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Diversionary conflict: Demonizing enemies or demonstrating competence?
Abstract
How do embattled leaders hope to secure their hold on power by initiating conflict abroad? The literature on diversionary war has emphasized two distinct mechanisms by which leaders stand to gain from conflict — the “rally around the flag” and “gambling for resurrection” theories. But despite a massive literature on the subject, these competing theories of diversionary incentives have never been subjected to comparative empirical evaluation. This article seeks to fill this gap. I argue that the rally and gambling theories predict diversionary conflicts to target different types of states. Diversionary conflicts driven by a rally logic will target traditional enemies and out-groups, including rivals, neighbors, and geopolitically incompatible states. Gambling for resurrection, on the other hand, pushes leaders to target powerful states in order to demonstrate competence to their constituents. Challenging the conventional wisdom, I find little evidence to support the rally mechanism. The results offer substantial support for the gambling for resurrection theory, indicating that diversionary conflict may be primarily driven by unpopular leaders attempting to prove their competence domestically.
... The diversionary war theory is one of the influential theories in international relations (Mayer 1969, Snyder 1993. According to the theory, leaders facing domestic strife choose to initiate a war with another state to enhance public support (Dassel and Reinhardt 1999, Hagan 2017, Haynes 2017, Schenoni et al. 2020 To justify such a war, leaders usually choose diversionary targets that trigger people's fear of loss or their greed to win (Jung 2014b). Tir and Jasinski (2008) extended this logic to the domestic sphere. ...
... I argue that President Saleh chose the Houthis primarily for representing the sectarian cleavage in Yemen between Zaydis on the one hand and Sunnis on the other hand. This cleavage was later manipulated by Saleh to justify the war and get the Yemeni population to 'rally around the flag' against a common enemy: Zaydis (Tarar 2006, Haynes 2017. The current Sunni-Zaydi cleavage has its seeds in the 1962 revolution that overthrew the Zaydi imamate that ruled Yemen for a millennium (Bonnefoy 2009, p. 14). ...
... First, despite employing heavy artillery, Saleh did not intend to kill Hussein al-Houthi. Saleh instead aimed to arrest Hussein to bolster his popularity and demonstrate his competence, both common aims of diversionary wars (Haynes 2017). In the words of Abdel Moez Debwan, a former MP of the Islah Party, Saleh did not plan to get Hussein al-Houthi killed. ...
There is a vibrant literature on civil war onset and endurance. Previous research has demonstrated that weak states are unlikely to use diversionary measures given the greater likelihood of their defeat. I offer a theoretical contribution to the literature by disentangling why this is particularly the case. Using insights from the Houthi conflict in Yemen between 2004 and 2010, the article shows how the conflict, first initiated as a diversionary operation, increased the Houthi movement’s grievances and galvanised an intra-regime power struggle leading to conflict endurance. The article, thus, offers one of the few exploratory applications of the domestic diversionary war theory in weak states.
... Some argue that domestic turmoil needs to be very large for leaders to resort to diversion (Dassel and Reinhardt 1999;Davies 2002). Others suggest that ethnic fragmentation may play a role in providing opportunities for diversionary action, either due to transborder ethnickinship ties (Haynes 2017) or from the existence of vulnerable ethnic minorities at home (Tir and Jasinski 2008). Scholars have also examined the role of regime type, with most arguing that democracies are particularly liable to engage in diversion (Russett 1990;Oneal and Tir 2006), although argue that variation exists among authoritarian regimes as well. ...
... For the independent variable of unrest, I use Arthur Banks' Cross-National Time Series dataset, which has been most often used in past studies of diversionary war. Also in keeping with prior literature (see Haynes 2017), I create the variable by generating an additive index of the count of protests, strikes, and demonstrations observed in a given country-year; the three are measured separately in the CNTS dataset. The index is thus a general measure of the level of unrest experienced by a given country-year. ...
Information plays a critical role in theories of interstate behavior. This dissertation examines the question: how does domestic politics structure and condition the role of information in international conflict? In the first essay, I test an observable implication of audience cost theory by exploiting elections as a way to identify variation in the costliness of interstate signaling, under the assumption that election-year threats are more costly than threats made in non-election years. I find evidence consistent with audience cost theory in the behavior of democratic targets, but fail to find similar results for targeted autocracies. The findings overall suggest variation in domestic political institutions can explain whether and when information about threat credibility is received and interpreted by target states. In the second essay, I examine a previously untested assumption of diversionary war theory by investigating whether and how initiation status affects the public’s propensity to rally ‘round the flag. Using a survey experiment with researcher manipulation of initiation status, I find heterogeneous rallies across partisan identification, with rallies limited to in-partisans under the initiation condition, but widespread rallies across the full sample when a leader is seen as responding to foreign provocation. In the third essay, I develop conventional diversionary theory in two ways. First, I argue that diversion is fundamentally the manipulation of foreign policy salience, and that this objective is generally accomplished through actions short of war. Second, I argue that domestic constraints—specifically, a country’s media system and the flow of information between elites and citizens—condition the ability of leaders to reap the rewards of diversion. The results provide tentative support for the theory, and are consistent with media systems playing an important role in conditioning and structuring the relationship between domestic unrest and conflict.
... The third strategy to evade accountability for foreign policy failures is to divert domestic and international attention. Following a similar logic as 'diversionary war' arguments (Haynes, 2017), the strategy relies on government attempts to defuse scrutiny for foreign policy failures by shifting the agenda of political debate. For example, this can involve high-level policy initiatives and announcements. ...
The paper considers the role of humour in dealing with failure in foreign policy and brings insights together from the studies of policy failure, humour studies, customer service management and crisis communication. It investigates how research in customer service management and crisis communication points to the use of humour as an additional strategy for dealing with foreign policy failure. This research has provided valuable insights into the benefits of humour for dealing with minor service failure, reducing the level of damage done to the standing of the actor responsible for the failure. The paper transfers these insights into IR and investigates the benefits and drawbacks of self-deprecating humour by policy makers responsible for failure. To illustrate this, we consider the humour employed by US President George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2004 when making fun of his administration’s inability to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. We argue that humour can be a tool to address policy failure only in front of a sympathetic audience when humour can be a means of addressing the cognitive tension between support for a policy and its empirical failure.
... By contrast, constituents are likely to view regimes with limited religious legitimacy as weak, untrustworthy, and uncommitted when engaging in these same diplomatic behaviors. This legitimacy gap ironically incentivizes precisely the outbidding dynamics expected above for religious regimes that fail to defend religiously-salient claims, such that resort to aggression becomes an extreme mechanism for establishing credibility (Goddard, 2010;Haynes, 2017;Zellman, 2020). ...
