Perception and Politics in Intelligence Assessment: U.S. Estimates of the Soviet and "Rogue-State" Nuclear Threats

United States estimates of Soviet nuclear goals and capabilities and the current "rogue-state" nuclear threat reflected prevailing beliefs about threat within the U.S. government and the relative influence of agencies charged with threat assessment. This article establishes that the patterns in formal Soviet threat assessment: (i) did not reflect a uniform response to "external threat," (ii) were inevitably tied to underlying assumptions about adversary intent, and (iii) were susceptible then to perceptual, organizational, and/or political influences within government. Thus, threat assessments reflected the optimism and pessimism—and political interests and ideologies—of those who participated in the estimating process. The article concludes by examining these lessons in light of the experiences and challenges of assessing threat from small states harboring nuclear ambitions.     

Correlates of Levels of Democracy in Latin America During the 1990s

Does the conventional wisdom about the relationships between economic, cultural, and political party variables and democracy stand up in the Latin American experience of the 1990s? This study, utilizing new data sets for the region, finds that some traditional hypotheses are upheld better than others. It sustains the conventional wisdom that economic development, economic growth, democratic values, and (with a two‐year lead) education correlate positively with the level of democracy. Surprisingly, however, neither social trust nor the number of political parties is significantly correlated with the level of democracy. The study suggests various possible explanations for the weak or nonexistent relationships for social trust and number of parties, in the hope that these surprising results will stimulate further research.     

Consider the Source: Organizational Bias in Estimates of Foreign Military Spending

I seek to determine the degree and nature of bias in the military spending estimates of the two main sources of such data—the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). I examine how ACDA and SIPRI revise their estimates of foreign military spending. I do so by evaluating ACDA and SIPRI growth rate estimates from successive statistical volumes for a full sample of countries and years as well as for seven identified regions (Africa, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, NATO Europe, and the Warsaw Pact), to determine whether, and by how much, early and late estimates of each organization depart from its own or the other's final estimates. The findings reveal that systematic (or patterned) error for some regions is high and that unpatterned error for some regions is extremely high. The latter finding is important because unpatterned error can become systematic with changes in sample size.