Jack S. Levy's research while affiliated with Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and other places
What is this page?
This page lists the scientific contributions of an author, who either does not have a ResearchGate profile, or has not yet added these contributions to their profile.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
Publications (78)
This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...
This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...
This chapter combines a general introduction to psychological approaches to international relations, with a particular focus on models of judgment and decision-making in foreign policy. It surveys the leading concepts, theories, findings, and methodologies associated with the major psychological approaches to foreign policy, and identifies question...
This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...
This chapter serves as an introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology . It provides an overview of the field, focusing on key theories, topics, and empirical approaches. The chapter begins by defining political psychology as the behavior of individuals within a specific political system. This is followed by a lengthy discussion on t...
Empirical research generally supports the dyadic-level trade-promotes-peace hypothesis, while demonstrating that the relationship is weaker, more complex, and more conditional than liberal theory suggests. We shift to the system level and examine a neglected path to conflict in economically interdependent systems. In the great power competition for...
Why did the July 1914 crisis—but not crises in 1905, 1908–9, 1911, and 1912–13—escalate to great-power war despite occurring under similar international and domestic conditions? Explanations based on underlying and slowly changing structural, social, or cultural variables cannot answer this question. Examining three Balkan crises of 1912–13 and the...
Audience costs theory posits that domestic audiences punish political leaders who make foreign threats but fail to follow through, and that anticipation of audience costs gives more accountable leaders greater leverage in crisis bargaining. We argue, contrary to the theory, that leaders are often unaware of audience costs and their impact on crisis...
Interdependence altered power relations between the European great powers between 1871 and 1914 in ways that both sustained the conditions for peace and, after 1911, made a European war more likely. Interdependence accelerated the development of international financial and commercial networks. Transnational social and cultural exchanges raised the...
If a declining state has incentives for preventive war, the rising state should have incentives to delay a confrontation until it is stronger. We develop the theoretical paradox and examine the July 1914 crisis. Why did Russia, rising relative to Germany, not adopt a buying-time strategy? We argue that although most Russian leaders hoped to avoid a...
We use a modified bargaining-model-of-war framework to guide a study of decision-making leading to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. We argue that informational asymmetries in bargaining can result not only from private information and incentives to misrepresent that information, as posited by rational bargaining models, but also from psychologica...
I focus primarily on the utility of counterfactual analysis for helping to validate causal inferences in historical analysis. How can we use what did not happen but which easily could have happened to understand what did happen? With an infinite number of things that might have happened, and with temptations to construct “counterfactuals of conveni...
Audience costs theory posits that domestic publics punish leaders for making an external threat and then backing down. One key mechanism driving this punishment involves the value the public places on consistency between their leaders’ statements and actions. If true, this mechanism should operate not only when leaders fail to implement threats, bu...
Established in 1964, the Journal of Peace Research (JPR) celebrates 50 years. This anniversary special issue of the journal offers broad reviews of research areas that have been central both to the journal and to the field of peace and conflict research generally. An opening article co-authored by long-time editor Nils Petter Gleditsch offers a his...
Political psychology applies what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. It examines citizens’ vote choices and public opinion as well as how political leaders deal with threat, mediate political conflicts, and make foreign policy decisions. The second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology gathers together a dist...
The debate on the waning of war has recently moved into higher gear. This forum contributes to that debate. Steven Pinker observes that a decline in war does not require a romantic theory of human nature. In fact, it is compatible with a hardheaded view of human violent inclinations, firmly rooted in evolutionary biology. Homo sapiens evolved with...
The years between the World Wars represent an era of broken balances: the retreat of the United States from global geopolitics, the weakening of Great Britain and France, Russian isolation following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the resurgence of German power in Europe, and the rise of Japan in East Asia. All these factors complicated great-power...
In their article, Jack Levy and William Thompson argue that leading sea powers have neither the capability nor the incentive to threaten the domestic political order of other major powers, and are thus more likely to be bandwagoned with as a supplier of global public goods and potential ally against continental threats than balanced against (pp. 16...
The study of international rivalry is a thriving research program in international relations, but it focuses primarily on strategic rivalries and generally neglects both commercial rivalries and the impact of domestic politics. We examine commercial rivalry and the causal paths through which it can escalate to war. After identifying alternative the...
