ABSTRACT
As mentioned in the article above, I had decided to start the project’s explorations from the “realist” vision of world politics. The point was not to accept the traditional explanations, but to begin to give some of the central concepts greater precision. In this context, the primary focus of the “realist” perspective is the power of system members. The following article, “Reconstructing the Correlates of War Dataset on Material Capabilities of States, 1816–1985” is my description of the way in which the project attempted to grapple with ways in which to operationalize national capabilities. It describes some of the alternative measures we rejected, and why the project adopted a conception of capabilities that entailed three general dimensions (demographic, industrial, and military capabilities). The Capabilities Dataset coded the three dimensions by six specific indicators of national capabilities (population, urban population, military expenditures, military personnel, energy consumption, and iron/steel production). A state’s share of each of the capability dimensions is added together to create an overall Composite Indicator of National Capability (CINC) score which reflects its “power”-potential.
