The premise of this dissertation is straight-forward – the U.S., as hegemon, acts
unilaterally given the power disparity between it and the rest of the world. In solving the
puzzle of why presidents make the “wrong” decision to act alone, I organize
international conflict literature along traditional lines – international and domestic
explanations – and use Gilpin’s (1981) hegemonic stability theory to test a theory of
unilateral use of force decision making. In order to overcome a lack of scientific study
on unilateralism, I devise a definition and coding rules for unilateral use of force,
develop a sequential model of presidential use of force decision making, and construct a
new, alternative measure of military power, a Composite Indicator of Military
Revolutions (CIMR). I then use three methods – a statistical test with a heckman probit
model, an experiment, and case studies – to test U.S. crisis behavior since 1937. I find
that presidents are realists and make an expected utility calculation to act unilaterally or
multilaterally after their decision to use force. The unilateral decision, in particular,
positively correlates with a wide military gap vis-à-vis an opponent, an opponent located
in the Western hemisphere, and a national security threat.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1965 |
| Date | 02 June 2009 |
| Creators | Podliska, Bradley Florian |
| Contributors | Sprecher, Christopher M. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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