Presidential Risk Behavior in Foreign Policy

Boettcher, William A.

doi:10.1057/9781403979407

Cited by 21 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…LTA endeavors to identify the latent content of leaders’ rhetoric through analysis of their verbal constructs, imagery, and contextualization (Keller ). The LTA system has been utilized to generate various measures of leadership traits by a great deal of scholarship in the psychology of foreign policy (e.g., Hermann and Hermann ; Boettcher ; Keller ; Foster ; Shannon and Keller ; Foster and Keller 2010; 2013; Keller and Foster ) and is regarded as valid (in relation to other psychological assessment tools), internally reliable, and internally consistent (Hermann ; ; ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don't Tread on Me: Constraint‐Challenging Presidents and Strategic Conflict Avoidance

Keller¹,

Foster²

2016

Pres Stud Q

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Recent research demonstrates that U.S. presidents’ psychological predispositions influence the frequency with which they choose diversionary foreign policy strategies. The purpose of this article is to extend the expectations of this “first‐image” theory of diversion to the strategic behavior of potential diversionary targets. We posit that U.S. presidents whose spontaneous public rhetoric indicates a willingness to challenge pacifying constraints should be viewed by potential enemies as more likely to engage in diversionary conflict. Building upon the “strategic conflict avoidance” perspective, we expect that when such presidents encounter diversionary incentives, other states will increase cooperation toward and avoid initiation of military disputes against the United States. Time‐series analyses of behavior toward the United States for the period 1953–2000 largely bear out this expectation, as interstate rivals increase cooperation toward, and all states decrease militarized incident initiation against, the United States when economic misery is high and presidents whose rhetoric has revealed a proclivity for challenging constraints are in office.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don't Tread on Me: Constraint‐Challenging Presidents and Strategic Conflict Avoidance

Keller¹,

Foster²

2016

Pres Stud Q

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“…In-group bias is constructed using the Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA) system (Hermann, 1987), which relies upon content analysis of leaders' verbal patterns. Hermann and Hermann, 1989;Boettcher, 2005;Keller, 2005;Dyson, 2007;Shannon and Keller, 2007;Keller and Foster, 2009), and is regarded as both broadly valid in regard to other psychological assessment tools (Hermann, 1984(Hermann, , 1988 and internally reliable and consistent (Hermann, 1987). The LTA system has been used to produce several measures of leadership psychology and managerial style which have been employed by numerous psychological studies of foreign policy (e.g.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rallies and the “First Image”

Foster

Keller

2010

Conflict Management and Peace Science

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Despite considerable scholarship regarding the degree to which the international use of force generates popular rallies, no work has addressed the possibility that leaders' managerial philosophies and psychological predispositions systematically influence their assessments of whether or not diversion "works". In this article, we test hypotheses-conceived through direct reference to work in political psychology-which suggest that the degree to which presidents are innately concerned with the maintenance of the American "in-group" is an important predictor of whether they scapegoat international "out-groups" and, by extension, whether they choose strategies of diversionary foreign conflict or more cordial foreign engagement when facing domestic problems. Several analyses of American foreign policy behavior for the period 1953-2000 produce findings that clearly are at odds with these hypotheses, in that in-group biased presidents are actually less likely to use force and more likely to attend superpower summits when faced with a poor economy. We believe that these unexpected findings have serious implications for both the psychological study of international conflict and the plausibility of the "traditional" diversionary hypothesis.Exactly how does the international use of force help leaders who face domestic political problems? According to several classical and contemporary international relations theorists, the answer to this question lies in the effects of international conflict involvement on group dynamics. In particular, the "traditional" diversionary hypothesis, which derives from socio-psychological treatises on group cohesion (Simmel, 1955;Coser, 1956), posits that conflicts with out-group rivals are likely to generate bursts of patriotic fervor. These "rallies", by effacing in-group disunity, subsequently redirect popular attention away from domestic problems. As such, leaders are alleged to have regular incentives to use force abroad when domestic

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“…The expectation has been that leaders who are risk‐acceptant are more willing to use force. Riskier choices are associated with less predictable outcomes, a potential for both extremely negative and extremely positive consequences, and high uncertainty in estimating outcomes (Taliaferro ; Boettcher ). While it is possible to hypothesize situations where the use of force is not the most risky action a decision maker can choose, there are several reasons that make it the most valid measure for a large‐N study of risk‐taking .…”

Section: Risk Propensity and Foreign Policy Decision Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… For more on equating military intervention with risk‐acceptant behavior, see Vertzberger (1998). Examples of scholarship that examine risk‐taking as military intervention include Bueno de Mesquita (), Morrow (), Huth, Gelpi and Bennett (), Tessman and Chan (), Boettcher (), and Horowitz, McDermott, and Stam (2005). …”

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confidence: 99%

Presidential Personality: Not Just a Nuisance

Gallagher

Allen

2013

Foreign Policy Anal

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Few systematic studies of US uses of force treat the inherent attributes of presidents as the key causal factors; nonetheless, the fact that individual leaders matter is evident to the public, the media, and foreign policymakers in other countries. This study advances the development of First Image explanations of conflict by empirically investigating the relationship between presidential personality and the variation surrounding foreign policy decision making. The importance of this type of variance has been understudied in international relations, and the consistency of leaders' policy decisions has important strategic implications for interstate conflict. Relying on Big Five measures of US presidents' personality traits, we find that leaders who have a high tendency toward Excitement Seeking are more likely to use force to carry out their foreign policy objectives, while those who are more Open to Action exhibit a greater variance around their foreign policy decision making. In sum, the personality traits of individual leaders influence not only the choices they make, but the consistency of their choices, which has important consequences for US foreign policy.

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Presidential Risk Behavior in Foreign Policy

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Don't Tread on Me: Constraint‐Challenging Presidents and Strategic Conflict Avoidance

Don't Tread on Me: Constraint‐Challenging Presidents and Strategic Conflict Avoidance

Rallies and the “First Image”

Presidential Personality: Not Just a Nuisance

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