Alliance Portfolio Similarity

Alliance portfolio similarity measures how alike two states' overall patterns of alliance commitments are. Each state has a 'portfolio' — the profile of defense pacts, neutrality agreements, ententes, or no tie it holds with every other state — and the similarity of two portfolios is summarized in a single dyadic score. Signorino and Ritter (1999) showed that the long-dominant Kendall's tau-b measure is flawed for this purpose and introduced the S-score as a better-behaved alternative. These scores are a standard proxy for shared interests and have been used to operationalize utilities in expected-utility models of war.