How and under what conditions do religious factors explain the militarization of interstate territorial disputes? We argue that inconclusive findings in previous studies stem from inadequate consideration of the interaction between challenger state religiosity and the domestic constituencies actually invested in religiously salient territorial claims. To address this gap, this article differentiates between secular regimes, which provide minimal support to their state's dominant religion and religious regimes, which strongly support their dominant religion. It also considers narrowly salient coreligionist populations, which appeal almost exclusively to religious audiences, versus broadly salient contested sacred sites, which appeal to much broader constituencies. We argue that the interaction between these two factors produces very different patterns of interstate conflict behavior. Secular regimes avoid escalation over narrowly salient religious claims because they do not depend upon religious constituents for support. However, they lack the necessary religious legitimacy to manage outbidding challenges that frequently arise over more broadly salient claims. Religious regimes, by contrast, enjoy high domestic religious legitimacy, enabling more peaceful engagement with broadly salient religious claims. Yet their political dependence upon religious constituencies incentivizes conflict when disputes involve narrowly salient religious claims. We test these propositions utilizing original data on the religious salience of interstate territorial disputes in the post-Cold War era, from 1990 to 2010. Analyses, using both dichotomous and continuous measures of regime religiosity, confirm these inferences and contribute to highly nuanced understandings of how state-religion policy and religious salience interact to influence patterns of interstate violence.
... On framing, political legitimacy and armed conflict, seeOlmastroni (2014).10 On the divergent causal logics and policy prescriptions of these functions, see:Haynes (2017). ...
Diversionary War Theory (DWT) posits that leaders engulfed in a domestic crisis will attempt to divert the attention of citizens by initiating an armed conflict against an external actor. War, under this logic, is a mechanism designed to distract, boost the leader’s popularity, or relegate the responsibility for the crisis to an outside scapegoat. In this article, I apply a discursive variation of DWT to account for and describe the shift in Donald Trump’s approach to China during the COVID-19 crisis. This analysis concludes the domestic political and economic difficulties Trump was grappling with during the 2020 presidential election motivated him to blame the Chinese government for the detrimental effects the pandemic had on the United States. Trump’s strategic use of novel social media platforms was instrumental in his campaign to name, shame, and scapegoat China to divert attention from the domestic crisis as well as to boost his popularity.
... A section of international relations scholars has theorised that the political leadership in a country resorts to warmongering to distract the various internal constituencies from domestic strife. Better known as diversionary war theorists, scholars like Haynes (2017), Levy (1989), Richards (1993), andTheiler (2018) have argued that leadership in certain countries instigate external conflicts to shore up their positions within the public and the military establishment during such times. Following the outbreak of the corona epidemic, the political manifestations of Chinese nationalism have become more visible. ...
BRICS is conceivably the most formidable organisation to have emerged in the post-Cold War period in the non-Western world. This book highlights the significance of BRICS in a wider global context and foregrounds the long-pending demand for the reform of global governance institutions.
The volume:
• Traces how the organisation came into being and looks at the distinct norms and principles espoused by it
• Discusses the glaring limitations of the existing institutions of global governance
• Explores the economic growth and the rising political influence of BRICS states
• Analyses the internal threats to the survival of the organisation and assesses its prospects in the foreseeable future.
A significant intervention in situating BRICS as one of the major players in global governance, the book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international political economy, international business and finance, international relations, politics, and Global South Studies.
... 1 Rather, research has turned away from the causes of rivalry to focus on the effects of rivalry (see Conrad 1 An exception to this is the literature linking state independence and rivalry formation (Diehl & Goertz 2001, Stinnet & Diehl 2001, Goertz & Diehl 1995. , Findley et al. 2012, Boutton 2014, Haynes 2015. This turn away from exploring the causes of rivalry is surprising, especially given the lack of understanding of the domestic influences on rivalry formation. ...
This article argues that dramatic political change in State A poses a threat to the interests that other states B share with it. The more salient those interests are to State B, the greater the threat posed by domestic political change within State A. Thus major changes in one state place the leaders of formerly friendly states into a domain of losses, motivating risk-seeking behavior in hopes of reversing these losses. Conversely, the new leaders of the state undergoing domestic political change initiate similarly risk-seeking behavior to defend their new endowments. The conflicts that result sow the seeds of long-lasting enmity (rivalry) between former partners. I test this argument in a dataset of rivalry onset during the period 1950–2005 and find evidence that in the wake of dramatic political change in State A, rivalries are most likely to form between A and its close partners.
... Finally, the ability to generate significant popularity rallies de pends on media amplification (Oneal and Bryan 1995) and credible elite and media sup port (Groeling and Baum 2008). In light of all these contingencies, it is not surprising that the literature about 'diversionary wars' has reached remarkably contradictory results, not only about the empirical regularity itself (Tarar 2006;Chiozza and Goemans 2003) but al so about the potential underlying mechanisms (Haynes 2017 ...
What executives are and what they do in democratic regimes should obviously be affected by public opinion. This occurs not only through the electoral process, but also through the influence that, in the interim, public attitudes exert on (re)election-minded politicians. But what drives public support for executives? This chapter focuses on four types of determinants: outcomes, processes, events, and time. After describing the findings of the early social-scientific studies on executive support of the 1970s and 1980s, we address the multiple caveats and contingencies that resulted from expanding these approaches to contexts different from those in which they originated. The result has been an increasing attention to heterogeneity: of effects, information levels, political and institutional contexts, and publics. Understanding this heterogeneity will be vital as we move more decisively in the future to the empirical study of the relationship between public opinion and the formation, survival, and (re)composition of executives.
... Therefore, in difficult times, instead of choosing a random target, political leaders, who want to divert attention away from domestic problems, would be better off confronting a rival. 20 Aggressive behavior against a state whose enmity has already been confirmed is easy to rationalize. 21 The enemy image in the repertoire of the public makes the hostile action more credible and more readily justifiable and supportable. ...
Recent studies of diversionary theory focus on domestic determinants of conflict between interstate rivals as well as the strategic behavior of potential targets of diversion. This paper addresses both issues by analyzing the tendency of the U.S. and Iran to use their rivalry for diversionary purposes from 1990 to 2004. Throughout the study, I seek to answer the following questions: Do the U.S. and Iran use their rivalry to divert attention away from domestic political and economic problems? Second, does Iran reciprocate hostile actions from the U.S. or act more conciliatory to avoid becoming the target of diversion. My findings demonstrate that U.S. Presidents appear to be more hostile toward Iran as there is a decline in their approval ratings. The same conclusion cannot be drawn for Iran. The findings suggest that Iran neither uses hostility toward the U.S. to divert attention away from domestic problems nor behaves strategically to avoid becoming the target of a potential U.S. diversion.
