This repository contains data and the manuscript for an in-progress paper on the sources of depth in alliance treaties. I argue that democracies are especially inclined to form deep alliances with formal military cooperation between members, as treaty depth is less vulnerable to electoral criticism. To understand depth better, I compare it with unconditional military support, which is more salient and costly in electoral politics. A wide range of statistical models finds consistent evidence that democracies design deep and conditional alliances, and I discuss the theoretical mechanisms with a short examination of NATO.
The folder contains multiple scripts, which only work in the context of a project. Start with setup-script.R then run alliance-democ.R, followed by alliance-measures.R. These three scripts create the dataset for analysis. After this, run any of the analysis scripts as needed, but only run plot-results.R after running the analysis scripts.