Measuring War Planning and Negotiation Outcomes

This chapter describes the data collection and data manipulation required to measure alliance treaty negotiation outcomes (agreement or nonagreement) and ideal war plan compatibility. To code agreement, the author uses two sources of data to identify negotiations that ended in agreement and to identify negotiations that ended in nonagreement. To code ideal war plan compatibility, the author uses data on both strategic compatibility and operational compatibility. Drawing from well-established data identifying the threats states face, the author identifies the threats facing each negotiation participant and then codes strategic compatibility as the ratio of the participants' shared threats to the total number of threats faced by the participants. The higher this ratio, the more likely the participants are to have compatible views regarding which state(s) should be the target of the alliance treaty. Drawing on the idea that the operational component of a state's ideal war plan emanates from its military doctrine, the author uses battle-level data from previous wars fought by negotiation participants to code whether the participants shared offensive or defensive military doctrines. These measures of strategic compatibility and operational compatibility are used to code when the negotiation participants have only strategic compatibility, only operational compatibility, or both strategic and operational compatibility.