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International conflict and strategic games: challenging conventional approaches to mathematical modelling in International Relations
Keywords:
formal modeling, empirical test, international conflict, audience cost, strategic interaction gamesAbstract
The prevalence of international conflicts makes them one of the main topics of discussion among International Relations (IR) scholars. The discipline has largely attempted to model the conditions and scenarios in which armed conflicts arise, and has sometimes employed formal models as tools to generate hypotheses and predictions. In this article, I discuss two different approaches to formal modeling in IR: one that fits data to mathematical models and another that derives statistical equations directly from the assumptions of a model. Through this analysis, I pose the following question: how should mathematics and statistics be linked to consistently test the validity of formal models in IR? To answer this question, he examined James Fearon's audience cost model and Curtis Signorino's strategic interaction game, and highlighted their mathematical assumptions and implications for formal model testing. I argue that Signorino's approach offers a more coherent set of epistemological and methodological tools for testing models, since it derives statistical equations that respect the assumptions of a model, whereas the data fitting approach tends to ignore such considerations.
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