James D. Morrow

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Political Science

Why do alliances end? We investigate the implications from two prominent theories of alliance behavior: capability aggregation and the Morrow (1991) theory of asymmetric benefits. Our research design builds from Leeds and Savun (2007), and uses a new measure, Probability of Victory, that captures the relationship between two states' capabilities, t...

A Presidential Address provides one with the opportunity to look backwards and forward. Backwards to understand how we got to where we are now; forwards to suggest paths to further progress. I will focus on the range of research methods that the members of the Society use, how they have evolved during my engagement with the Society, and some sugges...

J. David Singer, a globally recognized scholar of international politics, died Monday, December 28, 2009, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was involved in an auto accident on September 22 and had been hospitalized since. At the time of his death, Singer was Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he'd been on the faculty from 1958 until r...

Kevin Clarke and Randall Stone (2008) offer a methodological critique of some of our tests of the selectorate theory in The Logic of Political Survival (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003). We accept their critique of residualization for control variables in those tests, but reject the contention that the size of the winning coalition does not predict t...

The laws of war seek to regulate conduct during wartime. The record of compliance with these treaties is mixed. I explain compliance as the result of publicly accepted and so legally binding agreements that create incentives for the parties to enforce those agreements through reciprocity. Ratification by a democracy is a signal that it intends to a...

We explore how the sizes of the winning coalition and selectorate influence the war aims of states. Leaders who answer to a small winning coalition are more likely to seek territorial gain as a way to increase state resources. Nonterritorial war aims produce a commitment problem in that after the war the defeated state may not comply with the victo...

This report describes a dataset on compliance with the laws of war in 20th century interstate wars. We introduce the dataset, discuss sources, and explain the coding schemes. The unit is a directed warring dyad in a given war for one of nine issues. We collect five dimensions of compliance, including quality of the data, and construct a single meas...

The authors tested five novel hypotheses derived from the selectorate theory of war with data for up to about 140 states and spanning the years 1816-1993. The hypotheses point to subtle differences in selection effects across regime types that should operate during crises that fall short of war and also during wars. Leaders who rely on a large coal...

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During the twentieth century states negotiated and ratified formal treaties on the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs). These treaties have created a system for the treatment of POWs with universal and detailed standards and decentralized enforcement. I explain the form of the POW system as a rational institutional response to four strategic probl...

The authors of this ambitious book address a fundamental political question: why are leaders who produce peace and prosperity turned out of office while those who preside over corruption, war, and misery endure? Considering this political puzzle, they also answer the related economic question of why some countries experience successful economic dev...

It is commonly believed that trade leads states to avoid violent conflict out of the fear of losing the trade, that lost trade adds to the cost of war and so enhances the deterrence of war. I make two points about this argument; one, that the relationship between higher costs of war from loss of trade and war is indeterminate, and two, that higher...

Institutional arrangements influence the type of policies that leaders pursue. We examine two institutional variables: size of the selectorate (S) and the size of the winning coalition (W) – the minimal set of people whose support the incumbent needs in order to remain in power. The larger the winning coalition, the greater the emphasis leaders pla...

The laws of war have a mixed record of limiting violence during war. I explain these treaties as the codification of the common conjecture of an equilibrium of a game theory model of war. These laws succeed only when the parties comply on their own or reciprocal sanctions dissuade parties who are willing to violate the agreement. Treaties support r...

Under many nondemocratic systems, good policy is bad politics, and bad policy helps leaders stay in office. The result is poorer performance in terms of economic growth.

During fall 2000, all ISA members will be asked to vote on a set of changes to the association's constitution. Most of the proposed changes are required to bring ISA's constitution up to date with current practices and association circumstances (for example, instead of having only the Editor of ISQ as a member of the Governing Council, one of the p...

States formalize some relations into military alliances. A formal commitment could increase credibility by signaling an intention to come to the aid of another state or by creating commitment by altering the costs and benefits of such intervention. In this review, I lay out three considerations in a decision to intervene in a war. Signals require s...

We examine formally the link between domestic political institutions and policy choices in the context of eight empirical regularities that constitute the democratic peace. We demonstrate that democratic leaders, when faced with war, are more inclined to shift extra resources into the war efforts than are autocrats. This follows because the surviva...

Efforts to replicate our study of the effects of politics on trade flows between the major powers have revealed that the computer program written to calculate the estimates produced errors in both the coefficients and the standard errors. Furthermore, these errors have some consequences for the results. In this brief corrigendum, we present correct...

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is finishing a textbook, Principles of International Politics, to be published by Congressional Quarterly Press later this year. James D. Morrow is Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. We thank Robert Powell and Frank Zagare...

A common argument is that international trade prevents conflict because the possible loss of trade reduces the willingness of both sides to fight. I examine the logic of this argument in the light of game theoretic models of conflict. In such models, crises are contests of relative resolve. Neither side, however, can observe the other side's resolv...