... Buna karşın hedef saptırma tezinin geçerliliğini destekleyen çalışmalar, enflasyon, gayri safi milli hasılada meydana gelen gerilemeler, seçilme kaygısı, iç politik çatışmalar, gösteriler, eylemler vb. göstergeleri kullanmak suretiyle dış politik çatışmalar ve içsel sorunlar arasında bir ilişki olduğunu iddia etmektedir (Morgan ve Bickers,1992;Miller, 1999;Davies, 2002;James ve Oneal, 1991;Hess ve Orphanides, 2001;Fordham, 2002;Haynes, 2017). ...
... For the two mechanisms of diversionary conflict initiation "rally around the flag" and "gambling for resurrection," seeHaynes (2015). ...
The author presents contrarian arguments contesting mainstream US views on the danger of a Sino-American war over Taiwan's status. They contend that these countries' dispute about Taiwan is motivated by opposing strategic interests and security concerns rather than just, or even mainly, clashing values such as national reunification, sovereignty, democracy, and self-determination. The danger of a Sino-American confrontation has become more elevated recently due to a confluence of several concurrent developments. Despite this increased danger compared to any time since Richard Nixon visited Beijing in 1972, they conclude that war is not imminent or likely-barring extreme hardliners and radical nationalists taking over policymaking in Beijing, Taipei and/or Washington. Despite a rising chorus urging Washington to commit more firmly to Taiwan's defense, they argue that the United States will not likely intervene directly on Taiwan's behalf. Even more controversially, they submit that Beijing will eventually prevail in this dispute.
The article is an attempt to study impact of international conflicts on economic development and growth under the modern conditions of global environment. It is accentuated that the new threats and challenges are reflected in the changes going on in the principles of global development. A country is most likely to initiate a war conflict when it feels the highest degree of economic decline or when the aggressor country’s level of economic deceleration is higher than that in the country faced by a war. Autocratic countries initiate military aggressions against economically independent and politically different countries. The situation becomes even worse when it comes to an autocratic country with weak democratic institutes.
The article focuses on the popularity of the President of the Russian Federation and the factors that influence the level of his support among the population. It is shown that most of the previous literature was devoted to the study of the influence of such determinants as macroeconomic indicators, the standard of living of citizens, the media, the use of political technologies, etc. The author notes that researchers have begun to mark a certain impact on the rating of national leaders of international events and interstate conflicts. The review of the literature showed that most researchers studied the factors of approval of the president's activities on the example of the United States. The author came to the conclusion that Russia is also a good laboratory for research and finding answers to a number of questions: Does the country's participation in military conflicts affect the popularity of the President of the Russian Federation? Does the low approval rating of the head of state lead to the initiation of a military conflict? The diversionary theory of war and the «rally around the flag» effect became the methodological basis of the article. Based on theoretical reflection, two working hypotheses were formulated: 1) a decrease in the approval rating of the president leads to an increase in the aggressiveness of foreign policy and the initiation of a military conflict; 2) Russia's participation in military conflicts leads to an increase in the popularity / approval of the activities of the President of the Russian Federation. The purpose of the article is an empirical test of these hypotheses. The author collected data on the rating of Russia’s president from 2000 to 2022 and conducted a regression analysis of time series. A comparative analysis of cases was used as a research method. As a result of statistical and other calculations, the author came to the conclusion that a decrease in the approval rating of the President of the Russian Federation does not lead to the initiation of military conflicts. The article substantiates the idea that the effect of the «rally around the flag» has matter in Russia, the participation of the armed forces in conflicts leads to an increase in the approval of the activities of the President of the Russian Federation.
This article examines whether and how economic slowdowns lead to military conflict. Although a weak economy (as reflected, for example, by high inflation and unemployment rates) has often been regarded as a cause of interstate conflict, this study proposes that worse economy, that is, a negative trend of growth rates, tends to make political leaders face domestic challenge from dissatisfied public and look for diversionary targets. In addition, it hypothesizes that economically troubled states will target their junior trade partners, which are less likely to retaliate harshly. The results, based on an analysis of directed dyads from 1950 to 2010, show that a state is more likely to initiate military conflict when economic growth slows. When the initiator is an autocracy and the target is a democracy, this aggression is likely directed toward a vulnerable trade partner. However, a potential initiator’s political unrest does not increase the tendency to target a junior economic partner. These findings suggest that an autocracy’s slowing economy can threaten a politically dissimilar and economically dependent state, and that political and economic unrest have different effects on diversionary conflict as these factors interact with the domestic and international environments. Given our globalized economy and the current erosion of democracy worldwide, we could experience more frequent conflicts between economically troubled autocracies and their junior trade partners.
Over the past 30 years empirical international relations has discovered a number of conflict patterns which are variously considered to be competing, contradictory, or emanating from unique processes. I present a simplified and corrected selectorate model of war which unifies four such lines of research: the autocratic, democratic, and capitalist peaces with diversionary war. It is shown that domestic political competition, as understood within the selectorate approach, contains microfoundations for context conditional risk preference as a rationalist explanation for war. This novel mechanism, in turn, coherently explains the main findings from these various areas of enquiry. And so the discoveries of these four lines of enquiry can be understood not as apparently accidental or competing patterns but as aspects of the same mechanism operating under different empirical contexts.
What public pressures do leaders face in international disputes? Leaders often denounce foreign actions as provocations, triggering public anger and demands for restitution. Rather than generating a reflexive rally around the flag, we argue that leaders who invoke foreign provocations—whether hypothetical, remembered, exaggerated, or real—face heightened public disapproval if they fail to take tough action in the present. Across two survey experiments and a quasi-experiment involving US naval patrols in the South China Sea, we find that incidents construed as provocative increase public pressure on the Chinese government to respond or incur public disapproval. We discuss possible explanations, how government elites seek to mitigate public disapproval, and how such events can change the logic of coercion and deterrence.
The diversionary theory of war is one of the best-known conflict initiation theories focusing on democratic leaders’ incentives to divert public attention away from political scandals or economic policy failures. While this assumption is well-known, few studies have examined if and how the use of force could divert public attention from such a scandal or failure. By using cross-national experiments in Japan and Israel, we provide empirical tests of this particular assumption and test the other theoretically discussed implications. Our contribution is twofold. First, we confirm that, in both Japan and Israel, diverting public attention from salient political scandals may fail. Second, drawing from an experiment using a mock news article predicting the prime minister’s hawkish policy, we demonstrate that actual escalation against a potentially nuclear-armed enemy would not directly lead to greater support for the prime minister compared to the mere emphasis on the threat posed by the enemy. Simply warning of an imminent threat from North Korea or Iran is critical and sufficient to induce political support from the general public; we call it threat-induced political support.
