International Conflict Behavior Research Articles

Presidential political ambition and US foreign conflict behavior, 1816–2010

How do term limits affect international conflict behavior? We revisit this question using new quarter-year-level data on presidential political ambition in the US from 1816 to 2010. Multi-country research finds that the re-election motive decreases the likelihood of conflict initiation. We argue that there are good reasons to expect that the US is different. We find that politically ambitious US presidents are more likely to initiate international conflicts. Consistent with previous research, however, we find that political ambition appears to be unrelated to a president’s chances of becoming the target of a militarized dispute.

Long-Term Effects in Models with Temporal Dependence

A dominant trend in models with binary outcomes is to control for unmodeled duration dependence by including temporal dependence variables. A second, distinct trend is to interpret both the short- and long-term effects of explanatory variables in autoregressive models. While the first trend is nearly ubiquitous in models with binary outcomes, the second trend has yet to be applied consistently beyond models with continuous outcomes. While scholars use temporal splines and cubic polynomials to model the underlying hazard rate, they have neglected the fact that this causes the explanatory variables to have a long-term effect (LTE) by modifying the future values of the temporal dependence variables. In this article, I propose a simple technique that estimates a wide range of probabilistic LTEs in models with temporal dependence variables. These effects can range from simple LTEs for a one-time change in an explanatory variable to more complex scenarios where effects change in magnitude with time and compound across repeated events. I then replicate Clare's (2010, Ideological fractionalization and the international conflict behavior of parliamentary democracies.International Studies Quarterly54:965–87) examination of the influence of government fractionalization on conflict behavior to show that failing to interpret the results within the context of temporal dependence underestimates the total impact of fractionalization by neglecting LTEs.

Understanding the Conflict Choices of Dictatorships

Dictators at War and Peace. By Jessica L. P. Weeks Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014. 247 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-7982-3). The aggressive acts of dictatorships often dominate news headlines, ranging from Russia's annexation of the Ukraine's Crimea in early 2014 to North Korea's decision to test-fire both short- and medium-range missiles on multiple occasions that same year in violation of UN resolutions. Though we often associate dictatorships with belligerence, many dictatorships are, in fact, peaceful; for example, Malaysia (led by the United Malays National Organisation) or Botswana (led by the Botswana Democratic Party). Broad statements about the international conflict behavior of dictatorships are unlikely to be accurate, simply because there is enormous variation across dictatorships in how politics works within them. In the last decade, this insight—that dictatorships often differ from one another as much as they do from democracies—has led to an explosion of research in the comparative politics literature emphasizing the importance of disaggregating dictatorships for understanding political outcomes. This research has demonstrated that systematic differences among dictatorships help to explain important variations in the ways they repress (Davenport 2007), their use of foreign aid (Wright 2008), their prospects for democratization (Geddes 2003), and more (see Ezrow and Frantz 2011 for a review of this literature). One of the central messages to emerge is that lumping all dictatorships into one category can lead to misunderstandings of authoritarian politics. A few studies in the international …

Ideological Fractionalization and the International Conflict Behavior of Parliamentary Democracies1

Past studies examining the international conflict behavior of parliamentary democracies have reported inconsistent findings and produced some empirical puzzles. One of the main puzzles is that, despite a strong theoretical basis for expecting coalitional majority cabinets to be less conflict prone than single-party majorities, most studies found no difference in their conflict behavior. Still others report coalitional governments to be more conflict prone than single-party ones. In this study, I show that these empirical inconsistencies can be resolved once we take into account the ideological composition of the cabinet. The main contention is that relatively marginal coalitional partners may have a disproportionate influence when the government faces risky decisions, such as the initiation of international disputes. The key lies in their greater bargaining leverage in intra-coalitional politics, which is subsequently reflected in their influence over foreign conflict decisions. More generally, this study shows how different degrees of ideological diversity or cohesion abate and/or accentuate a state's conflict behavior. The expectations are tested empirically, and the findings more robustly predict the conflict behavior of parliamentary regimes than do the results of previous research.

Politics or the Economy? Domestic Correlates of Dispute Involvement in Developed Democracies

Consideration of the effects of domestic politics on international conflict behavior often consists simply of contrasting democracies with non-democracies. One notable exception is work that links economic performance and the use of force. This link has often been addressed through use of a diversionary perspective. In this paper, we argue that more important than the alleged incentive to pursue a rallying effect when times are bad are domestic political and economic factors affecting leaders’ constraints, representing some of the costs to pursuing adventurous foreign policies. We examine three sources of constraints on democratic leaders: the willingness of the constituency to support the use of force internationally; the macroeconomic preferences of the party’s constituency; and an interaction of those preferences with the state of the economy. We find that in developed democracies, the political orientation of the government is a significant factor affecting the likelihood of international conflict initiation. Specifically, right governments are more likely to initiate interstate disputes; economic conditions have a significant but lesser impact.

