Diversionary Incentives and the Bargaining Approach to War

Abstract

I use a game theoretic model of diversionary war incentives to help explain the lack of a consistent empirical relationship between domestic conditions and the use of force abroad. I argue that when diversionary behavior is about demonstrating competence rather than creating a short-term ''rally round the flag'' effect, a leader has incentives to use force against a challenging target, and this may dissuade many would-be diversionary uses of force. I then combine the diversionary model with the bargaining approach to war and show that when war is costly and bargaining is allowed, the diversionary leader can be peacefully appeased short of war as long as the benefit of holding office is not too large compared with the cost of war and other factors. However, when the office holding benefit is sufficiently large, the diversionary incentive emerges as a new domestic politics based ''rationalist explanation for war.''The well-known diversionary theory of war (Levy 1989) stipulates that domestic problems lead to incentives for a nation's leader to engage in aggressive foreign behavior, perhaps even war, to boost the nation's cohesiveness, to enhance the leader's popularity, and to thus increase her chances of remaining in power. There is now an immense empirical literature that attempts to ascertain whether or not leaders are more likely to be involved in foreign disputes when facing domestic problems. However, the empirical findings on this matter are quite inconsistent. While many studies find evidence for the diversionary hypothesis (e.g., Ward and

Logics of war: explanations for limited and unlimited conflicts

“…An alternate view sees war as a noisy signal of leadership competence: good leaders who have been unlucky in domestic politics or incompetent leaders who hope to get lucky in foreign policy may have an incentive to start a confl ict so as to improve public perceptions of them and thus increase the probability that they are able to remain in offi ce. Richards et al (1993), Smith (1998b), Tarar (2006). 96.…”

A Small Victorious War: Domestic Revolution and International Conflict

“…The second literature is mostly associated with the political science and deals specifically with the "diversionary wars" (Richards et al, 1993;Smith, 1996;Tarar, 2006). The idea of these studies is to show that the external war can be attractive for the incumbent political leader to gather domestic support.…”

Scapegoating Strategically: Reselection, Strategic Interaction, and the Diversionary Theory of War

“…While the foundations of the theory lie in the sociological literature on the in-group/out-group hypothesis, most formal models of diversionary theory (Downs and Rocke, 1994;Hess and Orphanides, 1995;Richards, Morgan, Wilson, Schwebach and Young, 1993;Smith, 1996Smith, , 1998Tarar 2006) have generally relied on principal-agent theory. In these models, the sanctions provided by reselection mechanisms 1 provide leaders with incentives to pursue aggressive foreign policies in order to increase their chances of being reselected.…”

“…A Two-Level Game of Diversionary Theory A number of scholars have attempted to place diversionary theory in a more coherent theoretical framework by developing game-theoretic models that analyze the incentives underlying the diversionary use of force (Downs and Rocke, 1994;Hess and Orphanides, 1995;Richards et al, 1993;Smith, 1996;Tarar, 2006). Instead of relying on the sociological in-group/out-group hypothesis, these principal-agent models examine how domestic reselection mechanisms give leaders incentives to pursue aggressive foreign policies in order to improve their chances of remaining in office.…”

“…Building upon a claim made by Smith (1996), which was later formalized by Tarar (2006), the strategic conflict avoidance hypothesis states that since other leaders know that a leader facing domestic unrest has diversionary incentives, they will refrain from entering into disputes with such a leader. Thus poor domestic conditions may actually decrease the likelihood of conflict.…”