Theories of decision-making grounded in political psychology have experienced a dramatic rise in the study of International Relations. There is widespread recognition of the benefits of incorporating insights from the behavioural sciences into analyses of political behaviour. However, some scholars have argued that the theoretical and empirical scope of these perspectives remains hampered by an unresolved issue: aggregation. While the fundamental unit of interest in psychology is the individual, most International Relations models concern patterns of collective decision-making in aggregate units such as states, bureaucracies, armed groups, transnational networks and institutions. This article contributes to the aggregation debate by providing a more optimistic portrait of its implications for interdisciplinary work. I argue that aggregation may be an overstated problem in International Relations and that a disciplinary preoccupation with it may hinder rather than pave the way for interdisciplinary theorizing.

How does the oil wealth of a potential target state affect the likelihood of the US public favoring the use of military force? Recent studies suggest that public opinion on foreign policy is responsive to the core characteristics of target states, such as regime type and majority religion. This article advances this research agenda by examining the effects of intra-regime heterogeneity in respect of an important characteristic of target states: their oil wealth. To examine the relationship between oil wealth and US public opinion on war, we fielded a conjoint experiment with US citizens. Respondents chose between hypothetical pairs of target states that varied across seven different intra-regime characteristics. We found that that the oil wealth of a target exerts a statistically significant (albeit small) effect on public support for the use of force, independent of the effects of other regime characteristics.

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