Political survival, policy distribution, and alliance formation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Existing work cannot explain why countries form alliances when direct security threats are not a key political issue, though we know countries routinely do engage in that behavior. Countries form alliances to manage the essential problem that they must use finite budget resources to provide social policy and national security; the ‘guns versus butter’ dilemma. States ally to ‘contract out’ national security via the formation of alliance contracts so they can allocate more resources to domestic concerns. Alliances increase the efficiency of security policy by providing the same level of security with fewer resources, thus freeing those resources for use in other domains. Not only should alliances form when security threats do not dominate the political agenda, but also domestic political and economic demands will influence alliance decisions. In positing a domestic politics-based explanation for alliance formation, this article argues that increased demands for social policy goods increase the chances of alliance formation as leaders seek greater policy allocation efficiency. The use of a production possibilities frontier illustrates the central argument. Those claims are examined on a sample of all country-years from 1816—2000 using a probit model. Empirical results suggest changes in the demand for social policy goods, operationalized as changes in the infant mortality rate, are an important cause of alliance behavior.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it