This dissertation examines three enduring questions for the study of conflict. First, I consider how domestic institutions affect threat credibility, arguing that audiences can either help or hinder a leader during bargaining. Second, I show that the success of third party guarantees of civil war treaties is conditional on the guarantor's credibility. Finally, I argue that the willingness of a leader to nurture a reputation depends on their time horizons, and that long time horizons can allow a leader to deter conflict. The first essay considers how leaders communicate in a crisis. Scholars frequently use audience costs to explain how accountable leaders communicate, but these have received mixed empirical support. I argue this apparent disconnect between theory and evidence is due to simplistic assumptions about how audiences use their sanctioning power. I contend that supporters balance concerns over consistency and policy outcomes. As such, accountable leaders' ability to credibly communicate depends on their supporters' policy preferences. I apply this insight using casualty sensitivity as a conditioning policy preference. I expect, and find, that audiences only help a leader commit to fight when fighting is low cost, and actually prevent commitment when fighting is high cost. Audiences have countervailing effects on credibility due to their preferences for leaders who are both consistent and avoid costly conflict. The second essay addresses a puzzle regarding outside enforcement of civil war peace agreements. Instead of fighting, domestic belligerents could have agreed to outside support for a peaceful resolution to their underlying dispute, avoiding war and its costs. Existing theory cannot explain why third parties can end but not prevent conflict. I argue that war breaks out if third parties cannot credibly promise to enforce a peacefully negotiated agreement. Subsequent military intervention serves as a sunk cost signal of the third party's resolve to enforce an agreement, facilitating peace. I test this theory using a new dataset of treaty terms and duration for civil wars that began between 1944 and 1997. Consistent with the theory, guarantees only prolong the post-war peace when the guarantor intervened in the conflict. Guarantees that were not associated with an intervention do not improve the prospects for peace. In the final essay I argue that reputation formation is a type of investment. Leaders pay the costs of fighting in the present, in return for future gains in the form of deterrence. The investment decision depends on whether leaders survive in office to reap the future benefits of their reputation. I formally show that, while long time horizons increase a leader's willingness to fight, this alone does not make reputation formation more likely. As reputations form through the strategic decision to go to war, the chance to form a reputation is determined by the opponent's bargaining strategy. Opponents can "pay'' a leader to forgo the chance to earn a reputation through fighting by making greater concessions. However, an opponent might instead offer small concessions that risk war to learn a leader's resolve. Knowing a leader's resolve gives the opponent an advantage should they bargain in the future. As a result, when both a leader and their opponent have long time horizons, they forgo bargaining concessions that would be acceptable without reputation concerns, leading to war. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / July 13, 2018. / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark A. Souva, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jonathan Grant, University Representative; William D. Berry, Committee Member; Robert J. Carroll, Committee Member.

Advances in computing and machine learning have enabled researchers to use many different tools to learn from data. This dissertation is devoted to using predictive modeling to learn from existing data in international conflict studies with the aim of offering new measures and insights for applied researchers in international relations. In the first chapter, I explore the expected cost of war, which is a foundational concept in the study of international conflict. However, the field currently lacks a measure of the expected costs of war, and thereby any measure of the bargaining range. I develop a proxy for the expected costs of war by focusing on one aspect of war costs - battle deaths. I train a variety of machine learning algorithms on battle deaths for all countries participating in fatal military disputes and interstate wars between 1816-2007 in order to maximize out of sample predictive performance. The best performing model (random forest) improves performance over that of a null model by 25% and a linear model with all predictors by 9%. I apply the random forest to all interstate dyads in the Correlates of War dataverse from 1816-2007 in order to produce an estimate of the expected costs of war for all existing country pairs in the international system. The resulting measure, which I refer to as Dispute Casualty Expectations (DiCE), can be used to fully explore the implications of the bargaining model of war, as well as allow applied researchers to develop and test new theories in the study of international relations. In the second chapter, I use these expected costs of war to explore another foundational concept in international relations: foreign threats. Researchers commonly theorize about the impact of a state's international security environment - that is the extent to which a state is threatened by other states - yet the field currently lacks a measure which can effectively proxy for expectations of conflict. In order to create a new measure of threat, I train a number of machine learning algorithms on fatal militarized disputes over the years 1870-2001. I aggregate the predictions from these models at the country level to create a new measure of international conflict expectations for all states. In so doing, I am able to revisit the causes of international conflict via a data-driven approach, as well as provide a new measure of foreign threat for applied researchers. Finally, in the third chapter, I make use of this new measure to assess how international security affects a state's human rights behavior. International relations scholars have increasingly relied on domestic institutions to explain international conflict but less work has focused on reversing the arrow. To this point, political violence scholars have principally relied on domestic factors to explain the conditions under which leaders use coercive means to maintain power. But, political leaders do not exist in a vacuum; their decision making is informed by international and domestic factors. Therefore, I rely on both a predictive and inferential approach to assess whether foreign threats matter for state repression. The measure of foreign threats does emerge as an important variable in predicting state repression, which suggests that there is a meaningful relationship between international security and human rights behavior. Additionally, I find some (limited) evidence that the measure is negatively related to human rights behavior: states with high levels of foreign threat are associated with higher levels of state repression. But this finding is sensitive to model specification and merits further inspection. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2018. / November 16, 2018. / International conflict, Machine learning, Predictive modeling / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Souva, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jonathan Grant, University Representative; Robert J. Carroll, Committee Member; Sean Ehrlich, Committee Member.

