Addressing decision-making over interstate disputes and the democratic peace thesis, Choi and James build an interactive foreign policy decision-making model with a special emphasis on civil-military relations, conscription, diplomatic channels and media openness. Each is significant in explaining decisions over dispute involvement. The temporal scope is broad while the geographic scope is global. The result is sophisticated analysis of the causes of conflict and factors that can ameliorate it, and a generalizable approach to the study of foreign relations. The findings that media openness...

Addresses a range of issues surrounding the search for scientific truths in the study of international conflict and international political economy. Unlike empirical studies in other disciplines, says Seung-Whan Choi, many political studies seem more competent at presenting theoretical conjecture and hypotheses than they are at performing rigorous empirical analyses.