USING POWER LAWS TO ESTIMATE CONFLICT SIZE.

How can scholars estimate the size of armed conflicts? Thorough research only goes so far in making such assessments - there will almost always be missing data, and thus a need to draw inferences about how comprehensively violence has been recorded. This paper addresses that challenge by developing an estimation strategy based on the observation that violent events are generally distributed according to power laws, a pattern which structures expectations about what event data on armed conflict would look like if those data were complete. This technique is applied to estimate the number of Native American and U.S. casualties in the American Indian Wars between 1776 and 1890, demonstrating how scholars can use power laws to estimate conflict size, even (and perhaps especially) in cases where previous literature has been unable to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]