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

Peaceful Neighborhoods and Democratic Differences

Democracies are thought to behave differently than other states when cooperating in alliances, organizations, trade, and a host of other international institutions. We contend, however, that these democratic differences largely depend upon geopolitical environments that make cooperation possible. Though studies have demonstrated endogeneity between democracy and peace, few analyze the effects of this joint relationship on democratic differences in cooperative foreign policy behavior. We address this using the alliance literature as an example. We argue that alliances are used to either deter aggression or serve as conduits to advance other goals. Alliances that deter occur in dangerous environments, while those that serve other purposes cluster in peaceful environments. We find that alliances used to deter are particularly unreliable “scraps of paper”, and that the general reliability of alliances is concentrated among those existing in already-peaceful environments, which are unlikely to be invoked. By jointly modeling regime type and political environment using data on alliance termination from 1920–2001, we show that alliance reliability is a function of the latter rather than the former. Our argument has important ramifications for a host of literatures focused on regime type, as well as current debates over the effectiveness of democratic deterrence

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: United States Economic Aid and Repression: The Opportunity Cost Argument. The Journal of Politics / Volume 70 / Issue 02 / April 2008, pp 513-526

The United States explicitly ties its foreign economic aid to respect for human rights by recipient countries. The United States is also the world's largest aid donor. It is therefore surprising that no link has been established between U.S. economic aid and greater respect for human rights abroad. I change this by arguing that U.S. aid policies do affect human rights records but in an indirect way. Repressive leaders foregoing substantial amounts of U.S. aid because of their human rights policies are also the leaders most likely to increase their respect for human rights in the future. I calculate the opportunity costs of human rights abuse, in part, by estimating a two-stage model with selection that simultaneously assesses the decision to grant aid and the amount of aid disbursed to each country. By modeling the process this way, I am able to demonstrate that human rights concerns affect only the decision to grant aid; need determines the amount of aid given after recipients are selected. I then use predicted aid amounts from the selection model to determine the likelihood and amount of aid for each country-year that was not selected to receive aid. These estimated opportunity costs correlate strongly with increases in human rights for “partly free” states

Replication data for: The Costs of Reneging Reputation and Alliance Formation. Journal of Conflict Resolution June 2008 vol. 52 no. 3 426-454

Reputations are supposed to matter. Decision makers consistently refer to reputations for resolve, and international relations theories confirm the value of being able to credibly signal intentions during times of crisis. However, empirical support for the effects of reputation has been lacking. Problems of strategic selection have hampered previous quantitative tests, and the qualitative literature provides scant support for the concept in individual crises. In this article, the author shifts the focus from crisis behavior to alliance commitments and examines the effects that opportunities to uphold previous commitments have on future alliance commitments and conflicts. The results demonstrate that alliance reputations do affect both alliance formation and dispute behavior

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