Leader Survival, Sources of Political Insecurity, and International Conflict

Abstract

Recent research identifies the risk and consequences of losing office as important factors in leaders’ decisions to initiate international conflicts. This paper argues that the institutional source of a domestic threat to a leader should condition the relationship between political insecurity and international conflict. Specifically, existing theoretical mechanisms linking international conflict to security in office should not apply to threats that come from outside a leader’s selectorate. Natural disasters provide a convenient opportunity to test this argument since others have argued that disasters not only affect the risk that all types of leaders lose office but that they do so by creating threats that operate through different mechanisms in different domestic institutional contexts. I find that deaths from disasters are positively associated with conflict initiation among large-coalition leaders throughout the period of 1950 to 2007. I also find that neither disaster deaths nor events are related to conflict behavior for small-coalition leaders. In arguing that not all threats to leader survival matter for international conflict, the paper offers an important qualification to theories of leader survival and international conflict.