La teoría de la guerra de distracción es una de las más conocidas sobre el inicio de los conflictos que se enfoca en los intereses de los líderes democráticos de desviar la atención pública de los escándalos políticos o las políticas económicas fallidas. Si bien este postulado es bien conocido, en pocos estudios se analizó si el uso de la fuerza podría desviar la atención del público de un escándalo o una política fallida, y de qué manera. Mediante la utilización de experimentos transnacionales en Japón e Israel, proporcionamos pruebas empíricas de este supuesto en particular y ponemos a prueba las otras implicancias debatidas en marcos teóricos. Nuestro aporte es doble. En primer lugar, confirmamos que, tanto en Japón como en Israel, desviar la atención de la opinión pública de los escándalos políticos más destacados puede fracasar. En segundo lugar, a partir de un experimento en el que se utiliza un artículo de prensa simulado que predice una política agresiva del primer ministro, demostramos que la escalada real contra un potencial enemigo armado con armas nucleares no conduce directamente a un mayor apoyo al primer ministro en comparación con el mero énfasis en la amenaza que supone el enemigo. La simple advertencia de una amenaza inminente por parte de Corea del Norte o Irán es determinante y suficiente para inducir el apoyo político del público; lo llamamos “apoyo político inducido por la amenaza.”
La théorie de la diversion de la guerre est l’une des théories les plus connues sur le déclenchement des conflits. Elle se concentre sur les motivations des dirigeants démocratiques à détourner l’attention du public des scandales politiques ou des échecs de la politique économique. Bien que cette hypothèse soit bien connue, peu d’études ont examiné si et comment le recours à la force pouvait détourner l’attention du public de tels scandales ou échecs. Nous nous appuyons sur des expériences transnationales menées au Japon et en Israël, nous proposons des analyses empiriques de cette hypothèse particulière et nous analysons les autres implications qui sont discutées d’un point de vue théorique. Notre contribution est en deux volets. D’une part, nous confirmons que, tant au Japon qu’en Israël, les tentatives de détourner l’attention du public des scandales politiques importants peuvent échouer. Et d’autre part, à partir d’une expérience reposant sur un article de presse fictif prédisant une politique belliciste du premier ministre, nous démontrons que l’escalade réelle du conflit contre un ennemi potentiellement doté de l’arme nucléaire ne conduirait pas directement à un plus grand soutien pour le premier ministre par rapport à la simple insistance sur la menace présentée par l’ennemi. Le simple fait d’avertir d’une menace imminente de la part de la Corée du Nord ou de l’Iran est essentiel et suffisant pour déclencher le soutien politique du grand public; nous qualifions cela de soutien politique induit par la menace.
States around the world are fortifying their international borders at unprecedented rates. While only seven states had fortified their borders with walls or fences as of the end of World War Two, this number has now grown to more than 75. Why do states build walls on their international borders? While states may build walls to ameliorate the consequences of cross-border economic inequalities and to defend against transnational security threats, we suggest that another compelling logic stems from domestic politics and leaders’ desire to remain in office. Building on assumptions furnished by diversionary theory, we argue that national political leaders at risk of losing office are incentivized to implement popular policies, such as border wall construction, hoping that doing so will prompt a domestic rally effect. To test this argument, we assemble a global dataset of leader-years and find that politically insecure leaders are more likely to be seen to start and continue border wall construction.
Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.
Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.
This article examines the failures of the Chechen Independence movement from the collapse of the Soviet Union until the installation of Ramzan Kadyrov's rule.
Bu çalışma, temel amacı devletlerin dış politika yönelimlerini sistematik temeller üzerine oturtmak için genellenebilir orta ölçekte açıklamalar geliştirmek olan dış politika analizine teorik ve kavramsal bir perspektiften yaklaşmaktadır. Çalışmada, öncelikle birey-yapı ilişkisi bağlamında Dış Politika Analizinin Uluslararası İlişkiler alanından nedenli ayrıştığı gösterilmekte ve dış politika analizinin ağırlıklı olarak karar alıcılara ve süreçlere odaklandığı vurgulanmaktadır. Rasyonel seçim kuramının ve psikolojik yaklaşımların öne çıktığı, karar alıcılar üzerinden dış politika yönelimlerini açıklama yoluna giden yaklaşımların tartışmasını süreç bazlı yaklaşımların değerlendirilmesi takip etmektedir. Dış politika yapımına etkide bulunan kurumsal süreçler ve ağırlıklı olarak kamuoyu, medya ve çıkar gruplarından oluşan iç politik süreçler üzerinden geliştirilen yaklaşımlar ele alınmaktadır. Çalışma son olarak kültürel ve duygusal boyutunu on plana çıkaran yaklaşımlara değinmektedir.
Under what circumstances do third-party states oppose governments that marginalize their ethnic kin in foreign civil conflicts? We argue that the effect of transborder ethnic ties on third-party support for rebel movements depends upon two factors: (1) a constellation of ethnic power relations in which an ethnicity with access to political power in a potential intervener but is marginalized in a civil conflict state and (2) the political insecurity of leaders in a potential intervener. Said leaders facing a high probability of removal from office are willing to undertake risky foreign policies, including support for rebel movements, hoping that such actions will generate an ethnically tinged rally effect. We draw upon the literature on diversionary theory to develop an empirical expectation. We then assemble a dataset of potential intervener–civil conflict state dyad-years to model this expectation. The political insecurity of leaders is measured with a variety of proxies. Our findings suggest that the well-known diversionary theory can be applied to a novel dependent variable that of third-party state sponsorship of rebel movements.
Since at least Cicero, we have known that “money is the sinew of war.” Is it possible for a political economy of security (PES) subfield to contribute knowledge beyond Cicero’s claim? This article aims to delineate the boundaries of a PES subfield by using the classic “guns versus butter” trade-off to define the existing literature within the subfield. Thinking seriously about this trade-off, including conditions under which a trade-off may not exist, raises a host of questions. The two most direct questions are: How does consuming “guns” influence the consumption of “butter”? And how does using “guns” influence the consumption of “butter”? Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science Volume 22 is May 11, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Scholars have argued for some time that the rally ’round the flag phenomenon creates incentives for political leaders to use military force to divert attention away from domestic turmoil. It is hypothesized that a state’s strategic or historical context conditions its use of military force abroad, and that the probability of diversionary uses of force is higher in opportunity-rich environments of enduring rivalry. Empirical analyses lend support to this hypothesis, showing that high levels of inflation increase the probability of militarized dispute initiation in settings of rivalry but actually decrease it in nonrival settings. However, the results are contingent on the regime type of the potential initiator. Consistent with recent strategic models of diversion, the analyses demonstrate that although democratic leaders have the greatest incentives to divert, they have fewer opportunities to do so due to the transparency of their regimes.
