Opportunity, Willingness, and the Diffusion of War

Using borders and alliances as indicators of opportunity and willingness, respectively, we test the relationship between the sea and the diffusion of war during the 1816-1965 period. The impact of borders and alliances, individually and in combination, on the growth of ongoing war through infectious diffusion is shown through the comparison of baseline cases to cases where states at peace were exposed to various treatments comprised of warring border nations or warring alliance partners. The findings indicate that the probability of war diffusion is substantially increased as opportunities and willingness increase, particularly when such geographic and political factors are combined. The applicability of the opportunity and willingness framework to the study of war and diffusion is expanded and confirmed

Trigger-happy? Military regimes and the timing of conflict

The proclivity of military regimes and their leaders for more frequent involvement in international conflict than other autocracies has been shown in several studies. The question raised here is not whether they participate in more conflicts and disputes, but rather whether after the leaders of military regimes enter office they initiate these acts more quickly than the leaders of other types of autocracies. Drawing on three authoritarian regime typologies and examining the time to the initiation of any dispute and the initiation of violent disputes, our results show that in comparison to other authoritarian leaders a subset of military leaders is distinctly trigger-happy

Selection institutions and war aims

We explore how the sizes of the winning coalition and selectorate influence the war aims of states. Leaders who answer to a small winning coalition are more likely to seek territorial gain as a way to increase state resources. Nonterritorial war aims produce a commitment problem in that after the war the defeated state may not comply with the victor's demands. States with large winning coalitions are more willing to continue the war to remove the enemy leader as a solution to this commitment problem. We test our hypotheses against the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set, and we find some support for our argument.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47901/1/10101_2005_Article_108.pd