Mike Ward and Peter Hoff

"Political Interactions in Central Asia: A Latent Space Analysis"

Presented to the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, University of Washington, 30 April 2003.

Theoretical and empirical models often ignore the interdependencies among the actors and actions that comprise world politics at the same time they seek to understand it. As a result Virtually all extant, empirical work proceeds by assuming the absence of any interdependencies among the actors and interactions. Yet, absent dependencies, these data would not interesting from a world politics perspective. As a way of addressing some of these important dependencies in the network of interactions world politics, we use a latent space approach (Hoff, Raftery, Handcock, 2002).