Expectational Models of U.S.-Soviet Rivalry

美苏关系对世界事务至关重要。尽管政治气候和技术能力不断变化，但这种关系的总体基调仍然非常稳定。激烈言辞和激烈危机的时期与关系改善的时期交替出现，但超级大国之间避免了直接战争，而迄今为止，建立持续合作的努力并未取得成功。同样，军备竞赛在不同时期以不同的速度进行，但各国投入军事的总体水平仍处于相当狭窄的范围内。在这个项目中，研究人员使用数学模型和时间序列数据来努力了解这种长期稳定性的潜在来源。以前对美苏关系的定量研究主要集中在军备竞赛模型上。第一次世界大战后，刘易斯·弗莱·理查森首先提出了军备竞赛模型。令人惊讶的是，统计测试并没有揭示超级大国之间存在反应的确凿证据，这个谜题产生了几条研究路线。有些人提供了预算或采购的政治过程的更详细的模型，或者更有区别的军事努力的衡量标准，但在这个项目中，研究人员开发了一个更一般的模型，旨在在总体层面上捕捉超级大国关系的总体结构。研究人员认为，这种“竞争体系”之所以稳定，主要是因为每个国家内部都发生了“复杂的反应”。也就是说，两国的重要政治行为者都付出了巨大的努力来获取有关对方未来可能行为的信息，他们利用这些信息来为自己的政策建议提供信息并为其辩护。由于政策制定者也担心军备竞赛的有害经济后果，每个国家的外交和安全政策取决于对威胁程度和经济成本有不同预期的行为体之间的竞争。正是这种对竞争预期基础的明确关注，是本研究中要研究的模型最独特的地方。为了估计和分析这些模型，调查人员使用了诸如军事预算、武器库存、总体外交关系、军事干预和其他武力使用、经济状况以及公众和精英舆论等总体水平特征的数据。研究人员收集了大量关于这些主题的数据，由于之前的大多数政策分析都侧重于短期变化，他们将来自不同来源（或来自不同时间的同一来源）的短期数据序列转换为一致的长期数据序列。一旦收集了这些数据，并比较了各种模型的特性，研究人员就会检查竞争系统对假设的政策变化的可能反应。调查应该对超级大国竞争的自然动态提供更客观的评估。

The relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is of crucial importance for world affairs. Despite changing political climates and technological capabilities, the overall tenor of this relationship has remained remarkably stable. Periods of harsh rhetoric and intense crises have alternated with periods of improving relations, but direct war between the superpowers has been avoided while efforts to establish sustained cooperation have not, thus far, been successful. Similarly, the arms race has proceeded at different speeds at different times, but the overall level of effort devoted to the military by each state has remained within a fairly narrow range. In this project the investigators use mathematical models and time series data in an effort to understand the underlying sources of this long term stability. Previous quantitative research on U.S.-Soviet relations has focused on arms race models first developed by Lewis Frye Richardson after World War I. Surprisingly, statistical tests have not revealed much hard evidence of the existence of reaction between the superpowers, and this puzzle has generated several lines of research. Some have offered more detailed models of the political processes of budgeting or procurement or more differentiated measures of military effort, but in this project the researchers develop a more general model meant to capture, at the aggregate level, the overall structure of superpower relations. The researchers argue that this "rivalry system" is stable essentially because of the "sophisticated reactions" occurring within each state. That is, important political actors in both states put forth great efforts to obtain information about the likely future behavior of the other state, and they use this information to inform and justify their policy proposals. Since policy makers are also concerned about the detrimental economic consequences of the arms race, each state's foreign and security policies are determined by competition between actors with different expectations of the level of threat and economic costs. It is this explicit focus on the expectational basis of rivalry that is most distinctive about the models to be examined in this proposed research. To estimate and analyze these models the investigators use data on such aggregate level characteristics as military budgets, weapons stocks, overall diplomatic relations, military interventions and other uses of force, economic conditions, and public and elite opinion. The researchers compile a vast amount of data on these topics and, since most previous policy analyses have focused on short term changes, they convert short data series from different sources (or from the same source at different times) into consistent long term data series. Once these data are collected and the properties of the various models compared, the investigators examine the rivalry system's likely response to hypothetical policy changes. The investigation should provide a more objective assessment of the natural dynamics of superpower rivalry.