Oneal and Russett: Assessing the Liberal Peace with Alternative Specifications

Oneal, JR, and B Russett. 1999. “Assessing the Liberal Peace with Alternative Specifications: Trade Still Reduces Conflict.” Journal of Peace Research 36:423.

This article deals with attacks coming from scholars who claim that trade interdependence does not have pacifying effects. These two claims, specifically from Beck et al. (1998) and Barbieri (1998), address potential effects that were not taken into consideration by the earlier work of Russett and Oneal (and Moaz). The authors find that, by extending the analysis to all dyads, there is not a “relationship between interdependence and peace, but the pacific benefits of trade become evident among the politically relevant dyads (those including a major power, or two contiguous states), among whom the great majority of disputes occur…With these sequential modifications we find increasingly strong support for the liberals’ belief that economic interdependence and democracy have important pacific benefits” (423). “We find no evidence that asymmetric trade increases conflict” (423).

“Beck et al. argue that simple logistic regression analysis is inappropriate for cross-sectional and time-series data because observations are not temporally independent. They suggest a method to correct for this problem and show that, with their technique, the beneficial influence of economic interdependence…becomes statistically insignificant” (423-4). “In this article, we address the concerns of our colleagues by adopting their suggestions for testing liberal theory, although we do not regard all of their proposed procedures as appropriate. Nevertheless, when we adopt their methods, we find that interdependence did significantly reduce the likelihood of conflict during the years 1950-92” (424).

“Beck et al. (1998) propose that researchers using logistic regression remedy temporal dependence in their time-series by creating a variable marks the number of years that have elapsed from the most recent occurrence of a dispute and by generating a spline function of the years of peace” (427).

They use COW data.

“We found that interdependence significantly reduced the likelihood of conflict…among contiguous and major-power pairs” (439).