Chinese Choices: A Poliheuristic Analysis of Foreign Policy Crises, 1950–1996

This paper uses the Poliheuristic Theory (PH), developed by Mintz, which incorporates both psychological and rational choice components in a synthesis of these previously isolated approaches, to explain decision making in Chinese foreign policy crises. China is an interesting initial case for this project for two reasons. One is its importance as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and rising superpower. The other is China's reputation as a nearly unique "black box"—an especially challenging case—with regard to decision making in foreign policy crises. Taken from the authoritative compilation of the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, the nine cases (with available data) in which China is a crisis actor span the period from 1950 to 1996. A comparative analysis of Chinese decision making in times of crisis is used to test hypotheses derived from the PH. The hypotheses focus on how decisions are anticipated to occur over two stages. Principal expectations are that the non compensatory rule, which places priority on political considerations, will determine viable alternatives at the first stage, while choices more in line with expected value maximization or lexicographic ordering will characterize the second stage.     

Decision Making in Autocratic Regimes: A Poliheuristic Perspective

This paper applies the poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision making to non-democratic states. Poliheuristic theory asserts that state leaders assign primary importance to their political survival; however, the meaning of "the political" varies dramatically from country to country. Furthermore, the types of actors who hold leaders politically accountable also vary between countries. Consequently, leaders often pursue vastly different means of ensuring their political survival. The author uses the common distinction between single-party, military, and personalist autocracies to show that apparently arbitrary differences in autocratic leaders' political concerns actually vary in systematic and potentially predictable ways. Because this argument is generalized to non-democratic states as a whole, it has important implications for the ways in which democratic states craft their policies toward autocracies.     

Explaining and Forecasting Leaders' Decisions: A Poliheuristic Analysis of the Iran Hostage Rescue Decision

In an increasingly dangerous world, forecasting national leaders' decisions during crises is a central concern of policy analysts. But with a wide range of specific military responses available to leaders, pinpointing a likely decision can be difficult. This essay argues that the poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision making is a useful tool for aiding policy analysts in forecasting the decisions of national leaders. The theory's emphasis on a noncompensatory decision dimension facilitates the elimination of many of the possible decision alternatives, reducing uncertainty. Then, surviving alternatives are weighed against additional, nontrivial dimensions, producing a likely decision. As an illustrative case, I examine Carter's decision to implement the hostage rescue mission, demonstrating that Carter ruled out alternatives that failed to satisfy criteria on the noncompensatory decision dimension—reelection. The president's final choice was selected from the remaining alternatives according to its ability to simultaneously maximize net benefits with respect to military and strategic concerns. Following a comparison of the analysis with compensatory models of decision making, I suggest a general forecasting framework rooted in the poliheuristic theory. The theory can be applied to international crises provided that policy analysts obtain information concerning (1) the leader's noncompensatory decision criteria, (2) the set of alternatives that satisfy those criteria, and (3) the expected net benefits of the remaining alternatives on other dimensions (i.e., the military and strategic dimensions).     

Humanitarian Intervention and Communal Civil Wars:

How do policymakers in democratic nations mobilize support for hard-line strategies? Existing answers to this question emphasize the exaggeration of external threats. Yet this overlooks an important dilemma: because democratic citizens expect their leaders to explore peaceful solutions or less aggressive alternatives when foreign dangers are ambiguous, the same conditions that make threat inflation necessary also make it difficult to employ successfully. To mobilize support for hard-line measures when the public wants its leaders to demonstrate restraint, policymakers may therefore attempt to shift blame onto an adversary by using “counterfeit diplomacy.” Specifically, democratic leaders may adopt more cooperative or less coercive options than they believe are necessary, but which they anticipate will fail. This approach can be a risky one, however, because an opponent might accept a nation's demands, accede to its conditions, or offer counterproposals in the hope of diffusing support for more confrontational measures.     

Principles of Persuasion

Drawing on the literatures on negotiation, communication, and persuasion as well as his research on organizational transformation, the author proposes a framework for understanding and enacting the persuasion process in organizations. He lays out key goals of persuasion and ways that skilled leaders can manage the process. The framework focuses attention on the ways leaders shape perceptions of interests and alternatives, as well as how they persuade one-on-one and from a distance. He also highlights the importance of gaining acceptance of tough, unpopular decisions, noting that the way leaders manage the process can have a major impact on outcomes in such situations.     

