Status Quo Preferences and Disputes Short of War

This paper suggests that the importance of preferences for the international order extend beyond the conditions proposed by power transition theory. Specifically, a dissimilarity of preferences for the international order should affect relations for all states in the international system for all levels of dispute. In essence, I posit that disagreements over the norms and rules that comprise the international order should increase the domain of conflict for all dyads—even when they have neither the ability nor opportunity to directly affect the construction of the international order. To test the above argument, I propose two new Euclidean-distance measures of dissimilarities of economic and security preferences. Using a series of logits and their predicted probabilities on data from the post-World War II period, I find that a dissimilarity of preferences for the status quo has an important, incendiary effect on the likelihood of dyadic disputes short of war. In fact, dissimilar preferences for the economic and security status quo provide greater leverage in explaining disputes short of war than even such traditionally important variables as the lowest level of dyadic democracy and economic interdependence.