Although the diversionary theory of international conflict is intuitively plausible and is supported by much anecdotal evidence, quantitative tests generally have failed to establish a systemic link between domestic political troubles and foreign policy adventurism. In this article we revise the diversionary theory. We argue that a state leader will treat an erosion of domestic support more seriously when it comes from within segments of society that are critical in the maintenance of the leader's ruling coalition than when it comes from other domestic groups. We also argue that diversionary behavior typically should involve actions short of war. The revised theory is tested for the United States over the period from 1953 to 1976. Multiple empirical techniques are used to analyze the relationship between the uses of external force by the United States and the level of support for the president among members of the president's party. The results provide strong support for the revised diversionary theory.
Do legislative constraints constrain or compel democratic executives’ conflict behavior during periods of economic decline? Although institutional constraints are thought to reduce democratic executives’ propensity to engage in interstate conflict, other research suggests that such constraints may provide incentives to engage in diversionary uses of force. Incorporating work from the comparative study of economic voting and cross-national research on the diversionary use of force, this article contends that government arrangements — coalition, minority, weak party cohesion — influence democratic conflict behavior by (1) shaping the extent to which the executive is held accountable for the economy and (2) determining the executive’s capacity to address the economy with legislation. Specifically, the argument presented here suggests that governing parties in coalition governments share the blame for a poor economy, reducing the likelihood that the executive initiates disputes in response to the economy. Compared to single-party majority governments with high party discipline, executives presiding over minority governments, or whose parties are plagued by a lack of cohesion, are more likely to initiate disputes when faced with poor economic conditions, because these executives are likely to face resistance to remedial economic policy. Probit analyses of the interactive effects of government arrangements and economic performance on dispute initiation among industrialized democracies, 1950—97, support the argument. The article concludes with implications for research in comparative politics and international relations, including, for example, executive—legislative relations and strategic conflict avoidance.
Ostrom and Job (1986) found that domestic, political factors are more influential on the president's decision to use military force than characteristics of the international environment. These results pose a serious challenge to realists' assumptions regarding the motives of states and the separability of domestic and foreign policy. This article reexamines Ostrom and Job's arguments and introduces a new indicator, a measure of the severity of ongoing international crises, to provide a better assessment of the relative effect of the international environment on presidential decision making. This severity index is significantly associated with the use of force by the United States from 1949 through 1976, and proves to be more influential than the international indicators used by Ostrom and Job. Nevertheless, domestic political factors remain most consequential in the president's decision to use force short of war.
This book provides the first detailed analysis of international rivalries, the long-standing and often violent confrontations between the same pairs of states. The book addresses conceptual components of rivalries and explores the origins, dynamics, and termination of the most dangerous form of rivalry--enduring rivalry--since 1816. Paul Diehl and Gary Goertz identify 1166 rivalries since 1816. They label sixty-three of those as enduring rivalries. These include the competitions between the United States and Soviet Union, India and Pakistan, and Israel and her Arab neighbors. The authors explain how rivalries form, evolve, and end. The first part of the book deals with how to conceptualize and measure rivalries and presents empirical patterns among rivalries in the period 1816-1992. The concepts derived from the study of rivalries are then used to reexamine two central pieces of international relations research, namely deterrence and "democratic peace" studies. The second half of the book builds an explanation of enduring rivalries based on a theory adapted from evolutionary biology, "punctuated equilibrium." The study of international rivalries has become one of the centerpieces of behavioral research on international conflict. This book, by two of the scholars who pioneered such studies, is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject. It will become the standard reference for all future studies of rivalries.
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 leaders. To provide a baseline of empirical results we explore how a broad range of domestic and international factors affects the tenure of leaders. We focus in particular on the effect of conflict and its outcome. We find that political institutions fundamentally mediate the costs and benefits of international conflict and that war is not necessarily ex post inefficient for leaders. This suggests that the assumption that war is ex post inefficient for unitary rational actors can not be simply extended to leaders. Therefore, a focus on leaders may yield important new rationalist explanations for war.
The diversionary hypothesis, that leaders use force to distract publics from suffering economies and declining performance, has been explored in numerous articles and books. Despite this attention, the empirical evidence is often contradictory Some argue there is little evidence of diversionary behavior, while others find significant relationships between domestic politics and U.S. foreign policy behavior. I argue that problems with research design and selection effects account for the contradictory evidence, and that by addressing these issues we can better model the impact of domestic political conditions on presidential decision-making. First, I hypothesize that domestic politics influence the occurrence of international crises. After accounting for this influence, I argue we should find that domestic political conditions do not directly influence presidential decision-making. Second, I hypothesize that we can best model their impact on the decision to use force as a function of the severity of the international crisis to which the President may respond. I find evidence to indicate domestic factor exercise little direct impact on the decision to use force. I found qualified evidence that domestic factors exercise some impact on the decision to use force when the severity of an international crisis is not so great as to demand action and not so insignificant as to guarantee inaction.
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 the risk of losing office and international conflict; Importance of the domestic economic and political features of a country to the probability of conflict initiation.
The literature on diversionary war has long argued that a leader's tenure considerations play an important role in international conflict behavior. However, for the diversionary use of force to be rational, international conflict must in turn affect the leader's tenure. A two-stage probit model on a new data set of all leaders between 1919 and 1992 is used to examine this reciprocal relationship between the probability of losing office and the probability of crisis initiation. Contrary to theories of the diversionary use of force, results show that an increase in the risk of losing office makes leaders less likely to initiate a crisis, and an increase in the risk of an international crisis makes leaders more likely to lose office. Results also suggest that democracies are overall less likely to initiate a crisis because of the domestic political insecurity of democratic leaders.
Many sources of economic data cover only a limited set of states at any given point in time. Data are often systematically missing for some states over certain time periods. In the context of conflict studies, economic data are frequently unavailable for states involved in conflicts, undermining the ability to draw inferences of linkages between economic and political interactions. For example, simply using available data in a study of trade and conflict and disregarding observations with missing data on economic variables excludes key conflicts such as the Berlin crisis, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Gulf War from the sample. A set of procedures are presented to create additional estimates to remedy some of the coverage problems for data on gross domestic product, population, and bilateral trade flows.
