Territorial Issues, Audience Costs, and the Democratic Peace: The Importance of Issue Salience

Democratic leaders are more prone to domestic sanction following defeats, and these audience costs allow democracies to signal their intentions during public disputes. Empirical tests strongly support this relationship; however, recent criticisms have questioned whether the causal mechanisms of audience costs are responsible for these findings. We provide a unified rationale for why both arguments are correct: democracies rarely contend over territorial issues, a consistently salient and contentious issue. Without these issues, leaders are unable to generate audience costs but are able to choose easy conflicts. Our reexaminations of threat-based and reciprocation-based studies support this argument. We also present tests of within-dispute behavior using MID incident data, which confirms that the salience of territory matters more than regime type when predicting militarized behavior. Any regime differences suggest a disadvantage for democratic challengers over territorial issues, and any peace between democracies results from the dearth of salient issues involving these regimes

Modeling Structural Selection in Disaggregated Event Data

Growing availability of disaggregated data, such as data on activity of subnational groups (e.g. protest campaigns, insurgents, terrorist groups, political parties or movements), has raised new types of theoretical and statistical challenges. In particular, rather than random, the observability and availability of disaggregated data are often a function of specific structural processes—an issue we refer to as structural selection. For example, domestic terrorist attacks or protester violence are conditional on the formation of domestic terrorist groups or protester movements in the first place. As a result, analytical inferences derived from subnational or other types of disaggregated data may suffer from structural selection bias, which is a type of sample selection bias. We propose a simple and elegant statistical approach to ameliorate such bias and demonstrate the advantages of this approach using a Monte Carlo example. We further illustrate the importance of accounting for structural processes by replicating three prominent empirical studies of government–opposition behavior and find that structural selection affects many of the inferences drawn from the observable data

Replication data for: The Territorial Peace, Chapter 5: Territorial Threats, Armies, and State Repression

This data serves as replication data for Chapter 7 of The Territorial Peace. Full citation: Gibler, Douglas M. 2012. The Territorial Peace: Borders, State Development, and International Conflict, Chapter 7. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 69-88

Replication data for: The Territorial Peace, Chapter 4: Territorial Threats and Political Behavior

This data serves as replication data for Chapter 4 of The Territorial Peace. Full citation: Gibler, Douglas M. 2012. The Territorial Peace: Borders, State Development, and International Conflict, Chapter 4. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 49-68

Replication data for: The Territorial Peace, Chapter 6: Territorial Threats and Domestic Institutions

This data serves as replication data for Chapter 6 of The Territorial Peace. Full citation: Gibler, Douglas M. 2012. The Territorial Peace: Borders, State Development, and International Conflict, Chapter 6. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 89-108

Replication data for: The Territorial Peace, Chapter 8: Territorial Peace and Negotiated Compromises

This data serves as replication data for Chapter 4 of The Territorial Peace. Full citation: Gibler, Douglas M. 2012. The Territorial Peace: Borders, State Development, and International Conflict, Chapter 8. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 135-148

Replication data for: Outside-In: The Effects of External Threat on State Centralization. Journal of Conflict Resolution August 2010 vol. 54 no. 4 519-542

Although centralization is thought to be a common response to external threats to the state, few theories develop the mechanisms by which domestic centralization occurs. Fewer still consistently demonstrate that centralization is indeed a common response to external threats in all states. This article therefore develops a comprehensive theory of domestic change in the shadow of external threat. Salient threats to the state create strong incentives for opposition forces to support the leader in power, even in non-democracies. The leadership then uses these favorable domestic political climates to decrease the number of institutional veto points that can stop future leader-driven policy changes. Collectively, this two-part theory provides a unified model of domestic behavioral change (also known as rally effects) and institutional centralization (defined by a declining number of veto players). In addition, by defining salient threats as challenges to homeland territory, the article provides some of the first domestic-level evidence that territorial disputes are fundamentally different from other types of international conflicts