Politically Motivated Opposition to War1

Does the Diversionary Use of Force Threaten the Democratic Peace? Assessing the Effect of Economic Growth on Interstate Conflict, 1921?2001

“…In the United States, Congress can limit a president's ability to create or use a crisis for his political advantage with powers derived from the Constitution and the War Powers Act of 1973. In addition to such formal powers, political leaders of the opposing party can influence public opinion (Levy and Mabe 2004). The rally effect is significantly reduced when they question the need for military action.…”

“…The veteran journalist R. W. Apple Jr. (1992:5) argued that a president is apt to gain politically when he acts forcefully overseas, which “has led America into a number of adventures over the last 45 years.” In 1994, the French defense minister criticized a deployment of U.S. marines to Kuwait, suggesting that the buildup was “not unconnected with domestic politics” (Sciolino 1994:1); and in 1996, Ross Perot accused President Clinton of using military force to increase his electoral prospects. The diversionary use of force has been an element in fiction from Shakespeare (Levy and Mabe 2004) to the contemporary American film, Wag the Dog .…”

Resolve in International Politics

“…(Sartori, 2005) 7 The accuracy and utility of the unitary actor assumption is frequently contested in IR (Allison, 1971;Keohane and Nye, 1977;Milner, 1997;Moravscik, 1997;Fearon, 1998;Hudson, 2005), but what matters for our purposes is that a divide exists in the rationalist literature between theories of resolve with unitary actors (Morrow, 1989;Morgan, 1990;Slantchev, 2005), and those that incorporate domestic politics, whether in the form of audience costs (Fearon, 1994), agent-principal problems (Downs and Rocke, 1995), selectorate theories (Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson, 1995), or two-level games (Putnam, 1988). In fact, much of the literature on the signaling of resolve explicitly requires non-unitary state actors, in that a state's ability to signal its resolve depends on the nature of the relationship between a government and its opposition (Schultz, 1998;Levy and Mabe Jr., 2004), or between the government and the public (Fearon, 1994). military, for example, has significant implications on who is "shouldering the soldiering" (Vasquez, 2005;Horowitz and Levendusky, 2011), and analyses of the effects of local casualties in the Vietnam war (Gartner, Segura, and Wilkening, 1997) suggest that the distribution of the conflict's costs also affects attitudes towards the mission in general. In addition to asymmetries in cost between different groups of the public, there also may be asymmetries between the public and its leaders; Chiozza and Goemans (2004) find that whether war is costly for leaders in terms of reduced time in office depends in large part on the regime type, such that leaders are often insulated from the costs of war imposed on their publics.…”

Resolve in International Politics

“…(Sartori, 2005) 7 The accuracy and utility of the unitary actor assumption is frequently contested in IR (Allison, 1971;Keohane and Nye, 1977;Milner, 1997;Moravscik, 1997;Fearon, 1998;Hudson, 2005), but what matters for our purposes is that a divide exists in the rationalist literature between theories of resolve with unitary actors (Morrow, 1989;Morgan, 1990;Slantchev, 2005), and those that incorporate domestic politics, whether in the form of audience costs (Fearon, 1994), agent-principal problems (Downs and Rocke, 1995), selectorate theories (Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson, 1995), or two-level games (Putnam, 1988). In fact, much of the literature on the signaling of resolve explicitly requires non-unitary state actors, in that a state's ability to signal its resolve depends on the nature of the relationship between a government and its opposition (Schultz, 1998;Levy and Mabe Jr., 2004), or between the government and the public (Fearon, 1994).…”