Alliance Network Analysis

Alliance network analysis studies international alliances as a graph of states linked by formal security commitments, and models how that network forms and evolves. Rather than treating each alliance dyad as independent, it uses network science and inferential models such as the exponential random graph model (ERGM) — applied to alliance data by Cranmer, Desmarais, and Menninga (2012) — to capture the complex dependencies, such as a state's tendency to ally with its allies' allies, that ordinary dyadic regression assumes away.