Explore the vast range of titles available.

We conduct a survey experiment to examine the effects of international compromise, war, and foreign government rhetoric on presidential approval. We find that, in certain conflicts, popular approval tracks fairness heuristics—leaders seeking to maximize voter approval prefer equitable divisions of disputed goods and are risk acceptant for divisions below this threshold. Moreover, aggressive rhetoric by a foreign leader increases domestic leaders' expected approval from war, decreases the value of compromise, and provides them with powerful incentives to fight harder. Thus, leaders motivated by popular approval have preferences that are inconsistent with the non-satiated, risk-averse preferences defined over shares of an objective good—that is, with those that much of the rationalist literature on conflict assumes. Fairness heuristics and the rhetorical framing of disputes during the conflict process may be at least as important as material factors in understanding why some disputes result in war.

Military successes present war leaders with a choice between maintaining their existing aims and strategy and changing one or the other to extend their gains or make the war cheaper. \"Staying the course\" minimizes the risk of failure but also foregoes possible gains. Making a change increases the risk of failure but leaves nothing on the table. I argue that emotional responses—particularly contentment and joy—account for leaders' preferences for changing or maintaining their approach to war. Joy, elicited by novel good news, makes change more likely because it leads to the derogation of risks and obstacles. Contentment, elicited by expected good news, tends to produce resistance to change. I substantiate my claims through World War II-era case studies from Japan and the United States.

In conventional crisis bargaining models, bluffing provides the primary rationale for states to misrepresent their private information, and war occurs because strong states are unable to credibly demonstrate strength to their opponents. Here, I argue that military strategy supplies an alternative reason for states to misrepresent their private information. Both strong and weak states may misrepresent themselves because of the battlefield benefits of fighting against an uninformed opponent, who may choose a suboptimal military strategy. Under appropriate conditions, the military gains for concealing information exceed the diplomatic gains available for revealing that information. Thus, states will choose to keep secrets and fight. To demonstrate this, I incorporate military strategy into the standard bargaining framework, showing that military concerns incentivize both strong and weak states to conceal information, even when they are able to reveal that information costlessly and credibly. As in the usual model, war may occur when states underestimate their adversaries, but it may aho occur when states overestimate their adversaries. I further show that a mere willingness to fight does not reveal that a state is strong. I conclude the paper with two brief case studies.

Many scholars argue that leaders' expectations about future shifts in the distribution of power can result in preventive war. If a leader expects her adversary to be significantly stronger in the future, the leader may choose to go to war with that adversary rather than bargain with a stronger adversary in the future. However, quantitative evaluations of this argument prove difficult, as they require a measure of leaders' expectations about future shifts in power rather than simply a measure of observed power. In this paper, we develop an empirical model of future power to create this measure. We then use that measure to evaluate the preventive war hypothesis. Our results support the preventive war hypothesis. Increases in a state's expected future probability of winning in war increase its probability of another state in a dyadic relationship initiating war against it.

This article introduces the idea of a compellence dilemma. This dilemma arises when the domestic policies of adversaries—such as hosting violent groups—threaten states' security. Such states often consider coercive instruments to compel their adversary to change those policies. The problem? The prospect of costly punishment makes cooperation more attractive for the adversary. However, if they fail to coerce policy change, harsh punishments can reduce the adversary's capacity to enact policy change and induce harmful domestic instability. These problems are compounded by the fact that both the threatened states' incentive to use costly punishments and the costs of failed compellence increase with the severity of the security threat. The logic of the compellence dilemma applies whenever a state uses damaging coercive instruments but risks failing to achieve its immediate objectives. I analyze the compellence dilemma with a dynamic game-theoretic model of interaction among a target state, host state, and violent group, and show that it is pervasive in equilibrium. I show that the compellence dilemma causes states to refrain from using harsh punishments even when they would compel the host state to cooperate. Concerns about decreasing future host-state capacity and increasing group power drive this result.

This paper offers a theory of military retrenchment by states in relative decline. I argue that a declining state will choose to withdraw foreign military deployments and security commitments when there exists a suitable regional \"successor\" to which it can devolve its current responsibilities. The degree of a successor's suitability and the strategic importance of the region to the declining state interact to determine when and how rapidly retrenchment will occur. Importantly, this devolutionary model of retrenchment predicts significant variations in retrenchment patterns across a declining state's multiple regional commitments. It advances the literature by producing nuanced predictions of precisely where, when, and how quickly retrenchment will occur. This paper assesses the theory empirically through an examination of Great Britain's varying regional retrenchment strategies prior to World War I.

How does a state's ethnic composition affect its propensity to engage in diversionary conflicts? Recent empirical work examines the political conditions under which domestic unrest compels an embattled leader to initiate conflict abroad. We remain uncertain, however, of what social or demographic characteristics make states particularly prone to diversionary behavior. This article tries to address this gap, examining whether a state's ethnic structure conditions its leader's response to domestic discontent. Combining the expansive literatures on ethnic politics and diversionary war yields conflicting expectations here. I find that ethnically fragmented states are significantly more prone to initiating diversionary conflicts, and I show that the greater availability of \"conflict opportunities\" resulting from transborder ethnic-kin groups, in part, drives this effect. A brief case study illustrates these dynamics.

How and why do regime type and interstate war affect government spending? We argue that a political leader allocates scarce resources between social and military expenditures as a function of their relative efficiency in securing her political survival. We derive four hypotheses concerning how mobilization for and demobilization from interstate war affects government spending differently in democratic and autocratic regimes. Compared to democracies, autocracies should increase military spending to a greater degree during wartime and decrease military spending to a greater extent following a war. Autocracies also should cut social spending more during an interstate war and increase social spending more during the process of demobilization from war than democracies. Our analyses of all states in the international system from 1950 to 2001 yield support for our hypotheses.

This paper argues that the effects of war as a performance issue in elections are different for a right-wing than a left-wing leader. War is consistent with the reputation of right-wing, hawkish governments, but does not fit the reputation of leftwing, dovish governments, and necessitates a turn away from the domestic issues the public expects left-wing governments to prioritize. War therefore varies in its effects on perceptions of right-wing and left-wing leaders. War also provides more temptation for left-wing supporters to defect to the incumbent under a right-wing government than for right-wing supporters to defect under a left-wing government. The War in Iraq and elections in the United States and UK provide a unique case to test these arguments. The results confirm that Blair paid a higher political price as a left-wing leader, because perceptions of Blair's trustworthiness became central to evaluations of him. Conversely, positive perceptions of strength became central to evaluations of Bush as a right-wing leader. The war also had asymmetric effects on supporters of the opposition party in the UK that resulted in higher costs to Blair. These findings imply that the risks of going to war are greater for left-wing leaders.

We present a formal model of international bargaining between two states in which one government must negotiate with a domestic opposition faction to secure tax revenue for military spending. The model examines how robust the international order is to domestic political crises that activate a stark tradeoff to a governing coalition. Namely, offering fiscal relief to stave off domestic revolution can simultaneously undermine the larger international political order by facilitating military spending that can, under some circumstances, result in sizable shifts in the relative distribution of military power between states. We find that two key domestic conditions influence the likelihood of preventive war: the distribution of income within the state's economy and the relative economic stake that opposition groups possess in international settlements.