On Guard
A spatiotemporal analysis of NATO member states' defense spending: How much do allies actually free ride?
Ringailė Kuokštytė & Vytautas Kuokštis
Political Science Research and Methods, forthcoming
Abstract:
Concerns over free riding in NATO are widespread. An intuitive approach to analyzing free riding is treating it as a systematic pattern of spatial interdependence between the allies: how does a NATO member's defense spending react to changes in other allies' military expenditures? While recent work has found statistically significant free riding (negative spatial interdependence in the outcomes), it suffers from important limitations. First, this research does not adequately account for temporal dependence. Second, it does not quantify the effect of interest. Accounting directly for temporal dependence provides a meaningfully distinct perspective on the within-alliance dynamics, demonstrating that the spatiotemporal effect of free riding is, in fact, more substantial than its short-run effect, challenging inferences of static spatial models. We discuss the relevant practical and theoretical implications.
How Effective Are the Post-9/11 U.S. Counterterrorism Policies Within and Outside the United States?
Ahmet Guler & Mustafa Demir
Criminal Justice Policy Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the effectiveness of post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policies in preventing terror attacks and reducing casualties against American targets within and outside the United States. Monthly data on terrorism incidents from July 1981 through December 2020 were obtained from the Global Terrorism Database (N = 462). The results of monthly interrupted time-series analyses showed that within the United States, after the 9/11 attacks, the number of attacks, the number of successful attacks, and the successful attack rate statistically significantly decreased in the first month following 9/11; then, no significant increase was observed in the trend of those outcomes. Outside the United States, after the 9/11 attacks, the trend of the number of successful attacks, the number of victims, the number of nonfatal victims, and the victim rate statistically significantly decreased. The results suggest that post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policies are effective both domestically and internationally. These findings and their policy implications are discussed.
The Politics of Punishment: Why Dictators Join the International Criminal Court
Leslie Johns & Francesca Parente
International Studies Quarterly, September 2024
Abstract:
Scholars commonly argue that international law and organizations promote democracy by helping dictators to credibly commit to accountability, individual rights, and transparency. Yet dictators routinely join treaties and international organizations without transitioning to democracy. International law and organizations can generate asymmetric costs for domestic actors because international rules often apply to both governments and non-state actors, yet dictators can limit how these rules are upheld at the domestic and international level. We argue that dictators are most likely to join such treaties and international organizations when they face strong domestic political competition. We illustrate our argument using the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has extensive powers to prosecute individuals for international crimes, including crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. We show that ICC investigations and prosecutions have become a tool for incumbent dictators to target their domestic opponents. We examine the implications of our theory for multiple outcome variables, including the decision to join the ICC, violence, and the survival of dictators in power. Our evidence suggests that dictators are most likely to join the ICC when they face strong political opponents and are subsequently less likely to commit violence and more likely to survive in office.
Terrorism Works, for its Supporters
Andrew Coe, Peter Schram & Heesun Yoo
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Empirical studies have shown that terrorists’ policy goals are rarely achieved, leading some to conclude that terrorism doesn’t work. We theorize that terrorism can work, but for its supporters rather than for the terrorists themselves. Because supporters are willing to contribute resources to a terrorist organization, thereby increasing the organization’s ability to launch attacks, this can coerce the targeted government to revise its policies in accordance with the supporters’ preferences. Targeted governments may respond with concessions in order to erode support and thereby render the terrorists easier to defeat. Support can be rational even when supporters’ ideal policies are closer to those of the government than to those of the terrorists. We examine Hamas and the Provisional IRA, generally regarded as failures. We show that targeted governments sometimes made concessions that placated supporters but not the terrorists, and that this was followed by reduced support for and occurrence of violence.
Losing on the home front? Battlefield casualties, media, and public support for foreign interventions
Thiemo Fetzer et al.
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
How domestic constituents respond to signals of weakness in foreign wars remains an important question in international relations. This paper studies the impact of battlefield casualties and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop fatalities, we leverage the timing of survey collection across respondents from nine members of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Quasi-experimental evidence demonstrates that battlefield casualties increase the news coverage of Afghanistan and the public demand for withdrawal. Evidence from a survey experiment replicates the main results. To shed light on the media mechanism, we leverage a news pressure design and find that major sporting matches occurring around the time of battlefield casualties drive down subsequent coverage, and significantly weaken the effect of casualties on support for war termination. These results highlight the role that media play in shaping public support for foreign military interventions.