Territory, Proximity, and Spatiality: The Geography of International Conflict1

This essay presents an overview of the literature on the ways in which space, spatiality, and proximity are theoretically important in the examination of international conflict behavior, for example, to agentstructure models of opportunity, notions concerning diffusion, the loss-of-strength gradient, and the effects of distance and space. The opportunity and willingness framework is used to organize both the literature and the discussion, which builds on Diehl’s (1991) seminal overview of geography and conflict. A recent theme of the annual meeting of the International Studies Association was ‘‘The Construction and Cumulation of Knowledge.’’ Both construction and cumulation of knowledge are central to the purposes of essays in the ‘‘Reflection, Evaluation, Integration’’ section of this journal, with cumulation asking scholars to focus on the ways and the extent to which our collective theory and research endeavor has built upon itself. One approach to cumulation and integration involves bringing together the theory and research falling within broad cross-disciplinary categories. That is, scholars will often categorize their work as reflecting a political economy or a political psychology approach or perspective. Another arena that has made a significant contribution to the study of international relations, but has received relatively less attention, is political geography. This essay is directed toward cumulation, reflection, and integration with regard to political geography and the geopolitical linkages found in the study of international relations generally and international conflict in particular. In doing so, it will explicitly draw on the work of geographers and provide linkages between the disciplines of geography and political science. This essay, then, has several interrelated themes within a broad discussion of political geography and cumulation. The most prominent is the linkage between geography and international conflict. It will be presented within several different contexts. First is the more general linkage between geography and international politics. However, to look at geography and international politics as well as geography and international conflict, we also need, second, to explicate more clearly a set of concepts that are related to geography and spatiality, including territory, territoriality, proximity and distance, and borders. These concepts help us understand the role and importance of spatiality and spatial perspectives and alert us to how the work of geographers can help us think about international conflict. And,

The International Conflict Behavior of Dictatorships from an Audience Cost Perspective

In this study, I look at the consequences of variations in authoritarian elite coalitions for international conflict behavior, using Fearon's audience cost theory to frame my argument. In dictatorships, the elite coalition is the group that has the power to oust the dictator. Because of this, the coalition plays the role of the domestic audience. Just as voters can make democratic leaders pay for failing to follow through with their commitments, so can the elite coalition in authoritarian regimes. In personalist regimes the elite coalition is the personalist clique, in military regimes it is the military junta, and in single party regimes it is the party cadre. Differences in the institutional nature of the elite coalition affect the ability of the coalition to impose costs upon the leader. Leaders face higher costs for reneging on commitments in regimes in which the elite coalition can more effectively constrain the leader's behavior. In single party and military dictatorships, leaders confront an elite coalition that is unified by a pre-existing party or military. In these regimes, being part of unifying institution increases the ability of the elite coalition to collectively constrain the actions of the dictator. Personalist dictators face a different scenario. There is no pre-existing institution that serves to unify elites, leaving personalist dictators to rule relatively unconstrained. In addition, in military regimes, the military elite have greater access to the security apparatus than do elites in other forms of dictatorship. This increases their ability to stage a coup and thereby impose costs on the military dictator for poor leadership. Due to institutional differences in the nature of the elite coalition, I argue that personalist dictatorships should be the least able to generate audience costs, followed by single party regimes, and lastly military regimes. I also add to Fearon's theory and posit that audience costs are only effective as a signal of commitment when the target regime can correctly identify the signal. Differences in the nature of the elite coalition affect the extent to which leaders correctly identify signals. I argue that personalist leaders tend to receive lower quality intelligence than do leaders in military or single party regimes and as a result. As a result, personalist leaders should be more likely to ignore what are credible threats. To test my predictions, I use quantitative tests. I look at whether or not target states choose to reciprocate initiators' challenges. States that are able to generate high audience costs should yield low rates of reciprocation from their targets. I find substantial support for my argument.

Threat Perception and Audience Costs: Differences in International Conflict Behavior among Authoritarian Regimes

International conflict behavior is often analyzed by looking at the differences between two regime types: democracies and dictatorships. Dictatorships are generally grouped together into one category regardless of their variations. Numerous patterns emerge, however, once the category of dictatorship is disaggregated. In this paper, I look at how different types of dictatorships respond to threats issued by democracies in the context of James Fearon's audience cost argument. I argue that when a democracy makes a threat, conflict is most likely to escalate with personalist dictatorships than with any other form of regime. Because personalist dictatorships are less able to perceive that democracies are able to generate high audience costs, they are the more likely to ignore what are credible threats. I support my argument using the experiences of the U.S. and Panama in 1989, the U.S. and Haiti in 1994, and the U.S. and the DPRK in 1994.

