An Analysis of the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) Dataset, 1816-2001 (with Steven Miller and Erin Little). pdf version. Appendices (describes coding issues and all drop and merge recommendations, as well as cases that could not be found). MID Bibliography.
Abstract: We conducted a five-year study that attempted to replicate and validate the original coding work of the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) project. After strictly applying MID coding rules, we recommend dropping 251 cases (or over 10% of the dataset) as we were either unable to find a militarized incident in the historical record or the dispute was already coded elsewhere in the data. We found evidence linking 75 disputes to other cases, and we could not identify 19 cases in the historical record. Among the remaining disputes, we recommend major changes (changes in dispute year, fatality level, and participants) in 234 disputes and minor changes in 1,009 disputes. We use this paper to examine the potential impact of our suggestions on existing studies. Though we are able to identify several systematic problems with the original coding effort, we find that these problems should not affect current understandings of the predictors of interstate conflict onset. However, estimates in our replications of three recent studies of dispute escalation, dispute duration, and dispute reciprocation all witness substantial changes when using corrected data, to the point of reversing previous conclusions in some cases.
Abstract: We conducted a five-year study that attempted to replicate and validate the original coding work of the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) project. After strictly applying MID coding rules, we recommend dropping 251 cases (or over 10% of the dataset) as we were either unable to find a militarized incident in the historical record or the dispute was already coded elsewhere in the data. We found evidence linking 75 disputes to other cases, and we could not identify 19 cases in the historical record. Among the remaining disputes, we recommend major changes (changes in dispute year, fatality level, and participants) in 234 disputes and minor changes in 1,009 disputes. We use this paper to examine the potential impact of our suggestions on existing studies. Though we are able to identify several systematic problems with the original coding effort, we find that these problems should not affect current understandings of the predictors of interstate conflict onset. However, estimates in our replications of three recent studies of dispute escalation, dispute duration, and dispute reciprocation all witness substantial changes when using corrected data, to the point of reversing previous conclusions in some cases.