Recently, international relations scholars have posited that, though economically unsuccessful American presidents may have incentives to divert via international conflict, their potential adversaries are also privy to their plight and may seek to avoid fighting them at such junctures. However, this “strategic conflict avoidance” (SCA) perspective offers relatively few insights concerning the impact of a potentially important source of leadership weakness in the American case: legislative opposition to presidential policy. Indeed, scholars seem uncertain about whether general legislative opposition actually drives American presidents to divert or leads them to refrain from international ventures. This article seeks to develop and test a general theory concerning the targeting of presidents who face legislative opposition to their foreign policies. The article predicts that economic distress increases “conflict avoidance” on the part of potential adversaries, whereas overt legislative opposition to presidential foreign policy decreases the utility of diversion and creates transparent elite divisions that invite targeting. Negative binomial generalized estimating equations (GEE) models of the U.S. foreign policy experience from 1949 to 2001 support these predictions, in that the U.S. is less likely to be the target of incident initiation by other states when the economic misery index increases, but is more likely to be targeted when members of Congress voice displeasure with presidential foreign policy. Further analyses show that these findings are generally strongest during periods of high American inflation, in the context of enduring rivalries, and during the Cold War.

Numerous works have studied the relationship between public approval and the propensity of United States presidents to use force abroad. One of these (Morgan and Bickers 1992) relies upon a refined view of internalization–externalization processes to reformulate the diversionary theory of conflict. The authors postulate that, as presidents are concerned with maintaining popularity among individuals upon whose support their continued power rests, they are more inclined to use diversionary force when approval among members of their party declines. Using more extensive and comprehensive measures of militarized actions, we find no support for Morgan and Bickers' original hypothesis, indicating that the results of one of the very few works that finds any evidence of diversion from low public approval may not be valid. In fact, event count analyses reveal that precisely the opposite relationship is operative. Additionally, Morgan and Bickers' formulation fails to account for potential differences in conflict propensity stemming from differences in political parties. We hypothesize that presidents whose partisan supporters are expected to react favorably to “hawkish” actions (Republicans) are more likely to use force abroad when faced with declining partisan support than those leaders whose partisan supporters are generally “dovish” (Democrats). Our results yield little support for this hypothesis. We conclude the article by exploring some possible explanations for our findings.

A growing body of work seeks to explain the lack of clear evidence for the diversionary use of force by casting doubt on such strategies' attractiveness for policy makers: while domestic political and economic problems may provide incentives for diversion, such strategies involve political and military risks that frequently outweigh these incentives. Such theories correctly identify the objective risks involved in diversion but do not account for variation in leaders' risk-taking propensities. We develop a "first image" theory of diversion that suggests a key psychological variable (locus of control) shapes leaders' willingness to engage in risky diversionary strategies. A statistical analysis of the American use of force, 1953-2000, finds strong support for this model. We conclude that the lack of clear evidence for diversion in general is a reflection of the contingent nature of the phenomenon and call for greater attention to how agents and structures interact to produce policy behavior. KEY WORDS: diversionary war, foreign policy, presidential leadership style, risk taking, elite decision making

Some scholars have suggested that when faced with domestic political problems, leaders employ simplified decision processes, preferring action to deliberation and highly visible diversionary uses of force to alternative policies. Others contend that domestically embattled leaders will pursue a more rational examination of the costs and benefits of various options-the sort of deliberation that will lead them to reject diversionary force in favor of less risky measures. Drawing on research in political psychology, we argue that leaders' cognitive processes are not constants but variables, and that both models are correct under certain circumstances. Leaders low in conceptual complexity (CC), and especially those with hawkish leanings, will pursue simplified decision-making procedures and embrace diversionary strategies, while leaders who are high in complexity will pursue a more thorough consideration of risks and alternatives and generally avoid diversionary actions. We examine these expectations by testing the interactive effect of economic misery and leaders' CC on American force usage for the period 1953-2000.The findings indicate that more conceptually simple leaders-particularly when high in distrust, a trait linked to more hawkish policy inclinations-are significantly more likely to engage in diversion.A great deal of scholarship in the past two decades has focused on the "diversionary hypothesis"-the notion that domestically embattled leaders may have political incentives to use force abroad. Despite a proliferation of theoretical models and empirical tests, the ambiguous nature of the evidence has prompted continuing debates over the validity of different theories and even the existence of the diversionary phenomenon (e.g., Levy 1989). One of the most important debates concerns the nature of the perceptions and decision-making processes employed by leaders contemplating diversionary actions. Some explanations assume that leaders use simplistic cybernetic decision rules (Ostrom and Job 1986;Steinbruner 2002) which dictate that when domestic political or economic problems become sufficiently serious, quick ameliorative actions, such as the diversionary use of force, must be taken. Other explanations envision leaders engaging in more sophisticated, rational calculations (Clark unpub. manuscript, 2001) in which the costs and benefits of an array of options are carefully weighed, and diversionary force is typically rejected given its high risks and potentially serious military and political costs. Deconstructing this debate reveals Foster, Dennis M. and Jonathan W. Keller. (2014) Leaders' Cognitive Complexity, Distrust, and the Diversionary Use of Force. Foreign Policy Analysis,

Mitchell and Prins (2004) have recently found that diversion from high levels of inflation is observed only among enduring rivals. However, neither this nor any other cross-national test of the relevance of opportunity to diversion has included a potentially important determinant of diversionary capacity: major power status. I contend that since militarily powerful states have both more extensive sets of international commitments and much greater physical capacities to divert against broader sets of opponents, they are less likely to limit their diversionary behavior to enduring rivals. Cross-national time series analyses of the association between inflation and militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation for the period 1960-1999 reveal several differences between the diversionary activity of major powers and that of all other states. Models that account for the interaction between inflation and rivalry reveal that while nonmajor powers seemingly divert only against enduring rivals, major powers are marginally less likely to do so against rivals than they are against nonrivals. However, more detailed analyses indicate that these latter findings are being driven by the American case: While the United States is more likely to initiate MIDs against nonrivals than rivals at the highest levels of inflation, other major powers are more likely to initiate MIDs against rivals than nonrivals at all points. Moreover, the United States is, on average, more likely than all other states to initiate MIDs at all levels of inflation. At minimum, these findings imply that the United States is unique among major powers both in its capacity to divert from inflation and in its propensity to link diversion from inflation against nonrivals to its most important rivalries.Perhaps no theoretical claim in the field of foreign policy has been so regularly expounded and yet received such mixed empirical support as the diversionary hypothesis. Despite its intuitive appeal and seemingly clear applicability in some cases, few international relations (IR) scholars have marshaled convincing evidence that state leaders engage in diversion with regularity. As analyses of the hypothesis have become more refined over the past generation of IR scholarship, several works have sought to develop explanations for this paucity. Perhaps the most compelling of these centers upon limitations not on the incentives of leaders to use force internationally for the purposes of diverting domestic attentions from their failings, but on the opportunity of those leaders to employ diversionary conflict to meet those incentives. Because leaders cannot automatically identify international situations to