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 peace accord was signed in Rome between President Chissano and the Renamo leader, Afonso Dhlakama. Elections were held two years later and again in 1999, which Chissano and the Frelimo party won. In 2004, President Chissano announced that he would not run for a third term, even though Mozambique's constitution would allow him to do so. Rather, he voluntarily retired and let a successor be selected. For all his services to his country, President Chissano was awarded the first Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, a great honor meant to celebrate his outstanding contributions to peace, prosperity and democracy, but also …a lot of money: 5 million US dollars over 10 years and 200,000 US dollars annually for life thereafter, in addition to up to 200,000 US dollars a year for 10 years towards the winner's public interest activities and good causes.
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 weaknesses so as to agree on the probable outcome of continued war. Yet the incentives that motivate leaders to then terminate war, Goemans maintains, can vary greatly depending on the type of government they represent. The author looks at democracies, dictatorships, and mixed regimes and compares the willingness among leaders to back out of wars or risk the costs of continued warfare. Democracies, according to Goemans, will prefer to withdraw quickly from a war they are not winning in order to appease the populace. Autocracies will do likewise so as not to be overthrown by their internal enemies. Mixed regimes, which are made up of several competing groups and which exclude a substantial proportion of the people from access to power, will likely see little risk in continuing a losing war in the hope of turning the tide. Goemans explores the conditions and the reasoning behind this "gamble for resurrection" as well as other strategies, using rational choice theory, statistical analysis, and detailed case studies of Germany, Britain, France, and Russia during World War I. In so doing, he offers a new perspective of the Great War that integrates domestic politics, international politics, and battlefield developments.
Throughout the post-World War II period the president has been called upon to make decisions concerning the use of force as a political instrument. The explanation that is offered is based upon a characterization of the president as a cybernetic human decision maker facing limitations. These limitations, in conjunction with the complexity of the environment, lead presidents to develop and use a relatively simple decision rule. The dependent variable, which is the probability of the use of force at any point in time, is explained in terms of enduring and essential concerns, which are operationalized as coming from the international, domestic, and personal environments. Data are taken from Blechman and Kaplan's Force Without War. On the basis of our estimation and evaluation, presidential decisions to use force are based on factors in all three arenas.
Classical diversionary theory suggests that domestic strife leads to foreign aggression. This theory has been unsupported empirically because it ignores the critical role played by the military in decisions to use force abroad. Strife leads to external aggression when it threatens the organizational interests of the military; otherwise, the military is reluctant to do politicians' dirty work. Only a particular type of domestic strife-contested political institutions or conflict over the fundamental rules of the political game-necessarily threatens the military's interests and thereby encourages aggression. Using annual observations on all countries since 1827, we estimate fixed-effects duration dependent logit models of the initiation of violence at home and abroad. We find robust evidence showing that contested institutions significantly increase the probability of the initiation of violence and that they account for violence usually attributed to other forms of domestic strife, regime type, and regime change.
This paper reformulates diversionary theory to take into account the effect of domestic structures on the propensity of leaders to use foreign policy to manipulate domestic politics. The structure of domestic political institutions and levels of policy resources condition the willingness of leaders to use conflict involvement to manipulate domestic audiences. Probit analysis of 294 militarized interstate disputes during the period from 1955 to 1976. Domestic structures have a significant effect on the propensity of leaders to use foreign policy as a vehicle of their personal political ambitions.
I think [my grandchildren] will be proud of two things. What I did for the Negro and seeing it through in Vietnam for all of Asia. The Negro cost me 15 points in the polls and Vietnam cost me 20.
Lyndon B. Johnson
With tenacious regularity over the last two and a half decades the Gallup Poll has posed to its cross-section samples of the American public the following query, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way (the incumbent) is handling his job as President?” The responses to this curious question form an index known as “Presidential popularity.” According to Richard Neustadt, the index is “widely taken to approximate reality” in Washington and reports about its behavior are “very widely read” there, including, the quotation above would suggest, the highest circles.
Plotted over time, the index forms probably the longest continuous trend line in polling history. This study seeks to analyze the behavior of this line for the period from the beginning of the Truman administration in 1945 to the end of the Johnson administration in January 1969 during which time the popularity question was asked some 300 times.
Four variables are used as predictors of a President's popularity. These include a measure of the length of time the incumbent has been in office as well as variables which attempt to estimate the influence on his rating of major international events, economic slump and war. To assess the independent impact of each of these variables as they interact in association with Presidential popularity, multiple regression analysis is used as the basic analytic technique.
We seek to answer the question, What effect does international war participation have on the ability of political leaders to survive in office? We develop a model of political reliability and derive seven related hypotheses from it that anticipate variation in the time a national political leader will survive in office after the onset of a war. Drawing upon a broadly based data set on state involvement in international war between 1816 and 1975, our expectations are tested through censored Weibull regression. Four of the hypotheses are tested, and all are supported by the analysis. We find that those leaders who engage their nation in war subject themselves to a domestic political hazard that threatens the very essence of the office-holding homo politicus, the retention of political power. The hazard is mitigated by longstanding experience for authoritarian elites, an effect that is muted for democratic leaders, while the hazard is militated by defeat and high costs from war for all types of leaders. Additionally, we find that authoritarian leaders are inclined to war longer after they come to power than democratic leaders. Further, democratic leaders select wars with a lower risk of defeat than do their authoritarian counterparts.
The 1990s saw the emergence of a new research agenda focused on enduring rivalries, longstanding competitions between the same pair of states. The original Diehl & Goertz dataset on international rivalries has been perhaps the most widely used collection to study those rivalries. Here, that dataset is extended through 2001, and additional criteria beyond the time-density approach are used to define a population of rivalries. In the first half of the article, the conceptual and operational bases on which the original rivalry collection was based are described. The article explores each of the dimensions of the rivalry concept and the associated operational criteria. The ‘linked conflict’ dimension of the rivalry concept is made more explicit in the discussion of rivalry dimensions. The article then presents and discusses all the major changes made vis-‡-vis the earlier rivalry collection. In the second half of the article, empirical analyses highlight the conceptual dimensions of rivalry. Particular attention is devoted to the issue of rivalry symmetry, with an investigation of rival power capabilities. In an analysis on the linked conflict dimension, the article examines war occurrence and sequence in rivalry (most of which occurs at or near the outset of the rivalry) as well as the outcome and waiting times between disputes. The article concludes with a comparison of this dataset to another prominent rivalry collection.
One of the most intriguing claims that has been made about the behavior of American presidents is that they have been motivated by deteriorating political conditions at home to engage in conflict abroad. However, we identify three problems with this literature: (1) the use of increments of time rather than international crises as the unit of analysis; (2) the assump tion that presidents can respond to international crises whenever they wish; and (3) the assumption that there are significant political payoffs for diver sionary uses of force. We argue that few if any relationships are likely to be found between presidential popularity, congressional support, economic conditions and elections and the use of force. We test our hypotheses by looking at the political use of military force by American presidents in the post-World War II era (1953-88). We also test to determine if the causal order is not reversed and if it is domestic conditions which precipitate international crises. Ultimately, we find little evidence of any kind of link between domestic political conditions in the United States and uses of force or international crises.