The ConflictSpace framework begins with the assumption that the factors leading a war to spread are different from the factors leading to the initiation of war. I argue that the presumed analytic separation of the initiation and spread of war is misleading because leaders’ expectations of how a war might spread have a significant effect on their de...
JERRY H. BENTLEY. Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. viii, 220. $20.95 (CDN), paper. Reviewed by André Wink
Pj. Heather. Goths and Romans, 332-489. New York: The Clarendon Press,Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xi, 378. $114.95 (CDN). Reviewed by Steven Muhlberger
Foreign policy choices are dependent both on expected international outcomes and on the factors shaping the power and behavior of the domestic opposition, including institutional rules. Kenneth Schultz’s model of domestic political competition and international crisis bargaining (2001) posits that an opposition's policy positions send credible sign...
Scholars often interpret balance of power theory to imply that great powers almost always balance against the leading power in the system, and they conclude that the absence of a counterbalancing coalition against the historically unprecedented power of the United States after the end of the Cold War is a puzzle for balance of power theory. They ar...
Striking First: Preemption and Prevention in International Conflict. By Edited Michael W. Doyle. and Macedo introduced by Stephen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 200p. $24.95. - Volume 8 Issue 1 - Jack S. Levy
Uri Bar-Joseph and Jack S. Levy look at the different ways in which the conscious distortion of information and the politicization of intelligence can lead to intelligence failure. They apply their categories to the Soviet failure to anticipate the German attack in 1941 and to the Israeli failure to anticipate the Arab attack in 1973.
In their article “Wishful Thinking or Buying Time? The Logic of British Appeasement in the 1930s,” Norrin Ripsman and Jack Levy argue that a rational calculation underpinned British policy toward Nazi Germany: the need to postpone a conflict until Britain was better prepared to address the German threat. Convinced of Adolf Hitler’s hegemonic ambiti...
Scholars typically define appeasement as a policy of satisfying grievances through one-sided concessions to avoid war for the foreseeable future and, therefore, as an alternative to balancing. They traditionally interpret British appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s as a naïve attempt to maintain peace with Germany by satisfying his grievances....
Alexander George was a towering figure who made path breaking and enduring contributions to political psychology, international relations, and social science methodology. I focus on George's closely related research programs on deterrence and coercive diplomacy, with special attention to the importance of the asymmetry of motivation, strategies for...
I focus on the role of case studies in developing causal explanations. I distinguish between the theoretical purposes of case studies and the case selection strategies or research designs used to advance those objectives. I construct a typology of case studies based on their purposes: idiographic (inductive and theory-guided), hypothesis-generating...
The theory of “preventive war” states that, under certain conditions, states respond to rising adversaries with military force in an attempt to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power. British and French passivity in response to the rapid rise of Germany in the 1930s would appear to constitute one of the leading empirical anomalies in th...
Although many decisions involve a stream of payoffs over time, political scientists have given little attention to how actors make the required tradeoffs between present and future payoffs, other than applying the standard exponential discounting model from economics. After summarizing the basic discounting model, we identify some of its leading be...
The author accepts the basic argument that recent advances in qualitative methods have had an uneven impact on the three major empirical fields in political science. He emphasizes that scholars in all three fields have made significant contributions to qualitative methodology, but these contributions have a more profound impact on the practice of q...
The central proposition of balance-of-power theory (albeit one that has never been tested systematically) is that great powers balance against hegemonic threats. This article argues that this proposition applies to hegemonic concentrations of land-based military power in autonomous continental systems, but not necessarily to hegemonic concentration...
All academic disciplines periodically appraise their effectiveness, evaluating the progress of previous scholarship and judging which approaches are useful and which are not. Although no field could survive if it did nothing but appraise its progress, occasional appraisals are important and if done well can help advance the field. This book investi...
Prospect theory is an alternative theory of choice under conditions of risk, and deviates from expected utility theory by positing that people evaluate choices with respect to gains and losses from a reference point. They tend to overweight losses with respect to comparable gains and engage in risk-averse behavior with respect to gains and risk-acc...
