Krebs, Ronald R. and Aaron Rapport. (2012) International Relations and the Psychology of Time Horizons. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468‐2478.2012.00726.x 
© 2012 International Studies Association Theories of international relations have often incorporated assumptions about time horizons—a metaphor for how heavily actors value the future relative to the present. However, they have not built on a growing body of experimental research that studies how human beings actually make intertemporal tradeoffs. In this article, we present relevant findings from psychology and behavioral economics, notably those of “construal level theory” (CLT), and explore these findings’ implications for three classic questions—international cooperation, preventive war, and coercion. We argue that experimental evidence regarding how people discount future value and construe future events challenges the conventional wisdom on international cooperation. We further maintain that CLT helps explain a longstanding puzzle about preventive wars—namely why they are often initiated too late by declining powers but too soon by rising competitors. Finally, we rely on these findings to explain who wins coercive contests and why compellence is often, but not always, harder than deterrence. Scholars of international relations often embed in their theories crucial assumptions about time horizons, and this article seeks to show what differences it makes if we ground these assumptions in what we know about actual human decision making.

While much research has been done on the domestic determinants of alliance institutionalization, there has been a neglect of the effect of domestic politics, by which we mean contestation between political actors in the same country. We hypothesize that the ideology of the parties governing countries negotiating the terms of security relationships will affect their preferences over the degree and kind of institutionalization seen in alliances. Drawing on previous literature, we argue that rightist parties are more sensitive to sovereignty costs and will therefore insist on maintaining more control over policy than their leftist counterparts. They can assert control either by imposing hierarchical forms of institutionalization when they are a stronger party to an alliance or by avoiding institutionalization altogether if they are the weaker party in an alliance. In contrast, we expect leftist parties to be less sensitive to sovereignty costs and generally favorable to more voice-driven, egalitarian institutions that have institutionalized mechanisms for consensus-building, regardless of their country’s relative power position. Combining the ATOP dataset on alliance design with the Parties Manifesto Project, we find broad support for our hypotheses. Our findings indicate that scholars should pay more attention to the internal ideological contestation within countries, making room for domestic political factors that go beyond regime type.

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What shapes public support for military missions? Existing scholarship points to, on the one hand, individuals’ affiliations and predispositions (such as political partisanship and gender), and, on the other hand, factors that shape a rational cost–benefit analysis (notably, mission objectives, the prospects for victory, and the magnitude and distribution of costs). We argue that public opinion is also shaped by beliefs about why soldiers voluntarily enlist. Using novel survey data and an experiment, deployed to a nationally representative sample of Americans, we test how four conceptions of soldiering affect support for a prospective military operation. We find, in observational data, that believing that a soldier is a good citizen or patriot bolsters support for the mission, while believing that a soldier has enlisted because he wants the material benefits of service or has “no other options” undermines support. These results support our causal argument: Americans’ attitudes toward military missions are shaped by their perception of whether the soldier has consented to deployment rather than by feelings of social obligation. This article has implications for debates on the determinants of public support for military missions and the relationship between military service and citizenship in democracies.

The George W. Bush administration's assessments of challenges that might come after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq were wide of the mark, but it is unclear why this was the case. Along with the difficulty of anticipating the future, perhaps the opportunity costs of allocating resources to postconflict considerations were simply too high. Institutional biases and civil-military friction may have also led actors to privilege certain information and plans over others. Although plausible, these hypotheses do not sufficiently explain strategic assessment prior to the 2003 invasion. They cannot account for the substance of most senior policymakers' assessments, especially those of President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which was optimistic when late-stage operations were considered but not when combat plans were deliberated. An established psychological theory that describes how people mentally represent distant future actions—as opposed to those that are seen as impending—explains the nature of strategic assessment in the Iraq case. As individuals think about actions at the end of a sequence of events, the desirability of their goals becomes increasingly salient relative to the feasibility of achieving them. This makes decisionmakers more prone to underestimate the costs and risks of future actions.