Testing the Biden Hypotheses: Leader Tenure, Age, and International Conflict

Abstract

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. predicted that Barack Obama would face an international challenge in his early term by foreign enemies who want to test a young leader’s resolve as a chief executive just like John F. Kennedy did in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. We test this argument using the directed‐leader‐dyad‐period data for both world leaders and the US presidents between 1875 and 2001. We find that old leaders are more likely to be a target of militarized disputes, and even more so during the early term as opposed to Biden’s prediction. The impact of tenure on the likelihood of being targeted largely depends on age. We also find that old Republican US presidents are especially vulnerable to foreign challenges early in their term.

Resolve in International Politics

“…Indeed, Wolford (2007) presents a formal model in which successors are more likely to be subject to (and initiate) military challenges than incumbents, whose reputations for resolve are already cemented. The empirical record, however, is less clear: Gelpi and Grieco (2001) find that leaders are less likely to be targeted for military crises the longer they spend in office, but Bak and Palmer (2010) finds that the effect of leadership tenure on the probability of military challenges is conditional on leaders' age -young leaders are actually less likely to be subjected to a challenge early on in their term, contrary to the leader-level reputation arguments (although they do not test whether leaders early on in their tenure are more likely to initiate military challenges themselves). Similarly, Horowitz, McDermott, and Stam (2005) find that older leaders are more likely to initiate military disputes.…”

“…There is an obvious levels-of-analysis issue here with regard to dispositional measures (are these the dispositions of individual leaders or the public at large? ), such that I investigate some of these dispositions for both publics in general, and at the leader level, as part of growing interest in the study of individual leaders in international politics (Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson, 1995;Byman and Pollack, 2001;Stanley, 2009;Bak and Palmer, 2010;Chiozza and Goemans, 2011;Saunders, 2011;Jervis, 2013), especially by political psychologists (Feldman and Valenty, 2001;Hermann et al, 2001;Dyson, 2007;Renshon, 2008Renshon, , 2009.…”

Strategic gerontocracy: why nondemocratic systems produce older leaders

“…First, in democracies, leaders also need extensive social ties to be elected. Second, as recent evidence shows, aging leaders are not necessarily wiser: they produce less economic growth (Jong-A-Pin and Mierau 2011) and are involved more often in interstate wars (Horowitz et al 2005;Potter 2007; Bak and Palmer 2010).…”

“…While leaders are considered to be one of the main units of analysis in some fields of political science, such as political economy and international relations, current research focuses almost exclusively on the impact of leaders' individual traits on their own behaviors in office, including studies centered on leaders' ages (Horowitz et al 2005;Potter 2007;Bak and Palmer 2010;Walter and Scheibe 2013). The argument presented herein departs from prior research on age and leadership to the extent that it investigates the impact of leaders' ages on the expectations and strategic behavior of the people ruled by those leaders, rather than on the leaders' own behaviors.…”

“…Relatedly, a growing body of work examines how the social and professional backgrounds of decision makers in the economic realm-like, for example, working-class background, training in economics, or prior experience in the business sector-influences their policy performances (Dreher et al 2009;Neumayer 2014, 2016;Joachimsen and Thomasius 2014). Another field in which leaders have gained attention is in the realm of international relations (IR), with recent studies showing that leaders' socio-demographic characteristics and professional backgrounds exert a nonnegligible influence on their foreign policy choices: leaders who are more risk-averse (Gallagher and Allen 2014) and more experienced (Potter 2007;Bak and Palmer 2010;Calin and Prins 2015) are less likely to get involved in interstate disputes. With regard to leaders' backgrounds, ample evidence now exists that prior experience in the military influences the way decision makers think about national security affairs (Gelpi and Feaver 2004;Horowitz and Stam 2014;Stadelmann et al 2015).…”