Search

Studies of signaling in international relations reveal how punishing bluffing ex post through domestic audience costs or opposition groups facilitates credible ex ante communication among states and reduces the impetus toward war. Global integration of economic markets may also reduce uncertainty by making talk costly ex ante. Autonomous global capital can respond dramatically to political crises. To the degree that globalization forces leaders to choose between pursuing competitive political goals and maintaining economic stability, it reveals the intensity of leaders' preferences, reducing the need for military contests as a method of identifying mutually acceptable bargains. Asymmetric integration can dampen the pacific effects of globalization, but asymmetry does not in itself exacerbate dispute behavior. We present the theory and offer preliminary corroborative tests of implications of the argument on postwar militarized disputes.

The article investigates the relationship between cultural similarities and differences on the part of the representatives of contending states and mediators, and outcomes of mediation efforts in militarized disputes. A distinction is made between social culture, defined primarily in terms of religious identity, and political culture, defined according to the state's political system. Analysis of 752 mediation attempts in militarized disputes occurring between 1945 and 1995 yields support for the hypothesis that mediation is more likely to succeed when the parties are from similar social cultures. The results, however, suggest that the relationship is more complex than that suggested by a simple categorization of states based on Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' thesis. We also find that mediation is more likely to succeed when the parties share democratic political cultures, a finding that is consistent with the cultural/normative explanation for the democratic peace.

This article illustrates the importance of testing empirical models in samples appropriate to the theories the models are intended to test. While social science appears to mandate that we prefer general theories to limited ones, the generality of a theory rests in its logical application to a set of observations, not solely to its statistical survival in a large data set. Theories in international relations, especially those linking domestic turmoil and international conflict, are advancing, but are sometimes applied to samples larger than the related theories indicate. This paper examines the statistical consequences of estimation in overexpansive samples with unmodeled treatment effects; we argue that samples containing cases that cannot experience the causal phenomenon in question produce unmodeled treatment effects, and we reexamine three published articles whose samples are perhaps broader than their theories suggest they should be. The empirical analyses demonstrate that overexpansive samples can produce somewhat misleading results: the new models produce interesting findings that emerge as treatment effects are identified.

Many statistical studies in international relations investigate the claim that democracies do not fight one another. Virtually all of these studies employ a single-equation design, where the dependent variable measures the presence or absence of a dyadic militarized interstate dispute (MID). A separate group of studies argues that conflict affects democracy and that its effect could be positive or negative. By and large, these two bodies of literature have not incorporated one another's insights. We argue that democracy and dyadic conflict affect each other significantly and that statistical models that ignore the reciprocal nature of these effects may make incorrect inferences. To test this argument, we develop a simultaneous equations model of democracy and dyadic conflict. Our sample includes all the politically relevant dyads from 1950 to 1992. We find that dyadic military disputes reduce joint democracy and joint democracy reduces the probability of MIDs. Compared with the single-equation estimates in the literature, the absolute effect of joint democracy in our paper is smaller while in relative terms, the effect is similar in size. The effect of joint democracy on MID involvement is considerably smaller for noncontiguous countries than for contiguous ones. The effects of a number of control variables in the MID equation are also found to differ from those reported previously in single-equation-based studies.

The existing literature on economic sanctions has rarely addressed the key question of comparing the effectiveness of positive and negative sanctions. It is the contention of this study that positive sanctions can potentially be more effective, even in cases where contentious 'high politics' issues are being negotiated, relations between the states concerned are tense and militarized, and the state being targeted with sanctions has substantial military power. This assertion will be tested in a set of case studies drawn from German-Polish and German-Russian/ Soviet relations from the nineteenth century to the present. It will be shown that positive sanctions can be used effectively, both as 'specific' sanctions to influence a target state on one particular issue, and as 'general' sanctions, which aim to change the state's behavior as a whole in a more slow and subtle process.

