Hein Goemans

• University of Rochester

This article examines how the institutional design of borders affects international trade. The authors explore variation in the effects of borders by comparing new international borders that follow precedent and thus have a prior institutional history with new international borders that lack such an institutional history. The former minimally disru...

Why do states make claims to some border areas and not others? We articulate three models of territorial claims and test them using a novel geospatial data set that precisely maps disputed and undisputed border segments in post-independence Africa. The geospatial approach helps eliminate problems of aggregation by permitting an analysis of variatio...

Formal theory and historical case studies, especially those that use process tracing, are extremely well suited companions in research. To bolster future research employing both case studies and formal theory, we suggest some best practices as well as some (common) pitfalls to avoid.

We use new data on coup d’états and elections to document a striking development: whereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1991 installed durable rules, the majority of coups after that have been followed by competitive elections. We argue that after the Cold War international pressure influenced the consequences of coups. In the post-C...

Borders are perhaps the most significant institutions in international relations. A massive literature demonstrates that border disputes fundamentally affect the character of relations between disputants, often escalating to violent and persistent conflict. However, the literature has barely begun to explore and identify the exact mechanisms that p...

We argue that new international borders are rarely new. We propose that when states choose new borders they use previous administrative frontiers to solve a difficult short-term bargaining problem and a long-term coordination problem. With a unique new set of data collected specifically for this project, we systematically examine the new internatio...

Joaquim Alberto Chissano, the second President of Mozambique, stepped down from power on February 2, 2005 after serving his country for 19 years. During his rule, Mozambique experienced economic progress, democratic development, and pacification. The civil war that had ravaged the country for 16 years came to an end in 1992 when a UN-sponsored peac...

We propose and test a formal model of war and domestic politics, building on recent evidence on the relationship between regime type, the effect of war on the probability of losing office, and the consequences of losing office. The less the outcome of international interaction affects a leader's tenure and the less punitive are the consequences of...

Scholars for a long time theorized about the role of political leaders, but empirical research has been limited by the lack of systematic data about individual leaders. Archigos is a new dataset with information on leaders in 188 countries from 1875 to 2004. We provide an overview of the main features of this data. Archigos specifically identifies...

We present and process-trace a complete information model of diversionary war. In our model, leaders must retain the support of some fraction of a selectorate whose response in turn depends on the outcome of an international conflict. The need to retain the loyalty of a segment of the selectorate generates institutionally induced risk preferences i...

Most of the burgeoning theoretical and empirical literature on the role of leaders in comparative politics and international relations is built on the assumption that leaders choose policies to stay in office. However, leaders can lose office in a variety of ways. Leaders can lose office as a result of ill health; they can lose office in a regular...

This course examines the literature on conflict that has developed in the last decade. We will examine recent formal literature as well as the latest substantive (non- formal) literature on conflict. The course will help graduate students identify the broad direction of international conflict studies and will also permit graduate stu- dents to purs...

Internal and international conflict have long been studied separately by different sub-fields in political science. Because of this unfortunate balkanization in the disci-pline, the relation between international and internal conflict remains understudied and poorly understood. To begin to remedy this situation, we examine the reciprocal relationsh...

In the first half of the twentieth century the study of territory and its role in international politics was very much in fashion among political scientists. Since then, however, the study of territory has lost much of its appeal among political scientists and has largely (but not completely) been left to political geographers. In the last decade o...

Internal and international conflict have long been studied separately. Different sub-fields in political science have staked their claim to the study of one form of conflict at the exclusion of the other, leaving the relation between international and internal conflict poorly understood. We seek to overcome the unfortunate Balkanization in our disc...

Recent work in comparative politics and international relations has shown a marked shift toward leaders as the theoretical unit of analysis. In most of the new theoretical models a core assumption is that leaders act to stay in power. There exists, however, remarkably little systematic empirical knowledge about the factors that affect the tenure of...

Recent work in comparative politics and international relations has shown a marked shift toward leaders as the theoretical unit of analysis. In most of the new theoretical models a core assumption is that leaders act to stay in power. There exists, however, remarkably little systematic empirical knowledge about the factors that affect the tenure of...

Abstract Autocratic regimes may be replaced by either new autocratic regimes or democratic regimes, but previous research has only looked at changes ,between ,democratic and non-democratic regimes where non-democracy ,is a residual category that lumps together both stable autocratic regimes and transitions between autocratic regimes. We develop hyp...

Examines the reciprocal relationship between the probability of losing office and the probability of crisis initiation using a two-stage probit model on a data set of all leaders between 1919 and 1992. Role of the tenure considerations of a national leader in international conflict behavior; Overview of diversionary war and the theories that link t...

The new collection of essays edited by John A. Vasquez in What Do We Know About War ? provides a useful overview of the quantitative literature on war. This book makes no claims to move the field forward significantly but, instead, offers seniors and first-year graduate students a good basic understanding of how statistical analyses have been used...

theoretical rigor and empirical depth to a long-standing question of securities studies. He explores how various government leaders assess the cost of war in terms of domestic politics and their own postwar fates. Goemans first develops the argument that two sides will wage war until both gain sufficient knowledge of the other's strengths and weakn...

This article examines how the postdefeat fate of leaders of different regimes affects their incentives to end or continue a losing war and how the outcome of war interacts with regime type to affect the leaders' postwar fate. Three regime types—democracies, dictatorships, and mixed regimes—and three fates—staying in power, losing power, and losing...

When and how can weak states increase their bargaining leverage in international orga-nizations? In my analysis of distributional bargaining in the European Union, I argue that during phases of routine bargaining, distributional outcomes depend on the states' political and economic leverage and less on the formal allocation rules, so they are unfav...

Abstract We propose and test a formal model of war and domestic politics, consistent with recent evidence on the relationship between regime type, the outcome of war and the probability and consequences of losing o‐ce. Our model builds on two fundamental and hitherto ne- glected difierences between regime types: the cost of replacing leaders and th...

Abstract will be provided by author.