A Neoclassical Realist Theory of Overbalancing
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Why do states overestimate threats and, as a result, mount disproportionately strong and therefore costly balancing responses? To answer this question, we build a neoclassical realist theory of overbalancing to argue that unit-level intervening variables help generate a counterforce greater than what a structurally induced ideal response would call for. We identify the factors and conditions that steer states to deviate from realist, optimal policies, pinpoint the consequences of such suboptimal behavior, and provide policymakers with recommendations more suited to an interest-driven foreign policy in line with power considerations. We apply our theory to two distinct case studies: Egypt's costly intervention in Yemen in the 1960s and the American overreaction to the real, but very limited, threat posed by terrorism since 2001.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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