States that choose to involve themselves in an ongoing dispute do so by choosing to align with or against one of the original disputants. What factors lead states to prefer to help one side over the other? We consider the effect of the disputants' power, political and economic institutional similarities between each disputant and the aligning state, and formal alliance commitments between each disputant and the aligning state on these alignment choices. We evaluate these expectations empirically by examining the alignment choices of states that joined with one side or another in a Militarized Interstate Dispute during the period of 1816 to 1986. The results indicate that regardless of regime type, institutional similarities matter to the aligning state's decision. We also find that power concerns matter only to autocracies; democracies do not seem to base their alignment choices on the power of the sides in the dispute. Finally, the evidence indicates that the alignment choices of democracies cannot be anticipated by their prior alliance commitments, although the alignment choices of autocracies can. These results suggest interesting implications for research on the democratic peace, the determinants of threat in the international system, and the impact of selection effects. The consistent empirical evidence that institutional similarity affects alignment decisions also increases our confidence that future investigations of institutional similarity generally, rather than an exclusive focus on joint democracy, will prove fruitful.

This article examines the foreign policy behavior of two rival states, India and Pakistan. Previous studies of this dyad reveal competing causal claims concerning the nature of Indian and Pakistani relations. I argue that Indian and Pakistani foreign policy behavior exhibits strong short-term relations in the context of long-term 'memories' that shape future expectations of their bilateral relations. The results indicate that reciprocity in Indo-Pakistani relations is shaped by a long-term equilibrium and suggest a reconceptualization of the nature of the Indo-Pakistani relations. The findings highlight the legacy of suspicions between these two countries, providing sober insights into the possibilities for reducing conflict and promoting cooperation in South Asia.

We build on the tradition of studying images in international relations by developing a theory of perceived relationships and their associated images. The psychological theory is connected to a set of assumptions drawn from international relations theory that suggest perceived strategic relationships can be conceived of as a function of perceived relative power, perceived culture, and the perceived threat or perceived opportunity that a subject believes another actor represents. We hypothesize that perceived relationships evoke both cognitive and affective processes that lead to at least four ideal typical images. We further hypothesize that enemy, ally, colony, and degenerate images have identifiable and interrelated components. We test to see if the component parts of these images are related to each other, if the overall image affects the processing and interpretation of new information, and if strategic foreign policy choices follow from the cognitive and affective aspects of the image. The findings indicate that three of the four images are unified schemata, used even by inexperienced analysts. We find further that affect in combination with cognition does predict policy choice in the case of the enemy image. We suggest that image theory is a promising means by which foreign policy and international relations may be fruitfully studied.

Scholars have become increasingly interested in the nature of potential linkage processes between public opinion and foreign policy. The literature on elite beliefs suggests that the beliefs decision makers hold concerning public opinion may have an important influence on this relationship. This article argues that how decision makers perceive and react to public opinion depends upon their views of the proper relationship between public opinion and foreign policy choices. A theoretical framework to analyze beliefs is suggested containing two dimensions: (1) normative beliefs relating to whether it is desirable for input from public opinion to affect foreign policy choices; and (2) practical beliefs regarding whether public support of a policy is necessary for it to be successful. To explore this issue, this article reports the findings of a qualitative content analysis of Dwight D. Eisenhower's and John Foster Dulles's public opinion beliefs. Predictions of behavior are tested in a case study of the September 1954 Chinese offshore islands crisis. The results of this analysis suggest elite beliefs regarding public opinion may provide an important intervening variable worthy of further examination.

This article examines the deductive basis upon which domestic-level theorizing may be combined with liberal and realist systemic-level theory in order to account for international outcomes. It is particularly concerned with whether existing systemic theory can incorporate domestic-level variables in a causally consistent rather than ad hoc manner. In addressing such a concern, it confronts the widely held assumption in the IR theory literature that liberalism is more accommodating of domestic-level variables and their potential causal impact than is realism. When the deductive logic of systemic liberal and realist theory is examined, however, it becomes clear that domestic-level variables can be consistently causal in systemic realist theory, but are accorded little causal weight in systemic liberal theory. The article concludes that realism is actually more accommodating of domestic-level variables and theorizing than is liberalism. Given the common misconceptions within the field regarding the relationship between systemic theories and domestic-level theorizing, issues of theoretical causal compatibility must be considered if domestic-level variables are going to be incorporated in a rigorous rather than ad hoc manner.

