Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. predicted that Barack Obama would face an international challenge in his early term by foreign enemies who want to test a young leader’s resolve as a chief executive just like John F. Kennedy did in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. We test this argument using the directed‐leader‐dyad‐period data for both world leaders and the US presidents between 1875 and 2001. We find that old leaders are more likely to be a target of militarized disputes, and even more so during the early term as opposed to Biden’s prediction. The impact of tenure on the likelihood of being targeted largely depends on age. We also find that old Republican US presidents are especially vulnerable to foreign challenges early in their term.

This article examines how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects the likelihood of authoritarian leaders’ political survival. We argue that FDI reduces the likelihood of experiencing political challenges from elites. We present two mechanisms for this claim. First, the host governments of authoritarian regimes can use FDI for long-term private good provision, so that FDI helps them to appease elite dissents and to buy off potential elite challengers. Second, FDI mitigates a commitment problem between elites and authoritarian leadership by creating an FDI-related distributional coalition, which in turn makes political defections costly to both parties. Our empirical tests using various two-stage estimators show that FDI significantly decreases the likelihood of elite-driven authoritarian leadership failure and coup attempt.

Given the conventional claim that external threats increase internal cohesion and government capacity, cross-country studies have examined how interstate conflict events influence domestic politics. This article reevaluates the in-group and out-group mechanisms by examining how international strategic rivalry, which indicates the presence of persistent external threats even in the absence of military conflict, affects domestic political competition. An alternative explanation suggests that the effect of external threats on political incentives of domestic actors differs between regime supporters and oppositions. We posit that the presence of international threats from rival states inflames domestic unrest and oppositions’ antiregime challenges, while making governments rely more on repressive tactics given resource constraints and a high level of domestic political intolerance. In addition, we propose that the domestic consequences of international rivalry are heterogeneous depending on the characteristics of political systems and the level of threat perception. Empirical tests reveal robust evidence for the hypotheses.

No abstract

Researchers measure regime stability in autocratic contexts using a variety of data sources that capture distinct concepts. Often this research uses concepts developed for the study of democratic politics, such as leadership change or institutionalized authority, to construct measures of regime breakdown in non-democratic contexts. This article assesses whether the measure a researcher chooses influences the results they obtain by examining data on executive leadership, political authority, and autocratic regimes. We illustrate the conceptual differences between these variables by extending recent studies in the literature on the political consequences of non-tax revenue and unearned foreign income.