Signorino and Ritter developed and advocated a new measure of the political similarity of states (S). They demonstrated logical flaws associated with the common Kendall's &tgr;b-based alliance similarity measure and showed that using S may yield quite different similarity estimates. But without a broader empirical comparison and analysis using S, the full empirical ramifications of this difference is not known. In this study, a comparison of S versus &tgr;b is conducted over a wide spatial and temporal domain, examining the relationship between S, &tgr;b, expected utility scores, and conflict. Despite significant positive correlations, important differences in the distribution of S and &tgr;b-based measures of alliance similarity are found. It should not be assumed that the measures are substitutable. Reanalysis of an important expected utility theory of war shows a stronger relationship between equilibrium predictions and conflict when S is used versus &tgr;b.
In this study, the “rally effect”—the propensity for the American public to put aside political differences and support the president during international crises—is measured by considering the changes in presidential popularity following all 193 Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) between 1933 and 1992 as identified by the Correlates of War project. Summary analyses find minor, statistically insignificant rallies associated with uses of force, although sizable rallies are associated with particular subcategories of military crises. However, larger rallies are associated with the United States as both revisionist and originator of the dispute, with the initiation of a full interstate war, and with prominent headline placement in the New York Times. Regression analyses indicate that rallies are more likely when they are associated with White House statements and bipartisan support for the administration's policies. Findings suggest that the size and appearance of a rally depends primarily on how the crisis is presented to the public in terms of media coverage, bipartisan support, and White House spin.
It is commonly asserted that state leaders, when faced with poor domestic political conditions, have an incentive to engage in diversionary foreign policy behavior. The standard view is that an aggressive foreign policy benefits the executive by leading the public to ignore domestic problems and to “rally around the flag” to meet the foreign threat. In this article, the authors formalize the diversionary argument as a principal-agent problem in which the state executive is an agent under contract to a public whose choice to retain or dismiss the executive is based on whether the agent is judged to be competent. The authors assume that the competence of the executive is private information and that the public makes Bayesian updates of the probability of executive competence based on domestic and foreign policy outcomes. Several implications are derived from the model. First, the competence of executives and their attitudes toward risk are central in the decision to engage in diversionary foreign policy. Second, an executive often can improve her or his chances of being retained only by altering the public's perception of the difficulty of the foreign operation. Third, the model points to the need to distinguish between short-term rally-around-the-flag effects of diversion and the public's long-term assessment of executive competence.
This study explores the relative propensity of democratic and autocratic regimes to engage in diversionary behavior. Although previous research has focused on the willingness of leaders to engage in conflict, recent studies suggest an alternative explanation: the effect of strategic interaction opportunities. Previous studies suggest that even though democratic leaders may have an incentive to use foreign policy to manipulate domestic audiences, would-be adversaries limit their interaction opportunities. This article extends the analysis to a comparison of the behavior of democratic and autocratic regimes. Using three different indicators of the domestic political vulnerability of leaders—economic growth rates, protests, and rebellions—the results indicate that democratic leaders are apparently more affected by strategic interaction opportunities than their autocratic counterparts.
Students of international politics have often argued that state leaders initiate the use of force internationally to divert attention away from domestic problems. The author contends that these arguments concerning the relationship between domestic unrest and international conflict are not supported empirically because they focus too narrowly on the incentives state leaders have to use external force as a diversionary tactic without considering alternative solutions to quieting domestic unrest. It is hypothesized that democratic leaders will respond to domestic unrest by diverting attention by using force internationally. On the other hand, authoritarian leaders are expected to repress the unrest directly, and these acts of repression will make them less likely to use force internationally. An analysis of the initiation of force by the challenging states in 180 international crises between 1948 and 1982 strongly supports these hypotheses. The results of the analyses and their implications for the literature on diversionary conflicts and the rapidly growing literature on democratic peace are discussed.
This study ascertains the extent to which domestic politics and the state of the national economy are relevant factors to U.S. presidents faced with the decision to use force during international crises. The author tests a diversionary theory of the use of force that treats the relationship between politics and the use of force as nonrecursive and that considers both the incentives and the constraints faced by the president. To analyze the political economy of the use of force from 1949 to 1984, the author uses a simultaneous equations model specified with force and presidential approval as the endogenous variables. This design taps the interdependence between politics, the economy, and the decision to use force, and allows the author to assess the direct and indirect effects of the economy on uses of force. The author finds an indirect link between the economy, politics, and the use of force.
It is conventional wisdom that the public rallies 'round the president when military force is used abroad. Indeed, this belief has encouraged the view that presidents are apt to rattle the saber to divert attention from domestic problems. The rally effect is assessed by measuring the change in the president's popularity following all major uses of force by the United States from 1950 through 1984. Surprisingly, for these 102 cases, the mean change in the president's approval rating is 0%, even among the members of his party. Even well-publicized uses of force during a crisis boost the president's standing only 2%-3% on average. Regression analyses confirm that the rallying effect of a use of force is greater in a crisis and when the action is prominently reported by the media. In addition, rallies are greater when the president enjoys bipartisan support, his initial popularity is low, and the country is not at war or fatigued by war.
This article identifies three common flaws in the empirical literature on the diversionary use of force. First, while theoretical models of the diversionary use of force are built on the motivations of leaders to stay in power, the great majority of empirical studies employ datasets with the country or countryyear as their unit of analysis. Second, while theories of the diversionary use of force strongly suggest a reciprocal relationship between the probabilities of losing office and international conflict, almost no studies have explicitly modeled such a reciprocal relationship. Third, most empirical studies ignore how the diversionary incentives of leaders might affect the strategic calculus of their potential foreign opponents. This article explicitly addresses these common flaws by using a dataset with the leader-year as the unit of analysis and by employing a two-stage probit model to examine a reciprocal relationship between the probabilities of losing office and becoming a target, thus focusing on targets. The authors find only qualified support for the modified strategic theory of diversionary conflict. On the one hand, as the risk of losing office increases, leaders become less likely to be targets in an international crisis. On the other hand, however, the risk of becoming a target in an international crisis does not affect the probability of losing office.