A number of recent international situations have raised again questions regarding the usefulness of economic sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. Sanctions continue to be applied in a variety of contexts, yet we have not developed a sufficient understanding of the processes involved to determine when, or even if, sanctions can 'work.' While a great deal has been written on the subject, there have been neither attempts to subject the theoretical arguments to empirical testing nor efforts to provide systematic theoretical explanations for the empirical results that have been produced. In this article, we attempt to address this shortcoming in the literature. We propose a theory of sanctions effectiveness that is based on the spatial model of bargaining in international crises and use this theory to derive a number of hypotheses regarding when sanctions should produce favorable policy outcomes. We then subject some of the derived hypotheses to an empirical test based on a large number of international disputes. The model suggests that while sanctions will not work in many cases, they can have a slight effect on the distribution of expected outcomes if the costs of the sanctions are sufficiently high relative to the values at stake. The available evidence appears to support these expectations.

The objective of this article is to provide an analytical framework for addressing the sources of great power regional involvement and its effects on regional conflicts. The thesis of the article is that variations in the degree of intensity of conflicts and the likelihood of successful conflict resolution in different regions are affected by the character of great power involvement in these regions. Our argument is that although great power involvement or noninvolvement cannot cause or terminate regional conflicts, it can either intensify existing local conflicts or mitigate them. We will propose causal linkages between balances of great power capabilities and interests, types of great power involvement in regional conflicts, and patterns of regional conflicts. The study will distinguish among four types of great power involvement in regional conflicts: competition, cooperation, dominance, and disengagement. The empirical section will examine the application of these propositions in seven historical illustrations, representing the four patterns of great power involvement in regional conflicts. All the illustrations will deal with one conflict-ridden region - Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in successive historical periods from the post-Napoleonic era to the post-Cold War era. Because of the variety of patterns of great power involvement in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, this region is uniquely suited to examine the propositions derived from the theoretical framework. Drawing on both the theoretical deductions and the historical illustrations should make it possible in the last section to discuss briefly the implications of the proposed framework for regional conflict management or mitigation in the Balkans in the post-Cold War era.

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 collective actors in interactive settings, and the conceptual status of prospect theory with respect to rational choice. In this essay I assess theoretical and methodological debates over these issues. I review work in social psychology and experimental economics and conclude that challenges to the external validity of prospect theory-based hypotheses for international behavior are much more serious than challenges to their internal validity. I emphasize the similarities between prospect theory and expected-utility theory, argue that hypotheses regarding loss aversion and the reflection effect are easily subsumed within the latter, and that evidence of framing effects and nonlinear responses to probabilities are more problematic for the theory. I conclude that priorities for future research include the construction of hypotheses on the framing of foreign policy decisions and research designs for testing them; the incorporation of framing, loss aversion, and the reflection effect into theories of collective and interactive decision making; and experimental research that is sensitive to the political and strategic context of foreign policy decision making.

A statistical analysis of international rivalries from 1816 to 1988, reveals that the external military threat and less contentious issues have a positive effect on the probable end of rivalries between two states. However, war, the balance of power and bipolarity in world politics have little effect on how long rivalries last. Security concerns affect positively the end of rivalry and the willingness to accept an offered settlement. The larger the hhreat faced by the states, the greater the probability of conflict resolution.

Many democratic governments give weight to political gains rather than to national interests while formulating foreign policy, and nonpartisan decisions may be taken only by a government which is sure of reelection. A government facing electoral uncertainties is more likely to be adventurous in its foreign policy. The chances of a government's misuse of foreign policy for electoral purposes are less in a political system involving more decision makers. A model is examined to show how reelection desires motivate governments to follow suboptimal foreign policies.

Recent changes in the post-cold war world scenario have prepared the ground for a revival of Wilsonian idealism. The question put forth by these changes is whether the early 1990s can be then regarded as a 'neoidealist' movement. The need to advocate the development of a principled realism, stressing liberal ideals, is great because the emerging conditions in the post-cold war world transcends the 'realpolitic' that has dominated international affairs since the Second World War.