It is impossible to do justice to the full range of Kahneman's research in the limited space available here, and I restrict my focus to his research programs on judgment and on decision making. Each is defined by an extraordinarily influential article coauthored with Tversky: a 1974 Science article on “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Bia...
Anderton & Carter claim that war significantly diminishes trade, challenging the earlier argument by Barbieri & Levy that there is no apparent systematic relationship between war and trade. Three main problems with Anderton & Carter's analyses are identified. First, and most importantly, they do not pay sufficient attention to the political dimensi...
This article analyzes the evolution of power transition theory from the perspective of Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs. The authors reconstruct the development of the power transition research program by analyzing its hard core of irrefutable assumptions, its negative and positive heuristics, and exemplary works contributing t...
Current debates over the question of whether economic interdependence promotes peace or contributes to international conflict are often framed in terms of the `paradigm wars' between liberal and realist theory. In spite of their differences, most liberal and realist theories of interdependence and conflict agree that trade and other forms of econom...
KEY WORDS: levels of analysis, balance of power theory, power transition theory, interdependence and war, diversionary theory ABSTRACT I organize this review and assessment of the literature on the causes of war around a levels-of-analysis framework and focus primarily on balance of power theories, power transition theories, the relationship betwee...
Cet article aborde la question de l'application de la Théorie de la Décision Comportementale (BDT) à deux domaines de la recherche en Sciences‐Politiques, le comportement électoral et les relations internationales. On commence par un bref survol de la BDT, puis on passe à ce qui n'est maintenant que l'amorce de l'exploitation de la BDT dans les Sci...
J. F. LAZENBY. The First Punic War: A Military History. London: UCL Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 205. £12.95, paper. Reviewed by Richard E. MitchellBRENT D. SHAW. Rulers, Nomads, and Christians in Roman North Africa. Alder-shot: Variorum, 1995; dist. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing. Pp. xii, 338. $89.95 (US). Reviewed by C. R. WhitakkerGEOFF KING. Mapp...
A half-decade after the first systematic applications of prospect theory to international relations, scholars continue to debate its potential utility as a theoretical framework. Key questions include the validity of the experimental findings themselves, their relevance for real-world international behavior that involves high-stakes decisions by co...
Prospect theory deviates from expected-utility theory by positing that how people frame a problem around a reference point has a critical influence on their choices and that people tend to overweight losses with respect to comparable gains, to be risk-averse with respect to gains and risk-acceptant with respect to losses, and to respond to probabil...
Daniel Nielson and Michael Tierney s article, Delegation to International Organizations: Agency Theory and World Bank Environmental Reform (International Organization, Spring 2003), makes a strong argument for ways in which principal-agent (P-A) models advance theoretical explanations of the behavior and performance of international organizations (...
The theoretical and empirical literature on international alliances has tended to support the realist view that the pursuit or tightening of external alignments stems predominantly from external security threats. Consequently, the role of domestic factors has generally been ignored or downplayed. This article begins with the observation that leader...
I argue that there is no a priori ground for claiming that a general theory of all wars is preferable to separate theories of big wars and little wars, or vice‐versa. The analytical distinction between “big” war and “little” war is excessively vague and devoid of empirical content, and it begs the more important question of what typologies of wars...
The war-weariness hypothesis and other hypotheses of negative addictive contagion assert that war induces in its participants an inhibition against subsequent war for several years. These national-level hypotheses are tested empirically by examining the addictive effects of wars between the great powers over the period 1500-1975. The findings are c...
The hypothesis that the frequency of war in a given period is inversely related to its seriousness is operationalized and tested for the modern great power system beginning in 1500. All imperial wars, as well as interstate wars since 1500, are identified and several indicators of the seriousness of war are constructed. It is found that the correlat...
The theoretical question under consideration is the relationship between the size of the international system and its stability. After several alternative conceptualizations are examined, size is defined as the number of individual Great Powers and stability is conceptualized as relatively infrequent and limited wars. Hypotheses linking stability t...
Many realist explanations of French and British appeasement policies in the 1930s, including our own, assume or imply that policy was closely informed by intelligence assessments. One potential threat to these interpretations is the possibility that instead of intelligence shaping policy, the policy preferences of political leaders may have shaped...
