"Dirty Pool" Revisited: When Less is More

Among IR scholars, a central empirical proposition is that democracies seek out other democracies as trading partners—the so-called democratic trade hypothesis. Yet, as revealed in a 2001 symposium on Green et al.’s “Dirty Pool” testing this hypothesis is entangled in debates over the appropriate statistical techniques and research design. We use this controversy as a springboard to offer a cautionary tale about how a large data set with a...