The balancing preference: Why powerful states win or lose militarized disputes

How often does fear of relative gains by third parties cause powerful states to lose the disputes they initiate? A good deal of work has examined the effects of the balancing preference on alignment, but there have been few attempts to examine how balancing affects the outcomes of disputes. In this dissertation, I argue that existing models greatly underestimate the influence the balancing preference has on international politics. I develop a model that illustrates the way the balancing preference can be expected to interact with other preferences to influence the outcomes of militarized interstate disputes and test hypotheses derived from the model using the Correlates of War Project's Militarized Interstate Dispute, 1816--1992 data set. I show that once a major power's military capability exceeds a certain threshold, third parties become increasingly likely to join its opponent and that there is a clear negative relationship between powerful states' military capability and their ability to win disputes. For extremely powerful states, the balancing model predicts winners a great deal better than existing quantitative models. I conclude that existing analysis has tended to underestimate the influence that the preference to balance against power has on major power diplomacy.