The logic of the preventive motivation for war is that an actor faced with a rising adversary often has an incentive to fight now rather than risk war under worse conditions later. In this study of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, we explore the role of preventive logic in Japanese decision-making in the years and months leading to the war. Many key...
Recent research has demonstrated that opposition groups have a constraining effect on decision-makers during crisis bargaining. However, there has been little theoretical or empirical research on how specific institutional arrangements and political processes affect opposition groups' influence and behavior during an international crisis and thereb...
In this seminar we undertake a comprehensive review of the literature in political science on the causes of war and the conditions of peace. We examine the leading theories, their key variables, the causal paths leading to war, and the conditions under which this outcome is most likely to occur. We also give some attention to the degree of empirica...
Theories of preventive war predict that states are most likely to undertake military action in response to a rising state if they expect that the rising adversary will surpass them in military strength and then engage in hostile behavior, which induces fear of the future and better now-than-later logic. The most significant anomaly for the theory i...
Abstract will be provided by author.
Abstract will be provided by author.
Political psychology occupies an uncertain space in the study of international relations and foreign policy. Longstanding but gradually receding conceptions of the international relations field as a series of paradigmatic clashes among realist, liberal, Marxist, and constructivist approaches, or even between rationalism and constructivism, leave li...
Citations
... For instance, whether Vasquez (1997) is correct in arguing that the neorealist research program is degenerating (see also Legro and Moravcsik 1999) cannot be verified with certainty. Perhaps not surprisingly, adherents of neorealism also employing Lakatosian criteria draw opposing conclusions (DiCicco and Levy 2003;Schweller 2003). Although Lakatos relaxed Kuhn's rigid assumptions about full-fledged shifts from one to another research programme, he remained wedded to Kuhn's confrontational notions of defending and testing theories and determining criteria for their survival or decay, with the noted difficulties. ...
Reference: Introduction: NATO as an object of research
... Naime percepcija konflikta, koja nerijetko prezentira perceptivnu distorziju ili iskrivljenost 8 , dovodi do predrasuda bez obzira na to je li riječ o »stvarnoj« prijetnji. Velik je broj istraživanja koja su pokazala povezanost percepcije prijetnje s različitim ekskluzionističkim stavovima u području etničkih i drugih socijalnih interakcija (Canetti-Nisim, Ariely i Halperin, 2008;Cantetti-Nisim i sur., 2009;Duckitt, 2003;Huddy, 2003;Shamir i Sagiv-Schifter, 2006). I u različitim studijama etnocentrizam se dovodi u vezu s percepcijom prijetnje na različitim razinama (McLaren, 2003;Stephan, Ybarra i Morrison, 2009). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/272544959823880-1441991190325_Q64/Leonie-Huddy.jpg)
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/366055869435908-1464285928385_Q64/David-Sears-2.jpg)
... politische Orientierung Das Konzept der politischen Orientierung basiert auf der Annahme, dass politische Ideologie, also Einstellungen und Annahmen über politische Sachverhalte, die innerhalb einer bestimmten Gruppe geteilt werden (Jost, Federico & Napier, 2009;Knight, 2006), auf einem Spektrum oder entlang einer Dimension beschrieben werden kann (Piurko, Schwartz & Davidov, 2011;Zaller, 1992). Politische Orientierung bezeichnet also die individuelle Ausprägung einer bestimmten Ideologie, die auch als ideologische Orientierung bezeichnet wird (Bolesta, 2021;Feldman, 2013;Jost et al., 2009). In der vorliegenden Studie wurde diese mittels Selbstverortung auf einem Links-Rechts-Spektrum erhoben. ...
... Alleine die Zahl der einschlägigen Handbücher und Überblickswerke ist zu groß, um einen vollständigen Überblick zu erhalten. Das "Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology" etwa behandelt die Emotionen mit eigenen Artikeln im Hinblick auf Rational Choice, auf Biopolitik im Sinne von evolutionärer Psychologie, auf Persönlichkeit und Psychodynamik, auf kognitive und affektive Psychologie sowie auf Gruppenbeziehungen (Huddy et al. 2013). Weitere Artikel betreffen "Rationalitätsgrade in der Politik" (Chong 2013), Emotionen im Kontext von "Verhalten und Entscheiden" (Redlawsk und Lau 2013), "Emotionen und Politische Psychologie" oder "Politische Rhetorik" (Condor et al. 2013). ...