This article surveys and assesses theories and research on public opinion and foreign policy. Most of the evidence is drawn from the literature on the United States. Three twentieth-century wars have had a significant impact on theory and scholarship. World War I - the first public relations war - and postwar efforts to create a new international order directed much attention to the nature of public opinion and its impact on foreign affairs, issues on which realists and liberals came to quite different conclusions. The period surrounding World War II coincided with the development of scientific polling. Much of the attention during and immediately after the war focused on the extent to which the public might support or oppose an internationalist American role. Extensive research during the first two decades after World War II yielded a broad agreement (the 'Almond-Lippmann consensus') on three propositions about public opinion: (1) it is volatile and thus provides inadequate foundations for stable and effective foreign policies, (2) it lacks coherence or structure, but (3) in the final analysis, it has little if any impact on foreign policy. The Vietnam War and its aftermath stimulated a new outburst of research activity on public opinion and foreign policy, much of which has challenged each of these three propositions. The article concludes with suggestions for further research efforts, including: (1) case studies employing archival sources to assess more directly the impact of public opinion, (2) cross-national studies, (3) development of standard questions in order to encourage better cumulation of survey results, and (4) research that will enable us to distinguish findings that are time-and context-bound from those that transcend the Cold War period.

This article examines the evolution of security studies, focusing on recent developments in the field. It provides a survey of the field, a guide to the current research agenda, and some practical lessons for managing the field in the years ahead. Security studies remains an interdisciplinary enterprise, but its earlier preoccupation with nuclear issues has broadened to include topics such as grand strategy, conventional warfare, and the domestic sources of international conflict, among others. Work in the field is increasingly rigorous and theoretically inclined, which reflects the marriage between security studies and social science and its improved standing within the academic world. Because national security will remain a problem for states and because an independent scholarly community contributes to effective public policy in this area, the renaissance of security studies is an important positive development for the field of international relations.

In this study we probe whether a simple model of reciprocity adequately describes superpower foreign policy interactions. We employ structural equation tests to detect the presence of 'reciprocity' in conflict and cooperation among the dyadic relations of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China. While these tests did not confirm the existence of consistent reciprocity in superpower relations, cointegration tests uniformly suggest that foreign policy behavior among the superpowers is characterized by trend components which move together via an 'error correction' mechanism. This, in turn, suggests that equilibria levels of cooperation and conflict exist which explain much of superpower foreign-policy behavior. We hypothesize that over the course of the last four decades reactivity among superpowers has been generally weak, but that stronger periods of short-term reactivity in the 1950s created norms. We argue that reactivity has declined in the period since the creation of these norms. Thus, it would appear that reciprocity in superpower interactions is more complicated than typically portrayed in the international relations literature.

This study examines the utility of moving beyond a simple 'on - off' dichotomous view of contiguous land borders. For each of the 301 contiguous land borders between states in the international system, measures of ease of interaction, salience, and overall border 'vitalness' have been developed using Geographical Information Systems technology. These variables are used to test two major extant lines of thought in international relations literature, as well as our proposed alternative, regarding the expected effect of the 'nature' of borders on interstate behavior. We conclude not only that the 'nature' of contiguous borders matters but also that the relationship between each of the three border measures and the likelihood of conflict is curvilinear concave - with both high ease of interaction and high salience related to lower levels of conflict, and the middle range of both variables related to higher levels of conflict.

Research on questions such as whether national leaders use force in the international arena to divert attention from problems at home depends on a valid and reliable list of the incidents in which various states have used military force. In the case of the United States, several data sets have been used for this purpose. This research note compares two widely used data sets, the militarized interstate disputes (MID) data, which cover disputes involving all states between 1816 and 1992, and the data originally compiled by Stephen Kaplan and Barry Blechman, which cover only the United States since World War II. This comparison indicates that, in spite of its usefulness for other conflict research, the MID data are not appropriate for analyses of U.S. decisions to use force, including tests of the diversionary hypothesis. The MID data set excludes several categories of incidents relevant to major theoretical arguments about the use of force and includes many irrelevant incidents. These problems are likely to apply to similar analyses of other states as well. The Blechman and Kaplan data set also excludes some relevant events, but its omissions are less consequential. We offer a revised list of United States uses of force between 1870 and 1995.