An Experimental Test of Selectorate Theory

This article uses a laboratory experiment to test one of the main predictions of selectorate theory, that is, that democratic leaders invest more resources in public goods than autocratic leaders. The results of the experiment confirm this prediction and further show citizens are better off on average under democratic institutions than autocratic institutions. Meanwhile, autocratic leaders receive higher payoffs than democratic leaders. Additionally, this article attempts to bring domestic politics into international relations experimentation with a focus on how communication may allow democracies to organize more efficiently for war than autocracies. A game theoretical model shows democracies have the potential to organize optimally and use their citizens’ skills to their full advantage while autocracies do not. The results of the experiment reveal some evidence that democracies organize more efficiently than autocracies, but that this increased efficiency did not produce a higher percentage of conflict wins.     

Prospect Theory and the Cuban Missile Crisis

This article tests the predictions of expected-utility and prospect theories against the most important dimensions of the Cuban missile crisis. Largely through use of the most recently released information on the crisis from the American and Soviet governments, I attempt to ascertain the anticipated benefits, costs, and probabilities of success associated with each of the major policy choices that the key leaders in both superpowers perceived before each of the major decisions throughout the crisis was made. Using this information and the logic of extensive-form game-theoretic models of choice, I construct a baseline for expected-utility theory that helps us to understand when prospect or expected-utility theory provides the better explanation for a particular decision. Prospect theory predicts that when individuals perceive themselves to be experiencing losses at the time they make a decision, and when their probability estimates associated with their principal policy options are in the moderate to high range, they will tend to make excessively risky, non–value maximizing choices. I find that the evidence for the Cuban missile crisis supports this prediction for the most important decisions made by both Khrushchev and Kennedy.     

Leopards Can Change Their Spots: When Leaders Take Out of Character Actions

According to audience cost theories, out of character actions by hawkish leaders are likely when such leaders can use their reputations to deflect criticism. This analysis examines the theory of out of character actions, focusing on shifting international conditions and the use of secrecy to allow leaders both to lead public opinion and avoid unwanted scrutiny. The plausibility of this theory is tested in the paradigmatic case for hawkish policy reversal: Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China in 1971–1972. Examination of four facets of Sino–American relations—the Soviet dimension, conservative opposition to rapprochement, growing domestic support for improved relations, and the secrecy of negotiations—reveal the significance of contextual factors and Nixon’s decisions in explaining improved relations. Leaders can effectively change their type with minimal political repercussions, as long as conditions are favourable and audience costs can be minimised.     

Threats to Leaders’ Political Survival and Pro-Government Militia Formation

It is puzzling why leaders delegate authority to pro-government militias (PGMs) at the expense of professional armed forces. Several state-level explanations, ranging from low state capacity to blame evasion for human rights violations have been proposed for the establishment of PGM linkages. These explanations lack focus on the individuals making decisions to form PGMs: national leaders. It is argued that leaders create linkages with PGMs to facilitate leaders’ political survival in the event of their deposition. Threats to leaders’ survival come from the military, foreign powers, or domestic actors outside the ruling coalition. As costs of leader deposition are low for the state, leaders facing threats from one or all of these sources must invest in protection from outside of the security apparatus. The argument is tested through data on PGM linkage formation and threats to political survival. Results show that leaders under coup threat are more likely to form PGM linkages, while threats from foreign actors make leaders particularly more likely to form linkages with ethnic or religious PGMs. The findings strongly suggest that PGM linkage formation is driven by leader-level desire for political survival, rather than a host of state-level explanations.     

Threats,opportunity, and force: Repression and diversion of domestic pressure, 1948–1982

This paper explores empirically how domestic political and economic challenges affect political leaders’ propensity to respond with the use of force at home and abroad. The foreign policy and world politics literatures are replete with references to leaders’ alleged use of external conflict when confronted with domestic challenges, but rarely consider domestic responses to dissent or the role of interstate threats. Comparative research on repression primarily focuses on linkages between domestic challenges and leaders’ resort to repressive policies, but ignores international alternatives. Neither literature considers the influence of external threats and opportunity structures on resort to use of force and coercion at home and abroad. Alternatively, we contend that foreign conflict and repression are complementary and potentially interchangeable policies that leaders may use to maintain political power in the face of domestic pressure. We hypothesize that the level of domestic political constraints conditions the opportunity and likelihood of selecting either repression or foreign conflict in response to domestic challenges. Since the ability to capitalize on external conflict involvement in all likelihood is not independent of international opportunity structures, we explicitly address differences in the availability of historical interstate animosity. We test our hypotheses on resort to repression and external dispute involvement on a global sample of political leaders for the period 1948–82. Our results indicate that repression and external conflict involvement appear to be largely independent and driven by different challenges: While there is some evidence that domestic conflict increases the likelihood of disputes and that external threat may promote repression, there is little support for the idea of direct substitution in kind since leaders frequently combine both dispute involvement and repression.     

