Scholars of international conflicts have long emphasized the role of private information in the onset of interstate wars. Yet, the literature lacks direct and systematic evidence of its effect. This is largely due to challenges with accessing decision-makers’ private and often confidential information and opinions. We compile a large corpus of declassified French diplomatic cables that span the period 1871–1914. Using these texts, we estimate a dynamic topic model to generate diplomatic thematic variables, which are then used to forecast the onset of French Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs). The inclusion of information from diplomatic correspondence greatly improves estimates of MID timing, compared to models that rely solely on public information such as structural determinants and revealed risk perceptions derived from financial markets or the press. These results emphasize the importance of private information in decisions to go to war and the limitations of empirical work that relies solely on publicly available data.

中文翻译：

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国际危机中的公共和私人信息：外交信函和冲突预测

国际冲突学者长期以来一直强调私人信息在国家间战争爆发中的作用。然而，文献缺乏直接和系统的证据证明其效果。这主要是由于访问决策者的私人且通常是机密的信息和意见所面临的挑战。我们汇编了跨越 1871 年至 1914 年期间的大量解密的法国外交电报。使用这些文本，我们估计了一个动态主题模型以生成外交主题变量，然后将其用于预测法国军事化州际争端 (MID) 的爆发。包含来自外交信函的信息极大地改进了对 MID 时间的估计，与仅依赖诸如结构性决定因素等公共信息的模型相比，以及来自金融市场或媒体的揭示的风险认知。这些结果强调了私人信息在战争决策中的重要性，以及仅依赖于公开数据的实证研究的局限性。