This study examines the relationships between regime formation, regime change, and international conflict. A distiction is made between evolutionary and revolutionary state formation processes as well as between revolutionary and evolutionary changes within existing states. It is hypothesized that revolutionary state formations and regime changes result in high levels of post-independence or post-regime change involvement in interstate disputes. On the other hand, evolutionary political development and regime change results in low levels of conflict involvement. These patterns of individual state involvement in international conflict provide new insights into the high correlations between the size of the international system and variety of interstate conflict attributes. The political development model suggests that the number of interstate conflicts in the system will increase when a large number of states are undergoing revolutionary regime changes, even when there is no change in the number of states in the system. These propositions are tested on data covering nearly all interstate system members in the 1816-1976 period. In addition, the extent to which the political development model accounts for patterns of contagious spread of international conflict is examined. The implications of the relations between internal processes of political development and change and interstate disputes for the study of international politics are examined.

This study explores the connections between the Long Wave and the Leadership Cycle by examining their possible effect on long-term patterns in major power war and colonial expansion. Building directly upon the Leadership Cycle work of Modelski and Thompson, Goldstein's Long Wave analysis, and the Modern World System School, a new analytical framework is developed. This framework treats the Leadership Cycle and Long Wave as separate, though interconnected processes, and permits derivation of empirically testable hypotheses concerning the effects of the Leadership Cycle and Long Wave on armed conflict in the system, and on the timing of colonial expansion by major powers into the periphery. This 'phase-pair' framework also allows assessment of the effect of each systemic process while controlling for the effect of the other. The results of our analysis suggest that the Long Wave and Leadership Cycle not only are associated with the most severe or systemic wars, but may affect conflict more broadly within the system. We also find strong identifiable effects of these processes on colonization. Finally, all results taken together indicate the Long Wave and Leadership Cycle should be treated as distinct, though interrelated processes.

A good deal of recent research has focused on the possible dangers associated with young democracies thai are trying to weave their way through modern interstate relations for the first time. Democratic transitions, and their immediate aftermath, have been isolated as periods plagued by all sorts of potential conflict. Further, some studies implicitly suggest that the maturity of the regime may matter at least as much as the type of regime. This research directly examines the interactive effects of both joint democracy and joint maturity on the levels of intensity reached in militarized conflict. The findings reveal the conditional importance of both factors. Joint democracy imparts disparate effects on the hostility intensification of disputes, in terms of direction and magnitude, depending on maturity levels. Similarly, the magnitude of the joint maturity impact is contingent on democracy levels, although the direction of its influence remains unchanged across varying degrees of democracy. These findings signal the necessity of explicitly considering linkages between the effects of regime type and regime maturity in theories and tests of dyadic conflict dynamics.

We use data from the Leadership Opinion Project (LOP), a panel survey of American opinion leaders which brackets the end of the Cold War, to investigate two interrelated questions about the structure of elites' foreign policy beliefs. We assess, first, whether the militant internationalism/cooperative internationalism scheme, developed primarily by Wittkopf (1981, 1990) and Holsti and Rosenau (1990), has continued relevance now that the USSR has collapsed; and second, whether Hurwitz and Peffley's (1987, 1990; see also Peffley and Hurwitz, 1992; Hurwitz, Peffley, and Seligson, 1993) domain-specific, hierarchical model of mass belief structure can be applied to elite belief systems. The evidence indicates that respondents' past stances toward military and cooperative ventures are highly predictive of their views once the Cold War ends. This continuity in leaders' postures toward international affairs, in itself, suggests that 'enemy images' of the Soviet Union were less important within elite belief systems than Hurwitz and Peffley (1990; see also Peffley and Hurwitz, 1992) posited for the mass public. The starkest difference, however, between their findings for mass samples and our findings for a leadership sample centers on the importance of ideology in constraining foreign policy beliefs, and the close interconnection with domestic beliefs. Consequently, as we illustrate, predictable ideological divisions among opinion leaders persist in the post-Cold War era. In sum, our evidence demonstrates considerable continuity in elites' beliefs despite profound changes in the global system, and reaffirms the importance that ideology plays in structuring attitudes within elite belief systems.