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The Diplomatic Importance of States, 1816–1970: An Extension and Refinement of the Indicator

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Melvin Small  and
J. David Singer
Melvin Small
Affiliation:
Professor of History at Wayne State University, and Visiting Lecturer at Aarhus University, Denmark.
J. David Singer
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, a member of its Mental Health Research Institute
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Extract

In an earlier issue of this journal, we presented our findings on the composition of the interstate system, along with the diplomatic importance or “status” attributed to each member by die others in the system. Covering the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the onset of World War II, we set out both to calculate the ranking of the states every five years during those 125 years, and to make explicit the criteria by which system membership and status ranks were established. Our major motivation was to identify the empirical domain within which our own research would go forth and to develop certain indicators which were relevant to me Correlates of War project; it also seemed likely that these data might be of use to others in tiie scholarly community.

Type
Research Notes
Information
World Politics , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , July 1973 , pp. 577 - 599
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1973

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References

1 See David Singer, J. and Small, Melvin, “The Composition and Status Ordering of the International System, 1815–1940,” World Politics, XVIII (January 1966), 236–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 In addition to several studies now under way in which attributed diplomatic importance serves as one of our independent or intervening variables, others are also utilizing these data. See, for example, Wallace, Michael, War and the International Pecking Order (Lexington, Mass. 1973)Google Scholar; Midlarsky, Manus I., “Status Inconsistency and the Onset of International Warfare,” Ph.D. diss. (Northwestern University 1968)Google Scholar; and East, Maurice A., “Stratification and International Politics,” Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University 1969).Google Scholar Among others who have done independent studies in this area are Alger, Chadwick F. and Brams, Steven J., “Patterns of Representation in National Capitals and Intergovernmental Organizations,” World Politics, XIX (July 1967), 646–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bernstein, Robert A. and Weldon, Peter D., “A Structural Approach to the Analysis of International Relations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, XII (June 1968), 159–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russett, Bruce M. and Curtis Lamb, W., “Global Patterns of Diplomatic interchange, 1963–64,” Journal of Peace Research, VI, No. 1 (1969), 37–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brams, Steven J., “The Structure of Influence Relationships in the International System,” in Rosenau, James N., ed., International Politics and Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (New York 1969), 583–99Google Scholar; and Väyrynen, Raimo, “On the Definition and Measurement of Small Power Status,” Cooperation and Conflict, VI, No. 2 (1971), 91–102.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSchwartzman, Simon and Mora, Manuel y Araujo, , in “The Images of International Stratification in Latin America,” Journal of Peace Research, in, No. 3 (1966), 225–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, using entirely different indicators of status, came up with a rank-ordering quite similar to our own.

3 One of the former is a witty, if uninformed, commentary in “Column,” Encounter, XXVII (July 1966), 29–30. Our critic, identified only as “R,” chose to ignore the text accompanying the tables, leading one to suspect that U.S. elites have used criteria of an extra-scholarly nature in selecting overseas recipients of our largesse.

4 In this vein, we are now gathering data by means of which we hope to calculate each state's military-industrial capability twice per decade for the same period, 1816–1970. Although we expect that these capability scores and ranks will show a high positive correlation with the diplomatic importance scores, we also expect some important and interesting exceptions. Two studies which explicidy examine the rank discrepancies produced by the two sets of measures are Wallace (fn. 2), and Ray, James Lee, “Status Inconsistency and War Involvement in the European Sub-System, 1815–1965,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Michigan 1973).Google Scholar In addition, there are some important theoretical implications in the fact that a given state's importance scores and capability scores may be rising or falling at sharply different rates, or perhaps moving in different directions at the same time.

5 For an application of that strategy to data on international trade, see Alker, Hayward and Puchala, Donald, “Trends in Economic Partnership: The North Atlantic Area, 1928–1963,” in David Singer, J., ed., Quantitative International Politics (New York 1968)Google Scholar; the original index is outlined in Richard Savage, I. and Deutsch, Karl W., “A Statistical Model of the Gross Analysis of Transaction Flows,” Econometrica, XXVIII (July 1960), 551–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Writing in 1946, diplomat-historian Harold Nicolson noted this inflationary trend when he wrote that “the Vienna Règlement (of 1815) did in fact setde the precedence problem for more than a hundred years. It may well be that some future Congress will find itself obliged, in view of the multiplicity of Embassies which have since been created, to adopt a further Règlement under which Ambassadors are classified as of the first, second, or third category. This, it is to be expected, will provoke a most invidious discussion.” The Congress of Vienna (London 1946), 219–20.

7 For an analysis based upon size of mission in the post-World War II era, see Alger and Brams (fn. 2).

8 One indication of how closely the original and the revised indices converge is the magnitude of the coefficient of concordance. The minimum value of Kendall's W when the asymmetric, the weighted, and the non-weighted symmetric scores are correlated is .83 (for 1824); the maximum is .99 (for 1935); and the mean is .96.

9 One other minor detail concerns the special case of the eight German and five Italian states which, prior to 1870, did not qualify for inclusion in the central system. Because the states in these two groupings had close dynastic ties, and were thus expected to exchange missions with their sister states, we excluded such missions in the original computation of each of their scores. In retrospect, that ad hoc rule seems both arbitrary and unnecessary; many groups of nations were in the same position of almost inevitably having to exchange missions. Furthermore, the effect of these more or less automatic missions is a minor one, raising the mean Italian score in 1859, for example, from 11.0 to 14.2, and that of the lesser German states from 8.63 to 13.75. Our data set, which is available at the International Relations Archive of the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan, now reflects this revision.

10 See Diplomatic Year-BooK (New York 1951), and World Diplomatic Directory and World Diplomatic Biography (London 1951).

11 See Maurice East (fn. 2); for the pre-World War II study, we used the following: Almanach de Brussels (Paris 1918); Almanach de Gotha (Gotha 1764–1940); Almanach de Paris (Paris 1865–1869); Annuaire Diplomatique et Consulaire de la République Française pour 1989 et 1900 (Paris 1900); Europa Year-Book (London 1926–1929); and The Statesman's Year-Book (London 1864–1940).

12 See Russett, Bruce M., David Singer, J., and Small, Melvin, “National Political Units in the Twentieth Century: A Standardized List,” American Political Science Review, LXII (September 1968), 932–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Space limitations preclude the listing here of the fluctuating system membership which emerges from the application of these coding criteria; the resulting lists may be found in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 of David Singer, J. and Small, Melvin, The Wages of War (New York 1972).Google Scholar