Reference: Emotions and Political Action
... Since the 1980s, a growing literature on emotions and politics has shown that feelings have strong effects on a variety of political phenomena, such as candidate appraisal, political participation and communication, and voting choice Brader and Marcus 2013). Cognitive appraisal and Affective Intelligence theories of political emotions have challenged the notion that feelings towards candidates are unidimensional (Abelson et al. 1982;Marcus 1988;Marcus and MacKuen 1993). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/272657191010351-1442017948985_Q64/Gian-Caprara.jpg)
... Accordingly, it meshes two strands of international relations research: one which casts world politics as a complex system where nonlinear feedback between system components can cause disproportional and dramatic responses to small changes (Saperstein, 1999;Jervis, 1997;Thompson, 2003;Ferguson, 2010;Stauffer, 2021) and the other which studies international relations with the concepts and methods of network analysis (Maoz, 2011;Dorussen et al., 2016). The system of alliances and rivalries among states has received much attention as a cause of systemic war (Snyder, 1984;Rasler & Thompson, 2010;Levy & Mulligan, 2021) and our model can shed light on which patterns are particularly prone to instability, as we will illustrate by our investigation of how the peace-to-war bifurcation is affected by polarized community structure and in our application to World War I. The analytical expressions for the bifurcation conditions we derive below will greatly facilitate more generalized study of the effects of different types of community structure, both abstract and empirical, by eliminating the need to identify bifurcation points through computationally intensive parameter sweeps of model simulations. ...
... 370 Scholars have amassed much evidence for this explanation, 371 and this article's examination of the Balkan crisis of 1912-13 supports the broader judgement that by 1914 the Concert of Europe had grown anaemic and Europe's leaders, riven by rivalry, no longer seemed capable of focusing their diplomacyabove allon Great Power peace. 372 Russia, in particular, had defined its increasingly dominant position in the Balkans vis-à-vis Austria and Turkey from 1912-13 as the new status quo, 373 placing any revision of this arrangement in the category of loss, 374 something it was unwilling to tolerate given its determination to 'speak' the language of firmness rather than restraint. 375 What was for Russia, however, the ordinary 'stealing of horses', was for Austria-Hungary a challenge to its existence. ...
... 2 Drawing on revisionist historiography, recent political science research challenged this deeply rooted conventional wisdom, arguing that sound strategic logic underpinned British decisionmaking in the 1930s. 3 In a series of studies, Ripsman and Levy (2007;2008;2012) make a powerful case that British appeasement followed a buying-time logic. Rather than reflecting unwarranted optimism about the limited nature of Hitler's ambitions, concessions were driven by a keen appreciation of British weakness. ...
... In introducing close counterfactuals, Kahneman and Varey (1990) focused exclusively on judgments of whether outcomes almost happened. But closeness can also be expressed by saying an outcome easily could have happened (e.g., Levy, 2015;Teigen, 1995Teigen, , 1996; also see Ch. 2 in Kraft, 2012), and people draw different inferences about these two forms of counterfactual closeness (Doan et al., 2023). Besides depending on propensity, judgments that a counterfactual outcome almost happened (henceforth Almost judgments) depend on its perceived distance from the actual outcome (Beck & Guthrie, 2011;Gerstenberg & Tenenbaum, 2016;Kahneman & Varey, 1990). ...
... In the present work we adopt a different standpoint by viewing decision makers as being rational and well informed, but we instead assume that the audiences upon which the fate of these leaders depend are subject to endogenous misperception biases. Indeed, leaders not only depend on their citizens' perceptions (Fearon 1994, Levy et al. 2015, both in democracies (Karol andMiguel 2007, Tomz 2007) and autocracies (Chen Weiss and Dafoe 2019, Dafoe et al. 2022), but they have also been shown to be responsive to these expected costs (Tomz et al. 2020). Our study is the first to consider how leaders rationally bias their audiences' perceptions, and how these misperceptions eventually influence the countries' decisions to go to war. ...
Reference: Propaganda and Conflict
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/273693251207177-1442264964271_Q64/Paul-Poast.jpg)