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This dissertation examines three enduring questions for the study of conflict. First, I consider how domestic institutions affect threat credibility, arguing that audiences can either help or hinder a leader during bargaining. Second, I show that the success of third party guarantees of civil war treaties is conditional on the guarantor's credibility. Finally, I argue that the willingness of a leader to nurture a reputation depends on their time horizons, and that long time horizons can allow a leader to deter conflict. The first essay considers how leaders communicate in a crisis. Scholars frequently use audience costs to explain how accountable leaders communicate, but these have received mixed empirical support. I argue this apparent disconnect between theory and evidence is due to simplistic assumptions about how audiences use their sanctioning power. I contend that supporters balance concerns over consistency and policy outcomes. As such, accountable leaders' ability to credibly communicate depends on their supporters' policy preferences. I apply this insight using casualty sensitivity as a conditioning policy preference. I expect, and find, that audiences only help a leader commit to fight when fighting is low cost, and actually prevent commitment when fighting is high cost. Audiences have countervailing effects on credibility due to their preferences for leaders who are both consistent and avoid costly conflict. The second essay addresses a puzzle regarding outside enforcement of civil war peace agreements. Instead of fighting, domestic belligerents could have agreed to outside support for a peaceful resolution to their underlying dispute, avoiding war and its costs. Existing theory cannot explain why third parties can end but not prevent conflict. I argue that war breaks out if third parties cannot credibly promise to enforce a peacefully negotiated agreement. Subsequent military intervention serves as a sunk cost signal of the third party's resolve to enforce an agreement, facilitating peace. I test this theory using a new dataset of treaty terms and duration for civil wars that began between 1944 and 1997. Consistent with the theory, guarantees only prolong the post-war peace when the guarantor intervened in the conflict. Guarantees that were not associated with an intervention do not improve the prospects for peace. In the final essay I argue that reputation formation is a type of investment. Leaders pay the costs of fighting in the present, in return for future gains in the form of deterrence. The investment decision depends on whether leaders survive in office to reap the future benefits of their reputation. I formally show that, while long time horizons increase a leader's willingness to fight, this alone does not make reputation formation more likely. As reputations form through the strategic decision to go to war, the chance to form a reputation is determined by the opponent's bargaining strategy. Opponents can "pay'' a leader to forgo the chance to earn a reputation through fighting by making greater concessions. However, an opponent might instead offer small concessions that risk war to learn a leader's resolve. Knowing a leader's resolve gives the opponent an advantage should they bargain in the future. As a result, when both a leader and their opponent have long time horizons, they forgo bargaining concessions that would be acceptable without reputation concerns, leading to war. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2018. / July 13, 2018. / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark A. Souva, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jonathan Grant, University Representative; William D. Berry, Committee Member; Robert J. Carroll, Committee Member.

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