Escalation: Competing Perspectives and Empirical Evidence

Since the early days of the Cold War, “escalation” has been used as shorthand to refer to rising hostility in interstate disputes. The escalator metaphor reminds us that the phenomenon is a dynamic process as opposed to a static condition, but in some respects the analogy can be misleading. Unlike escalators, militarized disputes do not always start at the same level. Nearly half of them (49 percent) begin with the use of force by one side (Jones, Bremer, and Singer 1996:195). Moreover, unlike the smooth upward process of an escalator, interstate disputes are likely to exhibit jagged patterns as they move through several phases of escalation, de-escalation, and renewed escalation before terminating (Leng 1993). What is less clear, however, is the extent to which the escalation process is self-reinforcing, as the escalator metaphor suggests, as opposed to remaining under the control of the participants. The survey of empirical findings that follows considers that question as part of a broader examination of what we now know about dispute escalation and its consequences. To provide theoretical focus for the survey, I begin by contrasting the works of those conflict strategists within the realist tradition, who view escalation as manageable and informative, with those political scientists and social psychologists who focus on what they see as escalation's self-reinforcing properties. I then appraise the relative validity of the two perspectives through a survey of empirical findings drawn from three data sets: the Correlates of War Militarized Dispute data, Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld's International Conflict Behavior data, and Russell Leng's Behavioral Correlates of War data. The results are mixed. The findings are consistent with the realist view of the informative properties of escalation; more often than not, states are capable of controlling the escalatory process. But there also is a positive association between escalation …

How Public Opinion Constrains the Use of Force: The Case of Operation Restore Hope

Most previous research on the influence of domestic politics on international conflict behavior treats public opinion as endogenous to political institutions, leaders’ preferences, or both. In contrast, I argue that public opinion is more accurately characterized as partially exogenous. I further argue that, partly as a consequence, public scrutiny can inhibit U.S. presidents from using force as a foreign policy tool, particularly when the strategic stakes in a dispute are relatively modest. The literature on domestic audience costs, in turn, holds that public scrutiny may enhance a democratic leader's credibility in the eyes of a potential adversary, thereby increasing his likelihood of victory in a dispute. Yet, it also raises the potential political price of a bad outcome. Democratic leaders are therefore cross‐pressured by the simultaneous advantages and disadvantages of public scrutiny. As a preliminary test of the theory, I conduct a plausibility probe of the influences of public opinion on the decision making of Presidents Bush and Clinton with respect to the 1992‐1994 U.S. intervention in Somalia. I find that only by considering the constraining effect of public scrutiny can we fully understand these two presidents’ policies regarding Somalia. At some level, the political decisions preempt in these kinds of operations. . . . Everything that's done is political. —General Joseph Hoar, USMC (ret.)Former CINCCENT1

What's Stopping You?: The Sources of Political Constraints on International Conflict Behavior in Parliamentary Democracies

Much of the work on the democratic peace treats democracies as a homogenous set. In this paper we focus on the heterogeneity of established parliamentary democracies and investigate the effects of their domestic constraints on international conflict behavior. We emphasize leaders' vulnerability to removal from office and how this vulnerability varies across democracies as a function of two aspects of a ruling parliamentary coalition: 1) its political position, that is, whether a government is "right" or "left"; and 2) its structural complexity. We present a model of the relationship between levels of conflict and leaders' vulnerability to removal from office. The model concludes that leaders who are more likely to be removed from office, should they use force, are less likely to become involved in militarized interstate conflict; but that once involved, they are more likely to see their conflicts escalate. We find that right governments (whose leaders are less vulnerable to removal from office should they use force) are more likely to be involved in militarized disputes, while left governments (whose leaders are more likely to be removed from office should they use force) are more likely to see the disputes in which they are involved escalate. Our evidence indicates that structural complexity is largely unrelated to the likelihood of either involvement in or escalation of militarized interstate disputes.

Peace through Insecurity

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.

Guess Who Did What

The impact of the political characteristics of national leaders on the management of territorial disputes is investigated to learn what kinds of leaders are more likely to resort to strategies of peaceful resolution. The choice to pursue strategies of accommodation and compromise is in part a function of leaders' time in office and the reputation they have established through their international conflict behavior and their military expertise. This is because leaders face different incentives as their tenure in office grows longer and because their reputation can be a form of expendable political capital that enables leaders to initiate a significant foreign policy change. A territorial dispute data set and a leader data set for the period from 1950 to 1990 are used to test this argument. An analysis using ordered probit models gives credence to the conjecture that leaders' characteristics are systematically associated with the choice of pursuing a peaceful resolution of a territorial dispute.

