The regime divide is one of the most studied cleavages in international politics, and the current discussion centers on whether the great power competition between the United States and China divides the world along regime lines. This paper focuses on the US-China competition in forming voting alignments in the United Nations General Assembly and disentangles the effects of regime type on actions, preferences, and strategic calculations of the rival powers and developing countries. We develop a formal model to theorize the competition and convert the game into a Bayesian statistical estimator. Empirical evidence suggests that the US-China competition increases the democracy/authoritarianism voting cleavage. States' regime-oriented voting or vote-buying choices, however, are not driven by their sincere preferences but by differential strategies shaped by regime type. These findings shed light on the nature of the US-China competition and its implications for the world order.
This paper proposes a Bayesian alternative to the synthetic control method for comparative case studies with a single or multiple treated units. We adopt a Bayesian posterior predictive approach to Rubin’s causal model, which allows researchers to make inferences about both individual and average treatment effects on treated observations based on the empirical posterior distributions of their counterfactuals. The prediction model we develop is a dynamic multilevel model with a latent factor term to correct biases induced by unit-specific time trends. It also considers heterogeneous and dynamic relationships between covariates and the outcome, thus improving precision of the causal estimates. To reduce model dependency, we adopt a Bayesian shrinkage method for model searching and factor selection. Monte Carlo exercises demonstrate that our method produces more precise causal estimates than existing approaches and achieves correct frequentist coverage rates even when sample sizes are small and rich heterogeneities are present in data. We illustrate the method with two empirical examples from political economy. (For software to implement the method, please visit https://github.com/liulch/bpCausal)