The authors begin the construction of a generalizable theory of casualties and opinion, reexamining the logic employed by Mueller and showing that although human costs are an important predictor of wartime opinion, Mueller's operationalization of those costs solely as the log of cumulative national casualties is problematic and incomplete. The authors argue that temporally proximate costs, captured as marginal casualty figures, are an important additional aspect of human costs and a critical factor in determining wartime opinion. Using Mueller's data on opinion in the Vietnam and Korean wars, the authors find that marginal casualties are important in explaining opinion when casualty accumulation is accelerating, and earlier findings about the importance and generalizability of the log of cumulative casualties as the sole casualty-based predictor of opinion are overstated. Finally, the authors offer some thoughts about other factors that should be considered when building a model of war deaths and domestic opinion.

P ublic support for a conflict is not a blank check. Combat provides information people use to update their expectations about the outcome, direction, value, and cost of a war. Critical are fatalities--the most salient costs of conflict. I develop a rational expectations theory in which both increasing recent casualties and rising casualty trends lead to decreased support. Traditional studies neither recognize nor provide a method for untangling these multiple influences. I conduct six experiments, three on the Iraq War (two with national, representative samples) and three with a new type of panel experiment design on hypothetical military interventions. The results of hazard and ordered logit analyses of almost 3,000 subjects support a rational expectations theory linking recent casualties, casualty trends, and their interaction to wartime approval. I also examine the effects of the probability of victory, information levels, and individual characteristics on the support for war, and contrast results from representative and convenience samples.War has an immediate effect upon the attitude of mind of everyone who is brought into connection with it.

Key mediation attributes, such as mediating actors, the strategy they choose, and previous mediation experiences, are widely thought to influence the nature of a conflict management outcome. But how and when these features shape outcomes is not a straightforward matter, and a standard analysis of these factors does not lead to their widely anticipated results. Why? We develop a new analytical framework that argues that a dispute's intensity alters the conflict management processes. Furthermore, in order to observe this variation, we also need to expand the traditional, dichotomous notion of conflict management outcomes (success or failure) to include a fuller range of observed results. Using the most recent International Conflict Management data set and our new analytical framework, we analyze the effect on conflict management outcome of mediator (a) identity, (b) strategy and (c) history. We find that directive strategies and international mediators are effective in resolving high intensity conflicts, procedural strategies and regional mediators are effective in resolving low intensity conflicts, and that mediation history always affects resolution. Our results have implications for both the study and practice of international dispute mediation.

An understanding of the causes of political repression has continually eluded researchers for the past decade. We argue that much of this can be tied to the theoretical specifications of the models employed. We developed a decision-theoretic model that predicts the level of repression used by governments to suppress political opposition. We believe that analysis of repression needs to include the political contexts in which states operate. In particular, we theorize and find that the nature of the threat posed by an opposition group influences the impact of both the domestic and international factors on the government's decision to repress. We argue that the international and domestic costs associated with a given level of government repression are best represented by separate, non-linear functions of the level of demand made by a dissident opposition group. From this model we deduce an equilibrium level of repression for any given demand; we then empirically test these predictions against original data generated from 18 Latin American countries during the years 1977-86. We find that as the nature of the threat posed by an opposition group moves from minor to extreme, the marginal increment of government repression decreases. Analyses of these data support our theoretical propositions, and suggest that both non-linear approaches and the inclusion of opposition group demands provide a useful tool for studying state repression.

We argue that a factor widely seen as facilitating cooperation in an international dispute, mediation, is also a sign that a resulting agreement is likely to be short-lived. Mediators get the tough cases, disputes that are most likely to result in short-lived settlementsFa selection effect. At the same time, mediation helps to resolve a conflict's underlying issues, making mediated settlements more likely to lastFa process effect. We develop a theory that captures these opposing forcesFfocusing on the conditional effect of mediation on nonstate actorsFand taking into account critical aspects of the disputants, conflict, conflict management processes and settlement. Using hazard analysis, Heckman two-stage probit and logistic regression, we statistically analyze over 1,400 settlements drawn from the just released International Conflict Management 2000 data set and also conduct a quantitative case study of mediation tools used in the former Yugoslavia. All analyses find strong support for the opposing effects of mediation; mediated agreements are more likely to be short-lived, unless they involve nonstate actors. This study advances our understanding of selection effects and the factors that lead to short-lived settlements, and provides policy makers and potential mediators a way to establish realistic expectations about the durability of dispute settlements.