Agreeing to Disagree: Domestic Institutional Congruence and U.S. Dispute Behavior

Domestic and international politics are linked so that domestic structure and domestic political preferences affect international conflict behavior. In particular, states' policy preferences can be characterized by the congruence of policy preferences between political institutions. As a state's policy preferences become more congruent, as policy preferences between political institutions are more similar, the state's conflict behavior changes. I hypothesize that as the domestic political institutions in a state share similar policy preferences or policy goals, disputes become more likely and tend to last longer. I employ event count and continuous-time hazard models to analyze U.S. conflict propensity and conflict duration during the period 1945-1992. Using the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set (version 2.1), I model U.S. militarized dispute behavior as a function of congruence between the policy preferences of the U.S. President and the Congress. The models reveal a strong relationship between preference congruence and both the amount of conflict and the duration of the disputes in which the U.S. engages. The congruence hypotheses are robust across a variety of measures. The results add substantial strength and substance to claims that domestic political characteristics affect international conflict. The theory and empirical analyses also refine the domestic-international linkage by allowing scholars to consider the effect of normal political change in a single state on that state's foreign policy decisions.

Ties that Bind?

In this article, the authors develop and empirically evaluate a general model of the linkages between domestic and international conflict behavior. Much of the literature on domestic international interactions has focused on the structural constraints of the international and domestic systems on leaders' foreign policy decisions. Rather than focusing on structural constraints, the present authors model the influence of the behavior of domestic and international rivals on leader decision making. The impact of rivals' behavior on conflict across the domestic-international nexus has been neglected relative to the role of structural factors. This study helps redress that imbalance. The authors test their model with a statistical analysis of Zaire during the period 1975 to 1992 and find substantial support for the model.

Action-Reaction or Rational Expectations?

In this article, the author makes a case for expanding our focus from national-attribute studies of intranational conflict toward strategic behavior studies of intranational conflict. One payoff of such a move is that it enables us to specify a linkage between the strategic behavior of both domestic and international actors and thus address the often theorized, but rarely established, intranational-international conflict nexus. Further, the author takes a synthetic approach to the recent debate between action-reaction and rational expectations models of international conflict behavior and derives hypotheses concerning the behavior of both domestic and international parties to an armed intranational conflict. The hypotheses are then tested in a time-series case study design using the Rhodesian/Zimbabwean case for the period from 1957 to 1979. The results demonstrate that there existed an intranational-international conflict nexus in this case and highlight the utility of adopting a strategic behavior approach to studying armed intranational conflict.

Election Cycles and War

Insight into the effect of domestic factors on the international conflict behavior of democratic states can be garnered from treating electoral cycles as cycles in the relative power of state and society. This article shows that there is a discernible relationship between election cycles and the behavior of democratic states in international conflicts. In the past 200 years, democratic states have tended to get into relatively more wars early in the election cycle and fewer wars late in the cycle. Interestingly, this result holds regardless of whether it was a democracy or a nondemocracy which initiated the war. The author argues, however, that this pattern at the international level is insufficient for drawing firm conclusions about the preferences of democratic states and societies at the domestic level. Finally, the author suggests that although election dynamics may mitigate against war entry in the short run, it is plausible that they have made war more likely or more severe in the long run.

Systemic wars and dyadic wars: No single theory∗

It is suggested that systemic and non‐systemic wars are theoretically distinct forms of international conflict behavior. Arguments are initially drawn from a comparison between mass or social revolutions and systemic wars. These domestic and international instances of widespread conflict are suggested to be comparable as are coups and non‐systemic (mostly dyadic) wars. Other analyses are drawn from the distinction between structural and mobilization wars as sub‐categories of the systemic war and the etiologies of both the social revolution and systemic war. The growth in systemic constraints over time prior to a structural systemic war is an important distinction between it and the dyadic war.

Internal-external linkage in Chinese international conflict behavior: A model

Internal-external linkage in Chinese international conflict behavior: A model

Consequences of Sharp Military Assistance Increases for International Conflict and Cooperation

Effects of sharp increases in military assistance on international conflict and cooperation on the part of recipient nations are investigated. Since traditional bivariate and multivariate statistical techniques are often conceptually inapplicable to this subject matter, a quasi-experimental design is used which relies on autoregressive moving average models and exponential smoothing forecasting mechanisms. Twenty-five annual observations, from 1946 through 1970, of 15 Asian nations serve as the data base. Key findings are: (1) sharp increases in military assistance tend to change decidedly the recipient nation's international conflict and cooperative behavior; (2) in a substantial majority of cases examined, the direction of that behavior change is toward increased conflict and decreased cooperation; and (3) a two-year lag between military assistance and behavior change of recipient nations is statistically supported. The effects of increased capabilities as well as bureaucratic politics, habit, expectation, and prior deals are offered as possible reasons for these results. The findings seem to refute the argument that giving military aid to a nation not involved in a war will help strengthen that nation and thereby avoid future conflict.