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As a tenured professor of government at The College of William & Mary, David Dessler, PhD, focused his research on foreign policy and international relations. Extensively published in his field, Dr. David Dessler is known for the paper “Beyond Correlations: Toward a Causal Theory of War” (International Studies Quarterly, 1991).
In said paper, Dr. Dessler argues that studies into the causes of war should move beyond correlations toward a more rigorous explanation that draws from the methods of integrative reasoning. In doing so, the presence or absence of “generative connections between observed phenomena” can be developed.
One major issue with contrasting quantitative approaches is that they use statistical relationships to infer processes, but do not directly observe those processes. The proxy variables that they employ only serve as a crude indicator of the actual factors being placed under analysis.
An example of such distorting comparisons is the expression of norms for liberal states that use compromise as a tactic for maintaining peace in metrics such as level of political and social violence and regime stability. The correlative application of this metric is limited, as totalitarian states may rate higher on such scales than liberal, democratic ones.
