ABSTRACT
Of course, students of world politics need to attend not only to the capabilities of the states in the system, but to the ways in which capabilities affect the manner in which states behave and interact in the system. Most scholars have felt that observing and measuring such behavior would be difficult, but my colleagues and I have—over quite a few years—given it a good deal of attention and are satisfied with our results. In “Measuring the Concentration of Power in the International System,” Jim Ray and I made a first attempt to do this, utilizing procedures similar to the ones economists use for measuring market share to combine the components of capabilities into power concentration measure. This measure has become one of the most widely used and accepted variables in world politics research and is now being observed, measured, updated, and recorded electronically via the Correlates of War database.