A Rising Power & the Coming of a Great War

This article examines the strategic decisions that led to the struggle between Britain and Germany, exploring how a great war involving Europe's leading powers could come to pass. In 1914, there were no forces beyond the control of decision makers pushing them into the grisly war of attrition that destroyed the social and political fabric of nineteenth-century Europe and ushered in the horrors of the twentieth century. Rather, those horrors resulted from poor policy and strategic choices made by the leaders of the great powers. The war's outbreak underscores history's contingent nature, dramatically showing how errors in judgment on the part of political and military leaders can ruin great countries. One stark lesson of the Great War is that no leader sought as an outcome the conflagration produced by their decisions. Today, China's weapons programs and foreign policy assertiveness conjures up fears that Beijing seeks to establish a new international order, much as Germany's rulers tried to do a hundred years ago with such catastrophic consequences. Shaping the internal debate among China's rulers, so that they judge self-restraint in armaments and strategy as being in their best interest, will test the strategic acumen of American leaders in the years ahead.     

Deeper Commitment to Human Rights Treaties: Signaling and Investment Risk Perception

Why do some leaders make deeper commitments to human rights treaties (HRAs) by consenting to receive extra monitoring of complaints or communications from individual citizens? Extant theory suggests leaders join HRAs for tangible benefits. However, empirical support for this argument is mixed. To address this mismatch, we approach this question from a different angle. We argue that by ratifying HRAs, leaders send a signal that they are reliable partners who value future returns. Accepting optional articles and protocols that increase monitoring of the state’s human rights behavior, without changing the state’s substantive obligations, helps better signal that the regime does not fear instability nor sees the need to resort to the proscribed abuses in the future. This, in turn, serves as an important middle step to recognizing tangible benefits, such as foreign direct investment, by improving investors’ risk perception of ratified countries.     

The Politics of Preferential Trade Liberalization in Authoritarian Countries

While autocracies constitute a third of all signatories of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), very little research has explained why some autocrats join PTAs while others do not. We argue that this variation reflects the leader’s degree of vulnerability to elite-led coups during leadership change–whether a leader enters power legally or extralegally. New extralegal leaders are more vulnerable than new legal leaders, which encourages extralegal leaders to use PTAs to both build support from exporters and pressure disloyal importers. We test our hypotheses using a dyadic data set of 120 autocracies from 1960 to 2014. Our results show that extralegal leaders sign more and deeper PTAs than legal leaders. Moreover, we find that extralegal leaders with a high risk of coups are more likely to form deep PTAs than extralegal leaders with a low risk of coups. In line with our argument, we also provide evidence that extralegal leaders sign trade agreements that are likely to be enforced. Our article has implications for the political economy of trade and for development studies.     

Knowing When to Salute

Due to a strong “Can Do” spirit and a well-engrained, albeit simplistic, notion of civilian control over the military, senior military leaders are disinclined to publicly share their disagreement with emerging national security policy. Many senior officers mistakenly believe that there are no alternatives other than just silently executing, resigning, or retiring when confronted with bad policy formulation. There are, however, options available to senior uniformed leaders when confronted with policy formulation that they, in their professional opinion, believe is flawed. Depending on the degree to which the civilian authorities are receptive to military advice and the magnitude of the threat to national security involved in the policy, senior military leaders can choose among many alternatives to widen the policy debate.     

Coup-Proofing and Military Inefficiencies: An Experiment

Coup-proofing occurs when a leader arranges his military to prevent military leaders from overthrowing him. However, coup-proofing often has the additional effect of lowering the military’s effectiveness in conflict. This article discusses coup-proofing in the context of the Nouri al-Maliki’s regime in Iraq before presenting two formal models. The first model shows when coups are possible, leaders select military commanders with lower ability but higher loyalty. The second model shows that when coups are possible, leaders rotate their military commanders to prevent any one commander from becoming too powerful. The article then presents experimental tests of the models. The results of these laboratory experiments show that leaders are more likely to select loyal commanders or rotate their commanders under the coup treatment relative to groups with no leadership turnover or with leadership turnover according to elections. Thus, when faced with the possibility of a coup, leaders intentionally lower their military effectiveness. This article captures the dynamics behind a fundamental inefficiency introduced into groups when leadership is valuable, delegation is necessary, and powerful subordinates can remove the leader from office.     

