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Original Articles
The word dyad is widespread in the international relations (IR) literature. Its first use in the political science literature appears to be from Rudolph J. Rummel's work in the 1960s.1Statisticians had been analyzing dyadic data at least since Fisher (1925), and sociologists had used the term by the late 19th century (Tönnies 1887); it even appears in sociological textbooks throughout the 19th century (Simmel 1908).2
Since the introduction of dyads into the political science literature, they have been extensively used as a framework for analyzing pairs of countries, taking each pair seriatim. Scholars sought to determine which dyads were dangerous (Bremer 1992), which sets of dyads were politically relevant (Gasiorowski and Polachek 1982; Maoz and Russett 1993), which were relevant (Lemke and Reed 2001) and even which dyads were jointly democratic (Reuveny and Li 2003).
The dyad has become ubiquitous. Early work in IR focused on the behavior and policies of individual states (for example, Morgenthau 1948). Subsequent work focused on the relationship of those individual states to a system (for example, Kaplan 1957), and some work focused entirely on the system (for example, McClelland 1967). Most contemporary empirical work has focused on analyzing data on dyads. This includes work on the democratic peace that invented dyadic covariates such as the level of democracy in the dyad (vide Maoz and Russett 1993; Rousseau et al. 1996), as well as work on the dynamics of conflict more generally (Russett, Oneal and Davis 1998; King 2001; Gartzke and Gleditsch 2004). Much of this analysis of the so-called democratic peace has adopted a dyadic design that is by now not only catholic, but that has not changed since it was first introduced. Indeed, the March 2013 issue of the International Studies Quarterly contains three articles that use a dyadic design (Gartzke and Weisiger 2013; Mousseau 2013; Dafoe, Oneal and Russett 2013). Dyads have also been used to analyze a wide variety of variables, beyond conflicts and militarized disputes, including investment (Elkins, Guzman and Simmons 2006). Recent work on trade mostly uses a dyadic perspective (Tomz, Goldstein and Rivers 2007; Rose 2007), and the dyadic perspective is growing in the area of...