Executive Constraints and Success in International Crises

Partell, Peter J.

doi:10.2307/448915

Cited by 7 publications

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“…To truly measure audience costs one would need to measure the likelihood that a leader will be removed from office in the event that she fails in the foreign-policy arena. Partell (1997b) argued that the amount of institutional constraint faced by an executive is a reasonable measure of potential audience costs. While not ideal in the sense that it does not address the likelihood of removal from office or the ability of the leader to generate actual audience costs, this measure does tap the extent to which a leader can institute policy unilaterally.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Audience Costs and Interstate Crises: An Empirical Assessment of Fearon's Model of Dispute Outcomes

1999

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In a recent article, James Fearon advances an innovative approach to the study of interstate crises. He adds to the traditional view (that crisis outcomes are influenced by the balance of capability and the balance of resolve) the notion that domestic political audiences exert a strong influence over which state in a crisis is likely to achieve a successful outcome. His game-theoretic analysis yields a number of interesting hypotheses, which are tested in this study using data on militarized disputes, the structure of polities, and national capability. In general the results strongly support Fearon's model, though we find that relative national capabilities do tend to affect the outcomes of crises. This study highlights the importance of combining formal models of political events with large-N empirical tests.Traditional notions of interstate bargaining suggest that crisis outcomes are a function of the relative military might of the participants and the willingness of each side to use force in order to demonstrate a higher degree of commitment to the issue at stake than the opponent (Snyder and Diesing, 1977;Maoz, 1983;Leng, 1993). The escalation of crises, according to this view, occurs as each side attempts to show its opponent that the costs of further conflict over the issue at stake will be larger than that opponent wants to bear. The outcomes of crises should be that either one side backs down, because it is less resolved than its opponent, or neither side backs down and the two sides go to war. The words often used to summarize this perspective on bargaining is that international crises are "competitions in risk taking" (Schelling, 1960;Kahn, 1965).In a recent article, James Fearon (1994) offers a fresh perspective on interstate crisis bargaining. Drawing on Thomas Schelling's (1960) work on credible commitment, he argues that the escalation and outcomes of interstate disputes are in large International Studies Quarterly (1999) 43, 389-405 for the comments and help on earlier drafts of this article. The article also benefited from the constructive suggestions of the reviewers and editors of this journal. We wish to thank the National Science Foundation, whose financial assistance through grant SBR-9507909 facilitated this research. We alone are responsible for any errors in this work.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Partell (1997b) shows that states facing higher audience costs are better able to obtain successful dispute outcomes than states facing lower audience costs.…”

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Audience Costs and Interstate Crises: An Empirical Assessment of Fearon's Model of Dispute Outcomes

1999

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“…Political opposition, then, is a necessary component of effective crisis signaling. Tests of Fearon's (1994) conjecture have primarily involved taking into account constraints on political action by governing elites (Partell & Palmer, 1999;Partell, 1997).6 However, executive parity with, or subordination to, another institutional body such as a legislature does not necessarily capture the extent to which a leader will be punished if policy actions fail to accomplish stated political goals. One can easily conceive of a leader holding an overwhelming majority in the legislature or an international crisis prompting a rally-around-the-flag effect.…”

Section: Information Asymmetries and Costly Signalingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given that distinctions within the democratic community of nations have been found with regards to conflict propensity (Prins & Sprecher, 1999;Ireland & Gartner, 2001), a more nuanced understanding of institutional effects is needed to explain fully crisis bargaining behavior. Some scholars, for instance, have tested the relationship between conflict involvement and executive constraints (Partell, 1997;Partell & Palmer, 1999). In general, though, these findings do not differ drastically from what has been found with overall level of democracy.1 To date, few other institutional elements of polities have been investigated systematically for their potential effect on conflictual foreign policy behavior.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutional Instability and the Credibility of Audience Costs: Political Participation and Interstate Crisis Bargaining, 1816-1992