Beyond the fallacy of coup-ism: conceptualizing civilian control of the military in emerging democracies

It is consensus in the democratization literature that civilian control of the military is a necessary ingredient for democracy and democratic consolidation. However, there is considerable disagreement on what civilian control of the military exactly entails and there is a lack of solid theoretical arguments for how weak or absent civilian control affects democratic governance. Furthermore, a considerable portion of the research literature is captured by the fallacy of coup-ism, ignoring the many other forms in which military officers can constrain the authority of democratically elected political leaders to make political decisions and get them implemented. This article addresses these lacunae by providing a new conceptual framework for the analysis of civil–military relations in emerging democracies. From democracy theory it derives a definition of civilian control as a certain distribution of decision-making power between civilian leaders and military officers. Based on this definition, the authors develop a five-dimensional concept of civilian control, discuss the effects of weakly institutionalized civilian control on the quality of democracy and address the chances for democratic consolidation.     

From East to West,and back again: Economic reform and Ukrainian Foreign Policy

In this article we argue that when Former Soviet Union (FSU) leaders can obtain Western economic resources, then their foreign policy will more often be independent of Russia. The principal factor we examine with respect to securing Western economic assistance concerns the willingness of leaders to implement economic reform, an enabling condition that allows leaders to adopt policies more independent from Russia. In contrast, if leaders cannot secure Western economic resources because of a lack of reform, they are more likely to adopt a pro‐Russian orientation. In the case of Ukrainian foreign policy throughout the past decade, we contend that there are three distinct phases. These include the initial anti‐Russian policy of the early 1990s that proved unsuccessful because of a lack of reform, the more moderate Russian orientation in the middle of the decade when moderate reform was implemented, and a stronger pro‐Russian orientation by the end of the decade as reform slowed.     

Democracy,Deception, and Entry into War

Realists propose that elected leaders that seek war but face a hesitant public may use deception to build public support for war. Leaders may secretly make provocative diplomatic or military moves to push the adversary to attack first, rallying the public behind a war effort seen as defensive, or publicly exaggerate the threat posed by the adversary. This paper develops a liberal institutionalist critique of this theory, positing that elected leaders are deterred from engaging in such deception because democratic political institutions such as political competition, a professionalized military, and the marketplace of ideas increase the likelihood that such moves will be exposed, and once exposed, deceptive politicians will suffer domestic political punishment. The paper examines the thesis that Franklin Roosevelt sought to provoke Germany and Japan to war in 1941, finding little support. It also finds that in general autocratic leaders are more likely than elected leaders to deceive.     

Coup Risk,Counterbalancing, and International Conflict

Contrary to the literature on rallies-around-the-flag, this article argues that, in some circumstances, leaders may use international conflict to promote domestic divisiveness. More specifically, the threat of a military coup generally prompts leaders to divide their militaries (a practice known as counterbalancing), and even to engage in international conflict to ensure that various branches of their own armed forces remain distrustful of one another. Two empirical tests of these claims are offered: a large-N statistical analysis that examines whether coup risk leads to counterbalancing, and whether counterbalanced nations engage in more low-level military conflict (controlling for other causes of conflict); and a case study of Georgia shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Both empirical studies support the arguments advanced by the authors.

     

Militarized Interstate Disputes and United States Uses of Force

Research on questions such as whether national leaders use force in the international arena to divert attention from problems at home depends on a valid and reliable list of the incidents in which various states have used military force. In the case of the United States, several data sets have been used for this purpose. This research note compares two widely used data sets, the militarized interstate disputes (MID) data, which cover disputes involving all states between 1816 and 1992, and the data originally compiled by Stephen Kaplan and Barry Blechman, which cover only the United States since World War II. This comparison indicates that, in spite of its usefulness for other conflict research, the MID data are not appropriate for analyses of U.S. decisions to use force, including tests of the diversionary hypothesis. The MID data set excludes several categories of incidents relevant to major theoretical arguments about the use of force and includes many irrelevant incidents. These problems are likely to apply to similar analyses of other states as well. The Blechman and Kaplan data set also excludes some relevant events, but its omissions are less consequential. We offer a revised list of United States uses of force between 1870 and 1995.