Violent Competition and Terrorist Restraint
Sara Polo & Blair Welsh
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
A large literature has argued that domestic competition increases a militant organization's use and severity of terrorism to differentiate their “brand” and “outbid” other organizations. However, most empirical analyses infer such competition from the quantity of groups present in a geographic area. This approach neglects specific group relationships, such as cooperation, rhetorical or violent rivalry, or peaceful coexistence. We introduce a behavioral measure of group competition and argue that variation in the quality, rather than the quantity, of competition affects the violence profile of militant groups in unexpected ways. Violent competition, where militants attack one another, imposes significant constraints on group resources and increases groups’ dependence on civilian support, which exacerbates the costs of a popular backlash against brutality. Moreover, violent competition effectively substitutes for crowding out rivals via outbidding. As competition becomes extreme, we posit that groups increasingly opt for a strategy of terrorist restraint and reduce the share of high-profile attacks on soft civilian targets. We test this argument at the macro and micro levels with cross-national data on 290 organizations in civil war (1970–2018) and granular data on the subnational targeting strategy of the Islamic State in Syria (2013–2018). Both analyses provide robust support for our argument. The findings shed light on the strategic limitations of outbidding and provide important insights for research and policy.
Foreign Policy Appointments
Matt Malis
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do leaders select their top-level foreign policy appointees? Through a formal model of the domestic and intragovernmental politics surrounding an international crisis, I investigate the trade-offs shaping leaders’ appointment strategies. In the model, a leader selects a foreign policy appointee, anticipating how the appointment will affect the advice he receives in the crisis, the electorate's evaluation of his performance, and ultimately the policies that he and his foreign counterparts pursue as a consequence. The analysis uncovers a fundamental tension in the leader's ability to use appointments to advance his core political and policy objectives of deterring foreign aggression, obtaining accurate advice, and maximizing domestic approval: any appointment that advances one of these objectives invariably comes at the cost of another, and the leader's appointment strategy must balance across these trade-offs. Analyzing cross-national appointment patterns to the offices of ministers of defense and foreign affairs, I find descriptive evidence consistent with the model's predictions: leaders from dovish parties are more than twice as likely as leaders from hawkish parties to select cross-partisan and politically independent appointees, and such appointments are less likely for leaders of either party as they approach re-election.
Resources and Territorial Claims: Domestic Opposition to Resource-Rich Territory
Soyoung Lee
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are states more interested in claiming territories that have economic resources? While previous theories of international relations assume that resources make a territory more tempting to claim, all else equal, I argue that certain types of economic resources can make states less willing to claim a territory. The presence of capital-intensive resources -- such as oil or minerals -- raises concerns about how the benefits of acquiring the territory would be distributed within the nation. These distributional concerns make it harder and costlier for leaders to mobilize widespread and consistent support for claiming resource-rich lands. Using original geocoded data on territorial claims in South America from 1830 to 2001, I show that states are indeed less likely to claim lands that have oil or minerals, even when they can be claimed for historical or administrative reasons. I then illustrate the theoretical mechanism through a case study of Bolivia, comparing Bolivian attitudes toward reclaiming its two lost provinces, the Chaco and the Litoral. By showing how the presence of economic resources can become a liability in mobilizing unified support, this paper questions the widespread assumption that resources make territories more desirable to claim.
The Effective Power of Military Coalitions: A Unified Theoretical and Empirical Model
Brenton Kenkel & Kristopher Ramsay
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We argue that the effective power of a coalition depends not only on its members’ raw capabilities, but also how much effort they exert. Free-riding and competition between partners mean a coalition’s power is not the sum of its members’ power. We develop a unified model of crisis bargaining and war fighting between coalitions. Using data on the escalation and outcomes of international disputes, we structurally estimate the model parameters to identify determinants of countries’ force multipliers and audience costs. We find that demographic and economic characteristics are the most important determinants of military effectiveness, with regime type and geopolitical considerations playing lesser roles. The structural model also allows us to simulate counterfactual outcomes in disputes between coalitions. This allows us to test historical claims like that earlier American involvement would have made a substantial difference in both World Wars, even in the face of strategic free-riding by its allies.
Drafting restraint: Are military recruitment policies associated with interstate conflict initiation?
Max Margulies
Journal of Peace Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are countries that use conscription more restrained in their use of military force? A common argument holds that military conscription restrains leaders from using force because it increases the political cost of war and distributes them more evenly and broadly across the population. Despite this intuition, empirical evidence to support it is at best inconclusive. This article introduces a novel perspective on the relationship between military recruitment (MR) policies and conflict initiation (CI) by arguing that the military’s size relative to society -- its military participation rate (MPR) -- is an important and overlooked part of this story. MPR is a more direct measure of the population’s exposure to the costs of war, but high MPR may also increase CI by enhancing military capacity. By incorporating MPR into the analysis of CI, both independently and in interaction with conscription, this article provides a more comprehensive understanding of how MR practices shape CI. It tests these new hypotheses about the relationship between MPR, conscription and CI using a variety of time-series models that cover all country-years from 1816 to 2011. The findings do not support the conventional wisdom, instead revealing that neither conscription nor volunteerism is independently associated with restrained initiation of military conflicts abroad. On the contrary, these recruitment practices are more likely to be associated with an increase in the likelihood of CI. These findings indicate that we should be skeptical of traditional arguments that assume conscription leads to restraint in the use of force, either independently or conditional on MPR. These counterintuitive results underscore the need for additional research on the complex relationship between MR practices, civil–military relations and foreign policy.