The authors advance a theory of the effects of political institutions on state policy. The theory explains how political institutions affect the ability of leaders to maintain themselves in office, why some political systems are more prone to policy failure than others, and why autocrats create mass political systems. The key characteristics of ins...

We test three arguments about the effect of international politics on trade flows. The first argument states that trade flows are greater between states with similar interests than those with dissimilar interests, the second that trade flows are greater in democratic dyads than nondemocratic dyads, and the third that trade flows are greater between...

The evolution of crises depends upon interpreting intentions under uncertainty. We model crises as a game of two-sided incomplete information. Players are uncertain about their own payoffs from war because of differences between observable and actual capabilities. We derive four hypotheses, testing them against crises in Europe between 1815 and 197...

Neorealists argue that states may refuse mutually profitable trade because of concern about “relative gains.” If one state profits more than another, the latter may fear the former will use its advantage to dominate it. However, the relative gains argument ignores states' ability to respond to external threats by arming. If a state does not spend i...

The demise of the Soviet threat and the growing importance of economic affairs have led to a loosening of international coalitions. We propose a spatial model to help understand the dynamics of international coalitions. States form coalitions to realize preferred outcomes of international issues. A coalition's ability to shift the status quo to suc...

The problems of distribution and information impede international cooperation. They arise when actors select how they will cooperate. An exploration of the interaction between these problems using a limited information model of cooperation leads to six conclusions. First, leadership solutions to coordination problems always exist, but leadership he...

Alliances are not perfectly credible. Although alliances raise the probability of intervention into war, many allies do not honor their promise in wartime. A formal model of alliances as signals of intentions to explore the credibility of alliances is presented. One state threatens another. A third state shares an interest with the second in preven...

Nations have two methods of increasing their security: building arms and forming alliances. Both methods present different political costs that must be incurred to raise security. Building arms requires shifting economic resources to the military. Forming alliances requires abandoning interests that conflict with those of the ally. Each of these st...

We present and test a choice-theoretic model of war decisions during shifts in power. The model assumes a rising state that overtakes a declining state in capabilities. In equilibrium, the declining state yields at a critical point in the transition. War can occur only before that critical time. Power shifts are more likely to lead to war as the ch...

This paper proposes an alternative logic of alliances to the capability aggregation model where both allies receive security from an alliance. In this alternative logic, one partner receives autonomy benefits, and the other, security benefits from the alliance. The former type of alliances are called symmetric and the latter asymmetric. The paper d...

This article presents and tests two arguments about how the democratic institutions of the United States influence arms control bargaining. Principal-agent models of elections with retrospective voters form the basis of a formal model linking elections and arms control. It implies that the United States offers additional concessions as economic con...

This paper presents and solves a crisis bargaining game under limited information. The sides alternate offers from three possible offers, with war and its costs starting if the target's counteroffer is rejected. The equilibrium of the model falls into four different cases. These four cases are analyzed to determine how the sides communicate through...

This article considers the effects of arms races on the occurrence of wars. Existing evidence on the link between arms races and wars suggests that arms races do not necessarily cause wars, but that some arms races end in war and others do not. Why? This article proposes an answer to this question by examining the motivations of each racing nation...

This paper analyzes the implications of social choice theory for the study of world politics. A view of the world system as a social choice mechanism leads to the observation that the outcomes of world politics are determined neither by structure nor by preferences alone, but rather by their interaction. Structural change occurs only when the actor...

This paper examines one method to measure the willingness of nations to take risks in international conflicts. Because war is inherently risky, the willingness to take risks is one of the most important predictors of escalation. This paper examines alliance behavior to find a measure for national risk attitudes. The willingness to take risks is ide...

The model presented here assumes that nations initiate conflict to change the international status quo across one or more issues to an outcome they prefer. Their preferences for different issue outcomes are represented by a classical spatial utility function. International coalitions are formed both to enhance the chance of a successful challenge a...

A continuous-outcome expected utility model is presented that generalizes the expected utility theory of Bueno de Mesquita. An examination of the more general model uncovers several unstated assumptions within and produces new conclusions from, while supporting the basic logic of, the expected utility theory. Among the new conclusions is the findin...

A Presidential Address provides one with the opportunity to look backwards and forward. Backwards to understand how we got to where we are now; forwards to suggest paths to further progress. I will focus on the range of research methods that the members of the Society use, how they have evolved during my engagement with the Society, and some sugges...

Institutional arrangements in°uence the type of policies that leaders pursue. We examine two institutional variables: the size of the selectorate (S){the set of people whohaveaninstitutionalsayinchoosingleaders{andthesizeofthewinningcoalition (W){theminimalsetofpeoplewhosesupporttheincumbentneedsinordertoremain inpower. Thelargerthewinningcoalition...

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