Institutional Opposition, Regime Accountability, and International Conflict

Can international organizations constrain a leader’s behavior during a military crisis? Existing studies have shown that joint membership in international organizations reduces the likelihood of dispute initiation; however, whether institutional opposition can prevent an ongoing conflict from escalating has yet to be investigated. We develop and test a theory of how domestic politics provides a mechanism through which international organizations can reverse the course of a military crisis. The argument leads to the hypothesis that more accountable regimes are less likely to escalate military crises when an international organization opposes their actions. We test the hypothesis with an analysis of territorial disputes from 1946 to 1995. We find that while neither institutional opposition nor the degree of regime accountability independently reduces the tendency for a country to escalate a conflict, the joint effect of the two does

Military Coalitions and Crisis Duration

Forming a military coalition during an international crisis can improve a state's chances of achieving its political goals. We argue that the involvement of a coalition, however, can have unintended adverse effects on crisis outcomes by complicating the bargaining process and extending the duration of crises. This argument suggests that crises involving coalitions should be significantly longer than crises without coalitions. However, other factors that affect crisis duration are also likely to influence coalition formation. Therefore, taking into account the endogeneity of the presence of a coalition is essential to testing our hypothesis. To deal with this inferential challenge we develop a new statistical model that is an extension of instrumental variable estimation in survival analysis. Our analysis of 255 post-World War II interstate crises demonstrates that, even after accounting for the endogeneity of coalition formation, military coalitions tend to extend the duration of crises by approximately 284 days

Essays on Durations of War and Postwar Peace

This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays that investigate the duration of war and the duration of postwar peace. The first essay studies both durations jointly, with a particular focus on the interdependence between the two processes. It demonstrates that membership in security organizations can prolong the durability of peace after conflict, but that the expected longer peace after conflict can also prolong the duration of conflict. The second essay analyzes the duration of war in a greater detail, exploring how third-party actors influence the process. It shows that balanced intervention can shorten the duration until a negotiated settlement is reached between the disputants. The third essay looks at the stability of postwar peace by focusing on the strength of cease-fire agreements. It argues that stronger agreements can maintain longer peace after wars by helping the disputants resolve the bargaining problems. The statistical analysis that corrects for the endogeneity of agreement strength provides support for the argument

Careful Commitments: Democratic States and Alliance Design

Evidence suggests that leaders of democratic states experience high costs from violating past commitments. We argue that because democratic leaders foresee the costs of violation, they are careful to design agreements they expect to have a high probability of fulfilling. This may cause democratic leaders to prefer flexible or limited commitments. We evaluate our argument by analyzing the design of alliance treaties signed by countries of the world between 1815 and 2003. We find that alliances formed among democratic states are more likely to include obligations for future consultation rather than precommitting leaders to active conflict, and defense pacts formed among democratic states are more likely to specify limits to the conditions under which member states must join their partners in conflict. This research suggests that separating screening effects and constraining effects of international agreements is even more difficult than previously believed. States with the greatest likelihood of being constrained are more carefully screened

The shape of things to come? Expanding the inequality and grievance model for civil war forecasts with event data

© The Author(s) 2017. We examine if dynamic information from event data can help improve on a model attempting to forecast civil war using measures reflecting plausible motivation and grievances. Buhaug, Cederman, and Gleditsch predict the risk of civil war using a horizontal inequality model with measures reflecting motivation and relevant group characteristics at the country level. The predictions from their model outperform in an out-of-sample forecast conventional countrylevel models of civil war, emphasizing vertical inequality and country characteristics. However, most grievance measures change little over time. We surmise that a model reflecting potential motivation for conflict can be improved with more dynamic information on mobilization and the behavior of actors. Our conjecture receives some support in the empirical analysis, where we consider both conflict onset and termination over territorial and governmental incompatibilities in the Uppsala/PRIO Armed Conflict Data, and find some evidence that event data can help improve forecasts. Moreover, models with the original grievance measures do better than purely event based models, supporting our claim that both structure and event based components can add value to conflict prediction models. However, the contribution of events to improving predictive power is modest and not entirely consistent, and some types of conflict events seem easier to forecast than others

Replication data for: Decomposing the Relationship Between Contiguity and Militarized Conflict

It is well known that the majority of militarized conflicts and wars have been fought by neighbors. Yet, much remains to be learned about the relationship between shared borders and militarized conflict. This paper decomposes the effects of territorial contiguity into ex ante "observable" and "behavioral" effects. It provides powerful empirical evidence for the claim that although neighbors are more likely to experience conflict because of ex ante differences in observable variables such as economic interdependence, alliance membership, joint democracy, and the balance of military capabilities, most conflicts between neighbors occur because of differences in how neighbors and nonneighbors respond to the observable variables

Colonial legacy and foreign aid: Decomposing the colonial bias

It is well-known that donors give considerably more foreign aid to former colonies than to countries lacking past colonial ties. Unfortunately, we know relatively little about why this is the case. For one, there is almost never a theoretical justification for the inclusion of colonial history in statistical models. For the other, the only explicitly made rationale by Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2009) actually predicts an interpre- tational problem: colonial history not only increases a former colony’s saliency to the donor, but also has left deep marks on recipients’ social and political institutions to- day. Both aspects shape how much aid a donor transfers to the recipient. This leaves ambiguous the meaning of the routinely found positive, sizable, and significant coef- ficient of colonial history on aid flows. We solve the inferential quandary by using a decomposition approach from labor econometrics. Our results show that about 75– 100% of the colony effect on foreign aid stems from the greater saliency that donors give to policy concessions from former colonies

Replication Data for: Military Coalitions and Crisis Duration

Replication data and code for "Military Coalitions and Crisis Duration

Replication data for: Major Powers and Militarized Conflict

This paper attempts to answer the question of why major powers engage in more active foreign policy behaviors than minor powers. It does so by comparing two explanations for the increased conflict propensity of major powers. The first explanation focuses on major powers' observable capabilities, while the second stresses their different behavior. We incorporate both into an ultimatum model of conflict in which a state's cost of conflict consists of both observable and behavioral components. Using data from the period from 1870 to 2001, we empirically illustrate the observable and behavioral differences between major and minor powers. We then utilize a decomposition model to assess the relative significance of the two explanations. The results suggest that most of the difference in conflict propensity between major and minor powers can be attributed to observable differences