A Critique of Dyadic Design

TL;DR

This paper critically examines dyadic research designs in international politics, highlighting their theoretical and statistical limitations, including model misspecification and challenges in valid inference.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive critique of dyadic designs, emphasizing the intertwined issues of theoretical validity and statistical challenges in empirical research.

Findings

Identifies model misspecification issues

Highlights problems with independence assumptions

Discusses challenges in valid statistical inference

Abstract

Dyadic research designs concern data that comprises interactions among actors. Dyadic approaches unambiguously constitute the most frequent designs employed in the empirical study of international politics, but what do such designs cary with them in terms of theoretical claims and statistical problems? These two issues are closely intertwined. When testing hypotheses empirically, the statistical model must be a careful operationalization of the theory being tested. Given that the theoretical and statistical cannot be separated, we discuss dyadic research designs from these two perspectives; highlighting model misspecification, erroneous assumptions about independence of events, artificial levels of analysis, and the incoherent treatment of multilateral/multiparty events on the theoretical side and difficult-to-escape challenges to valid inference on the statistical side.