separate from the effects of the issue at stake, is not a quirk of the effects
of multicollinearity with the democracy variable, and is not an artifact
of the casualties/no-casualties threshold.
The substantive implications of this analysis should also not be over-
looked. With just six instances of one free press state inflicting casualties
upon another in the forty-five-year span of this study, it is clear that
dyads that share press freedoms are extremely unlikely to resort to lethal
conflicts in disputes. In 1994, the last year covered by the press freedom
data, fully 40 percent of states were coded as having a free or imperfectly
free press. That suggests that 16 percent of all possible dyads in the
international system are extremely unlikely to engage in lethal conflicts.
10
Further, there are no instances of lethal conflict between states that share
the more restrictive coding of a clearly free and effective press. In 1994,
this subset of states made up 25.3 percent of all states and 6.4 percent
of all possible dyads in the international system. This suggests that 6.4
percent of dyads simply will not inflict any casualties whatsoever on
each other.
NOTES
1.See Moses ( 1991) and Staub ( 1989), though the entire issue of Political Psychology (Vol. 10, No. 1) in which the Staub article appears
is relevant to this point.
2.Specifically Gault said, "The image of a degraded enemy is essential to the psychology of any robustly homicidal combat team" ( 1971: 451).
3.In that article, Ottosen also references several works not published
in English that, according to Ottosen's summaries, appear to support the
conclusion that the news media play a role in enemy image formation.
4.Even if we assume that in all nations public support for war is
essential to the successful conduct of hostilities, in a restricted press
country leadership dominance of the news media is a simple task of
command, and there is no reason to expect the nature of the opponent
to have any effect upon this process. Thus, a leader in a restricted press
country is presumably always able to meet this necessary condition for
conflict.
5. Luostarinen ( 1989: 126) also lists the credibility of the means of
mass socialization as a necessary condition of effective enemy image
formulation. Even though the free press is subject to indirect influence,
it is considered extremely credible.
6.However, the experimental results of Geva and
Hanson ( 1997),
-93-
