Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This study introduces a simple nonparametric test for the relative discrimination of models in international relations research. The common parametric approach, the Vuong test, does not perform well under the small-n, high canonical correlation conditions that are sometimes encountered in world politics research. The nonparametric approach outperforms the Vuong test in Monte Carlo experiments and is trivial to implement even for the most complicated models. The method is applied to two empirical examples: the debate over long cycles and the effect of domestic politics on foreign policy decision making.

Keywords

nonnested nonparametric model testing Vuong

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Akaike, H. 1973. Information theory and an extension of the likelihood ratio principle. In Second international symposium of information theory (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science), edited by B. N. Petrov and F. Csaki , 267-81. Budapest, Hungary: Akademinai Kiado.

Bennett, D. Scott , and Allan C. Stam . 1996. The duration of interstate wars, 1816-1985. American Political Science Review 90:239-57.

Benoit, Kenneth . 1996. Democracies really are more pacific (in general): Reexamining regime type and war involvement. Journal of Conflict Resolution 40:636-57.

Clarke, Kevin A. 2000. The effect of priors on approximate Bayes factors from mcmc output. Unpublished manuscript.

--- 2001. Testing nonnested models of international relations: Reevaluating realism. American Journal of Political Science 45:724-44.

Conover, W. J. 1980. Practical nonparametric statistics. 2d ed. New York: John Wiley.

Davidson, Russell , and James G. MacKinnon . 1981. Several tests for model specification in the presence of alternative hypotheses. Econometrica 49:781-93.

Doran, Howard . 1993. Testing nonnested models. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 75:95-103.

Gilpin, Robert . 1981. War and change in world politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10.

Goldstein, Joshua . 1991. A war-economy theory of the long wave. In Business cycles: Theories, evidence, and analysis, edited by N. Thygesen , K. Velupillai , and S. Zambelli , chap. 12. London: Macmillan.

11.

Greene, William H. 1997. Econometric analysis. 3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

12.

Huth, Paul K. 1988. Extended deterrence and the prevention of war. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

13.

Huth, Paul K., and Todd Allee. Forthcoming. The democratic peace and territorial conflict in the twentieth century.

14.

Huth, Paul , Christopher Gelpi , and D. Scott Bennett . 1993. The escalation of great power militarized disputes: Testing rational deterrence theory and structural realism. American Political Science Review 87:609-23.

15.

Johnson, Richard A. , and Dean W. Wichern . 1998. Applied multivariate statistical analysis. 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

16.

Judge, George G. , W. E. Griffiths , R. Carter Hill , Helmut Lutkepohl , and Tsoung-Chao Lee . 1985. The theory and practice of econometrics. 2d ed. New York: John Wiley.

17.

Kaiser, Henry F. , and Kern Dickman . 1962. Sample and population score matrices and sample correlation matrices from an arbitrary population correlation matrix. Psychometrika 27:179-82.

18.

Kmenta, Jan . 1986. Elements of econometrics. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan.

19.

Kullback, Solomon , and R. A. Leibler . 1951. On information and sufficiency. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 22:79-86.

20.

Lavergne, Pascal , and Quang H. Vuong . 1996. Nonparametric selection of regressors: The nonnested case. Econometrica 64:207-19.

21.

Maoz, Zeev , and Bruce Russett . 1993. Normative and structural causes of democratic peace, 1946-1986. American Political Science Review 87:624-38.

22.

McAleer, Michael . 1987. Specification tests for separate models: A survey. In Specification analysis in the linear model, edited by M. L. King and D. E. A. Giles . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

23.

Modelski, George , and William R. Thompson . 1987. Testing cobweb models of the long cycle. In Exploring long cycles, edited by George Modelski , 85-111. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner.

24.

Mooney, Christopher Z. 1997. Monte Carlo simulation: Quantitative application in the social sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

25.

Pollins, Brian M. 1996. Global political order, economic change, and armed conflict: Coevolving systems and the use of force. American Political Science Review 90:103-17.

26.

Raftery, Adrian E. 1995. Bayesian model selection in social research (with discussion). In Sociological methodology 1995, edited by P. V. Marsden . Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

27.

Reiter, Dan , and Allan Stam . 1998. Democracy, war initiation, and victory. American Political Science Review 92:377-89.

28.

Schwarz, G. 1978. Estimating the dimension of a model. Annals of Statistics 6:461-64.

29.

Signorino, Curtis S., and Ahmer Tarar. 2002. A unified theory and test of extended immediate deterrence. Unpublished manuscript.

30.

Vuong, Quang . 1989. Likelihood ratio tests for model selection and nonnested hypotheses. Econometrica 57:307-33.

31.

Wallerstein, Immanuel . 1983. Three instances of hegemony in the history of the capitalist-world economy. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 24:100-108.

32.

Wilcoxon, Fred . 1945. Individual comparisons by ranking methods. Biometrics Bulletin 1:80-83.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.15 MB

0.00 MB