This dissertation explores the interactive effects of domestic audience costs and
strategic interests on state behavior in international crises. I argue that the magnitude of a
leaderâÂÂs audience costs is influenced by the level of strategic interests, which leads to
several predictions of crisis behavior in terms of (1) decisions to issue threats, including
bluffs, (2) the credibility of these threats and the willingness of opponents to resist, and
(3) crisis outcomes, including war. In the theoretical chapters, a formal model of crisis
bargaining is stylized under conditions of complete and incomplete information. Based
on this model, several novel predictions are derived regarding crisis behavior. These
predictions are quantitatively tested through a series of monadic and dyadic probit and
multinomial logit models using a dataset of deterrence crises for the period 1895-1985.
The results lend strong validity to the approach advanced here that does not consider
endogenous and exogenous factors in isolation, but rather models their interplay to
predict the dynamics of crisis behavior.
With respect to dispute initiation, the results show that strategic interests have a
much stronger influence on authoritarian leadersâ willingness to initiate disputes than they do for democracies. Moreover, the formal stylization and empirical analyses show
that democracies can and do bluff, which is in contrast to the conventional expectations
from audience cost research. Relatedly, this study specifies if and when democratic
threats are credible and how the interplay between variable domestic costs and strategic
interests can lead to deterrence success, failure, or war. While there is little difference
between the credibility of democratic and authoritarian threats at the lower level of
interests, democratic threats become more credible and less likely to be resisted as the
interests at stake increase. As for crisis outcomes, among others, war is more likely
between opponents with vital interests involved; yet even here, the predictions are not
straightforward but rather the probability of war is increasing at a differential rate for
democratic and authoritarian initiators. Whereas the formal models in this study provide
the logical rationale for these and other expectations, the quantitative findings
demonstrate their empirical validity as well.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4866 |
| Date | 25 April 2007 |
| Creators | Clare, Joseph Daniel |
| Contributors | Danilovic, Vesna, Whitten, Guy D |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | 1727583 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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