December Slacking

From Dr. John Windmueller’s blog.

Does it ever seem like you just don’t get a whole lot done in December? The year is winding down, many folks are celebrating holidays, whatever. Well, for whatever reasons, it seems like states have recently been slacking off in December as well, at least when it comes to both starting and ending interstate conflicts.

This is the distribution of start and end months for militarized interstate disputes, using data from the 1991-2003 MID (Militarized Interstate Incidents Data) dataset. The dataset is tied to the Correlates of War (COW) project.

Why not explore the COW data yourself? You can download COW datasets in .csv format directly from the project’s website. Data files are in .csv format, which Excel or any statistical package can load right up. Downloading the data and producing these histograms (using JMP in my case) took under 5 minutes.

                       

John Windmueller

Dr. John Windmueller I’m an Assistant Professor at the University of Baltimore’s Center for Negotiations and Conflict Management. My Ph.D. is in Conflict Analysis & Resolution (George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution) and my MA and BA degrees are in International Affairs (Florida State University). Prior to… MORE >