A Summary of Political Selection: The Effect of Strategic Choice on the Escalation of International Crises

If we believe that politics involves a significant amount of strategic interaction then classical statistical tests, such as Ordinary Least Squares, Probit or Logit, cannot give us the right answers. This is true for two reasons: the dependent variables under observation are interdependent-that is, the essence of game theoretic logic-and the data is censored-that is, an inherent feature of off the path expectations that leads to selection effects. I explore the consequences of strategic decision-making on empirical estimation in the context of international crisis escalation. Having shown how and why classical estimation techniques fail in strategic settings, I develop a method that ameliorates these problems.