Dyadic Analysis in International Relations: A Cautionary Tale

Robert S. Erikson, Pablo M. Pinto and Kelly T. Rader

Political Analysis, 2014, vol. 22, issue 4, 457-463

Abstract: International relations scholars frequently rely on data sets with country pairs, or dyads, as the unit of analysis. Dyadic data, with its thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of observations, may seem ideal for hypothesis testing. However, dyadic observations are not independent events. Failure to account for this dependence in the data dramatically understates the size of standard errors and overstates the power of hypothesis tests. We illustrate this problem by analyzing a central proposition among IR scholars, the democratic trade hypothesis, which claims that democracies seek out other democracies as trading partners. We employ randomization tests to infer the correct p-values associated with the trade hypotheses. Our results show that typical statistical tests for significance are severely overconfident when applied to dyadic data.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:polals:v:22:y:2014:i:04:p:457-463_01

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Political Analysis from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().