io-data-analysis

Data Analysis (io-data-analysis)

Two facts shape how you analyze for IO. First, IO publishes international-relations work, so the estimation problems are IR-specific — dyads are not independent, states select into treaties and wars, trade follows a gravity structure, and many "variables" are estimated constructs. Second, IO's editorial staff later re-run your quantitative analyses and verify your formal proofs before final acceptance (see io-transparency-and-data-policy). This skill covers execution and reporting; identification choices live in io-research-design.

When to trigger

• Estimating the main international effect and supporting analyses; writing the results section
• A referee asked for robustness, heterogeneity by issue area, or an alternative estimator
• Deriving and presenting the results/comparative statics of a formal model
• Separating preregistered from exploratory analyses on a foreign-policy experiment

IR-specific estimation concerns

• Dyadic and network dependence. Directed/undirected dyads share members, so observations are not independent. Use two-way or multiway clustering, dyadic-robust SEs, or latent-space/AME network models rather than naive OLS standard errors.
• Selection at the international level. States choose into alliances, treaties, IO membership, and conflict. Model or bound that selection; do not read a compliance correlation as an institutional effect.
• Gravity and trade. For bilateral flows, prefer PPML with high-dimensional fixed effects over log-linear OLS; handle zeros honestly.
• Estimated regressors. Ideal points, institutional-design indices, latent regime scores, and text-derived measures carry estimation uncertainty — propagate it rather than treating point estimates as observed data.
• Few effective units. With a small number of countries/IGOs as clusters, use wild-cluster bootstrap or randomization inference, not asymptotic clustered SEs.

Reporting standards IO referees expect

1. Substantive magnitude, not stars. Give the size of the international effect with an interval and interpret it in IR terms (probability of conflict, change in trade, shift in compliance).
2. Probing robustness. Vary the operationalization of the international construct, the dyad/year sample, the estimator, and the fixed effects; report what breaks the result, not only what survives.
3. Disciplined heterogeneity. Pre-register or pre-state cuts by issue area, regime type, or region; adjust for multiple comparisons; never harvest one significant interaction and theorize it afterward.
4. Construct validity. Show the finding is not an artifact of one conflict coding, one alliance dataset, or one scaling decision; cross-walk to an alternative source where one exists.

Formal-model results

• Present equilibrium results and comparative statics so a reader can map them to the empirics.
• Keep a complete proof appendix — IO staff verify proofs before final acceptance, so derivations must be checkable, not sketched.

Verification-readiness (engineer it during analysis)

• A single driver script reproduces every reported number from the raw/constructed data in one run.
• Record seeds for every bootstrap, simulation, and randomization-inference step.
• Pin the toolchain (renv.lock, requirements.txt, logged ssc/net install lines) and the dataset versions (COW vX, V-Dem vY, UCDP release Z).
• The numbers printed in the manuscript must equal the script's output exactly — the IO re-run will compare them.

Anti-patterns

• Treating dyads as independent; ignoring selection into treaties/alliances/conflict
• Log-OLS on trade flows where zeros and heteroskedasticity bias the gravity estimates
• Plugging in estimated ideal points/indices as if measured without error
• Asymptotic clustered SEs with a handful of country clusters
• A formal section with results stated but proofs left incomplete (verification will stall)

Output format

【Estimand】the international effect + how identified (per io-research-design)
【IR estimation】dyadic dependence / selection / gravity / few-cluster handled? [Y/N]
【Magnitude】effect size + interval + IR interpretation
【Robustness】which specs could break it → what held
【Heterogeneity】pre-stated by issue area/regime? MHT-adjusted?
【Formal proofs】complete + checkable appendix? [Y/N/NA]
【Verification-ready】one-run driver script, seeds, pinned data/toolchain? [Y/N]
【Next】io-tables-figures

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — dyadic/network/gravity estimation, few-cluster inference, and text-as-data packages
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — verification of results and formal proofs before final acceptance