects of successive presidential administrations are given precise empirical interpretations. Our central results suggest that U.S. foreign policy behavior exhibits a characteristic persistence that seems relatively immune from the potentially disruptive effects of presidential succession. Presidential administrations do appear to be associated with periodie shifts in long-term behavioral tendencies toward friendlier or more hostile relations, but there are no detectable systematie differences in the way administrations regularly build on their own past behavior or in the way they respond to Soviet actions. We also undertake a descriptive analysis of individual presidencies in order to highlight those few cases that deviate from the general Cold War pattern.

This study conceptualizes the U.S. Supreme Court as a political institution whose decision-making behavior over time can be effectively explained and predicted. A four-variable model is constructed as a means of better understanding the Court's policy outputs in criminal justice disputes. This model represents Court decisions as a function of the institution's political composition, the generally stable attitudes of its members, its policymaking priorities, and the political environment. The results indicate that the model has substantial explanatory and predictive capacity when applied to Supreme Court criminal rights cases from 1946 to 1986.

This study undertakes an empirical investigation of the near universal assumption that domestic political conflict is invariably harmful to the societies in which it occurs. In particular, we examine the implications of domestic conflict for the provision of basic human needs once the known effects of aggregate national wealth are removed. Using a variation of the panel regression model, we regress an index of basic needs satisfaction on measures of domestic conflict scope and intensity, along with suitable controls, for a sample of 85 contemporary nations. The findings indicate that the intensity measure is associated with long-term improvements in basic needs while the scope of conflict carries a negative impact for basic needs outcomes.

This study reexamines the dynamic patterns of US-Soviet foreign policy behavior using recently developed methods for the sequential analysis of categorical data. The methods proposed here have several advantages over conventional regression based modeling procedures. First, assumptions about the role of time in foreign policy behavior and decisionmaking processes are more realistic in that time is represented as an ordinal sequence on human experience. Second, these methods better approximate the causal structure of actionreaction theories by delineating the temporal order of stimulus and response, and by focusing attention on individual behaviors rather than aggregate behavioral constructs. Third, the probabilistic nature of action-reaction hypotheses are made explicit through the use of logit transformed conditional probabilities. Finally, by accommodating model specifications that are virtually isomorphic to traditional action-reaction modeling efforts, these methods retain the flexibility and interpretability of standard regression approaches. Application of these methods to US-Soviet interaction revealed a marked asymmetry in the superpowers' responsiveness to one another's foreign policy behavior during the 1966–1978 period. According to these analyses, Soviet behavior is more clearly a function of its own prior activities than a response to the United States whereas American behavior is far more dependent on prior Soviet actions than its on own.