Most interstate wars are fought or begin between neighbors. This relationship between contiguity and war has long been known, but ignored within peace research. The major reason for this is that it has been seen as essentially a trivial relationship, reflecting the opportunity for war rather than the real underlying cause of war. Recent work on territory and the issues over which wars are fought has begun to question that interpretation. This article maintains that the clustering of war among neighbors may be theoretically significant. It presents a territorial explanation of the relationship and juxtaposes it with the proximity and interaction explanations. Each of the three explanations is appraised in terms of explicit criteria to see which is the most adequate. Ultimately, however, each explanation must specify a set of tests that would falsify it, and this article does so for the territorial explanation. The article concludes with some implications for peace in the post-Cold War era if the theoretical explanation is correct.
Dealing with questions of war and peace and understanding the causes of interstate conflict is a primary goal of the field of international relations. In order to study interstate conflict in a rigorous manner, scholars have relied on established rules and procedures for gathering information into coherent data sets. Among those data sets is the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data. In this paper we first outline the data-collection process for the MID3 data. Second, we introduce two new data sets emerging from the project, “MID-I” and “MID-IP.” Third, we present relatively small changes in coding rules for the new MID3 data and some descriptive statistics. The statistics indicate that the MID3 data are remarkably similar to the MID2.1 version, varying in some minor and predictable ways.
Mitchell and Prins (2004) have recently found that diversion from high levels of inflation is observed only among enduring rivals. However, neither this nor any other cross-national test of the relevance of opportunity to diversion has included a potentially important determinant of diversionary capacity: major power status. I contend that since militarily powerful states have both more extensive sets of international commitments and much greater physical capacities to divert against broader sets of opponents, they are less likely to limit their diversionary behavior to enduring rivals. Cross-national time series analyses of the association between inflation and militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation for the period 1960—1999 reveal several differences between the diversionary activity of major powers and that of all other states. Models that account for the interaction between inflation and rivalry reveal that while nonmajor powers seemingly divert only against enduring rivals, major powers are marginally less likely to do so against rivals than they are against nonrivals. However, more detailed analyses indicate that these latter findings are being driven by the American case: While the United States is more likely to initiate MIDs against nonrivals than rivals at the highest levels of inflation, other major powers are more likely to initiate MIDs against rivals than nonrivals at all points. Moreover, the United States is, on average, more likely than all other states to initiate MIDs at all levels of inflation. At minimum, these findings imply that the United States is unique among major powers both in its capacity to divert from inflation and in its propensity to link diversion from inflation against nonrivals to its most important rivalries.
Political scientists are often called upon to estimate models in which the standard assumption that the data are conditionally independent can be called into question. I review the method of generalized estimating equations (GEE) for dealing with such correlated data. The GEE approach offers a number of advantages to researchers interested in modeling correlated data, including applicability to data in which the outcome variable takes on a wide range of forms. In addition, GEE models allow for substantial flexibility in specifying the correlation structure within cases and offer the potential for valuable substantive insights into the nature of that correlation. Moreover, GEE models are estimable with many currently available software packages, and the interpretation of model estimates is identical to that for commonly used models for uncorrelated data (e.g., logit and probit). I discuss practical issues relating to the use of GEE models and illustrate their usefulness for analyzing correlated data through three applications in political science.
Many sources of economic data cover only a limited set of states at any given point in time. Data are often systematically missing for some states over certain time periods. In the context of conflict studies, economic data are frequently unavailable for states involved in conflicts, undermining the ability to draw inferences of linkages between economic and political interactions. For example, simply using available data in a study of trade and conflict and disregarding observations with missing data on economic variables excludes key conflicts such as the Berlin crisis, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Gulf War from the sample. A set of procedures are presented to create additional estimates to remedy some of the coverage problems for data on gross domestic product, population, and bilateral trade flows.
Theoretical arguments and some empirical evidence suggest that war is more likely to occur between states that are geographically proximate, approximately equal in power, major powers, allied, undemocratic, economically advanced, and highly militarized than between those that are not. Bivariate analyses of these seven factors in relation to the onset of interstate war over all pairs of states in the period from 1816 to 1965 generally support these associations. However, multivariate analyses reveal some differences. In order of declining importance, the conditions that characterize a dangerous, war-prone dyad are: presence of contiguity, absence of alliance, absence of more advanced economy, absence of democratic polity, absence of overwhelming preponderance, and presence of major power. Taken together these findings suggest that our research priorities may be seriously distorted and that the idealist prescription for peace may be better than the realist one.
This article examines how reelection incentives influence foreign policy decision making in democratic states. A formal model characterizes how future electoral prospects affect a government's decision to undertake adventurous foreign policies. When governments are assured of relection, they make unbiased decisions considering only international factors. Decision making is similarly unbiased when governments have no prospects of reelection. When the voters' evaluation of foreign policy outcomes could have an effect on election results then governments are biased towards violent, adventurous foreign policy projects. Institutional constraints are shown to reduce the magnitude of these biases. The bias in foreign policy decisions at the end of the electoral cycle influences decision making in other countries. As a nation approaches the end of its electoral cycle other nations are more conciliatory and less confrontational towards it. With endogenous crisis formation, the model provides an explanation for the empirical phenomenon that democracies are more likely to become involved in war early in their electoral term.
The proposition that domestic political vulnerability provides an incentive for leaders to engage in international conflict has been widely accepted because of appealing logic and anecdotal support. Although empirical studies of U.S. behavior during the cold war era have demonstrated some support for a relationship between domestic political vulnerability and aggressive international behavior, the generalizability of these tests should not be assumed. In fact, there is little empirical evidence in support of this relationship as a general pattern. This study assesses theories linking domestic political vulnerability to international disputes on a cross-national basis by examining the relationships between economic decline, the electroal cycle, and measures of aggressive international action for 18 advanced industrialized democracies during the period from 1952 to 1988. The authors find no consistent support for a relationship between constraining domestic political conditions and international behavior. Instead, fewer international demands are made on politically vulnerable leaders. Due to strategic interaction in the international system, just when a state leader might be most willing to act aggressively, he or she is likely to have the least opportunity to do so. Variance in the behavior of international rivals may explain the lack of an empirical relationship between domestic political conditions and foreign policy behavior.
Given the central role of the concept of material capabilities in international politics models, and the ambiguity of the notion, it is essential that we define and measure it in operational terms. Such efforts have a long history and, given the multiplicity of interpretations as well as the difficulty of validation, we can expect alternative indicators to be put forth with some regularity well into the future. Herein, some of the assumptions, procedures, and implications of the Correlates of War project effort.First, we treat “power” as the generic concept, defined as the capacity of a state (or other actor) both to exercise influence and to resist influence attempts. That capacity is a function of, inter alia, geography, political organization and legitimacy, definition of “interests,” elite competence, and, of course, material capabilities. We see the last of these as falling along three dimensions: demographic, industrial, and military. The paper spells out the measurement problems, theoretic premises, data sources, and combinatorial options of this dataset on national capabilities.