Prins

2003

Journal of Peace Research

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.While considerable empirical evidence shows democratic dyads to be less prone to violence than other types of regime pairs, disagreement still exists on the causal factors inhibiting conflict among democratic states. Some scholars have concluded that increased attention needs to be given to identifying specific characteristics of democratic states that might mitigate or incite coercive foreign policy actions. This article begins to pull apart the Polity IIId regime index by assessing the role of political participation in crisis bargaining. If the ability of opposition groups to challenge government policies enables state leaders to communicate credibly their intentions and thus avoid conflict, increased attention needs to be given to the permanence of such structural features of the domestic political environment. What may facilitate efficient signaling is not only competitive political participation, but also the enduring nature of such participation. Regimes that oscillate between severe restrictions on political participation and regulated competition engage in more escalatory behavior because they fail to signal their preferences effectively. The results indicate that while democracy has little effect on MID reciprocation, factionalism among domestic political groups tends to be strongly associated with such a dispute response. Contiguity, military balance, and years at peace also appear to influence dispute reciprocation. *The author has benefited from the helpful comments of Scott Gates, Sara Mitchell, Nils Petter Gleditsch, Mark Souva, David Lektzian, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce Russett, William Dixon, and four anonymous reviewers. They, of course, are not responsible for the remaining errors and omissions. The data used in this article can be obtained from http://www.uno.edu/-bprins/data.htm. 1998). Former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott (1996: 63) articulated the administration's view when he wrote, 'democracies are demonstrably more likely to maintain their international commitments, less likely to engage in terrorism or wreak environmental damage, and less likely to make war on each other'. What's more, Talbott concluded his article by stating, 'Only in an increasingly democratic world will the American people feel themselves truly secure.' While considerable empirical evidence shows democratic dyads to be less prone to violence than other types of regime pairs, disagreement still exists on the causal factors inhibiting conflict among democratic states (Gowa, 1995). Indeed, theoretical and empirical discrepancies in the regime type and 67 l 68 journal of PEACE RESEARCH

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“…Such anomic action, typically used to articulate opposition to domestic rather than foreign policy, tends to be more rare in majority/ plurality systems with single-member constituencies (e.g., the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia). 36 See Palmer, Regan, and London (2001), Partell (1997), and Prins and Sprecher (1999) for additional examples of this line of research focusing on the institutional differences among the democracies. ment, and the size of the ruling coalitionFdo not seem to matter.…”

Section: Proportional Representation Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Opinion as a Constraint against War: Democracies' Responses to Operation Iraqi Freedom

Chan

Safran

2006

Foreign Policy Analysis

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A central logic of the democratic peace theory claims that public opinion acts as a powerful restraint against war. Democratic officials, unlike their autocratic counterparts, are wary of going to war because they expect to pay an electoral penalty for fighting even successful wars. Several democracies, however, recently joined Operation Iraqi Freedom despite substantial and even overwhelming domestic opposition. We argue that electoral institutions can heighten or lessen the impact of public opinion on democratic officials' concerns for their reelection prospects, thus pointing to an important dimension of variation that has been overlooked in the democratic peace literature. However, contrary to conventional attributions of a greater incentive motivating the parties and candidates in predominantly two-party systems with majority/plurality decision rules to respond to national public opinion, we suggest mitigating factors that tend to reduce such responsiveness. Conversely, we point out that multiparty competition in proportional representation systems can reduce electoral disproportionality without sacrificing responsiveness to public opinion. The pertinent electoral institutions therefore present varying opportunities (or, conversely, constraints) for democratic officials to override their constituents' sentiments when they are so inclined.

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Executive Constraints and Success in International Crises

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Audience Costs and Interstate Crises: An Empirical Assessment of Fearon's Model of Dispute Outcomes

Audience Costs and Interstate Crises: An Empirical Assessment of Fearon's Model of Dispute Outcomes

Institutional Instability and the Credibility of Audience Costs: Political Participation and Interstate Crisis Bargaining, 1816-1992

Public Opinion as a Constraint against War: Democracies' Responses to Operation Iraqi Freedom

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