Given these considerations, I primarily rely on the MIDs data set (Ghosn and
Palmer 2003). For the purposes of this study, MID initiation is coded as 1 if state A
at a minimum issued a threat of force toward state B in a given directed dyad-year and
is coded 0 if no dispute is recorded. More belligerent classifications of MIDs are also
included and only the first year of the MID is used in the analysis. Alternative specifications
of the dependent variable are included to test the robustness of the findings.
First, I consider a higher level of conflict intensity by including war, or the initiation of
a MID that resulted in over 999 battle deaths. Next, I include two dependent variables
from the International Conflict Behavior (ICB) data set (Brecher and Wilkenfeld
2010). An international crisis (IC) refers to events in which state A acted as the trigger
for a foreign policy crisis, defined as an ‘‘act by a state as creating a basic threat to
values, time pressure, and heightened probably of military hostilities’’ (Brecher and
Wilkenfeld 2010, 14). A violent international crisis (VIC) considers only events that
included a violent military act, such as a border clash, invasion of air space, bombing
of a large target, or war. Due to the dichotomous and rare nature of the dependent variable,
a rare events logistic regression is employed (King and Zeng 2001)