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Forecasts and Contingencies: From Methodology to Policy Schrodt, Philip A. Uploaded 08-19-2002 Keywords forecast foreign policy international relations future Abstract A "folk criticism" in political science maintains that the discipline should confine its efforts to explanation and avoid venturing down the dark, dirty, and dangerous path to forecasting and prediction. I argue that not only is this position inconsistent with the experiences of other sciences, but in fact the questions involved in making robust and valid predictions invoke many core methodological issues in political analysis. Those issues include, among others, the question of the level of predictability in political behavior, the problem of case selection in small-N situations, and the various alternative models that could be used to formalize predictions. This essay focuses on the problem of forecasting in international politics, and concludes by noting some of the problems of institutional culture -- bureaucratic and academic -- that have inhibited greater use of systematic forecasting methods in foreign policy.

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Estimation and Strategic Interaction in Discrete Choice Models of International Conflict Signorino, Curtis S. Uploaded 07-23-1997 Keywords discrete choice strategic QRE logit international relations Abstract Typical applications of logit and probit to theories of international conflict do not capture the structure of the strategic interdependence implied by those theories. In this paper I demonstrate how to use a game-theoretic solution concept, the quantal response equilibrium (QRE), to derive strategic discrete choice models of international conflict, where the structure of the strategic interaction is incorporated directly in the statistical model. I demonstrate this for a crisis interaction model and use monte carlo analysis to show that logit provides estimates with incorrect substantive interpretations and fitted values that are often far from the true values. Finally, I reanalyze a well-known game-theoretic model of war, Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's (1992) international interaction game, using this method. My results indicate that their model does not explain international interaction as well as they claim.

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Death by Survey: Estimating Adult Mortality without Selection Bias King, Gary Gakidou, Emmanuela Uploaded 07-14-2005 Keywords surveys selection bias mortality data extrapolation international relations Abstract The widely used methods for estimating adult mortality rates from sample survey responses about the survival of siblings, parents, spouses, and others depend crucially on an assumption that we demonstrate does not hold in real data. We show that when this assumption is violated -- so that the mortality rate varies with sibship size -- mortality estimates can be massively biased. By using insights from work on the statistical analysis of selection bias, survey weighting, and extrapolation problems, we propose a new and relatively simple method of recovering the mortality rate with both greatly reduced potential for bias and increased clarity about the source of necessary assumptions.