The answer to all your questions, after the jump…

Two important things happen when new leaders take office. First, they’re only rarely bound by their predecessor’s policies, particularly when it comes to ultimate decisions over war and peace. Second, they might differ from their predecessors in their resolve, or their willingness to use force. Taken together, these two factors mean that, when new national leaders take office, their opponents will be largely uncertain over their resolve, because a predecessor’s reputation may not be all that informative about a new incumbent’s preferences. Is the new leader a dove, or is she a hawk? Tragically, her opponents don’t know, and there’s at least one serious obstacle between them and the answer: this “untested” new leader has every incentive to claim that she’s resolute, that she’s tough, that she’s willing to risk war to safeguard her country’s interests, even and especially if she isn’t all that resolute.

Put differently, she’s got private information over her resolve (she’s either hawkish or dovish, say), and incentives to lie about it: a potentially dangerous combination. How does one demonstrate resolve? Well, pure talk—which is cheap—won’t do, because a dove would say the same thing as a hawk if she’d be believed, which undermines her opponent’s incentives to believe what she says. So she’s got to take costly actions to demonstrate resolve, backing up her verbal declarations of strength with actions that entail either real costs (financial or political) or increase the risks of war. Otherwise, her opponents may believe her weak—which doesn’t exactly help in things like crisis bargaining. So when a new leader takes office, there are strong reputational incentives to demonstrate resolve, which might ensure that her country’s opponents don’t make unacceptable demands in the future.

This is all well and good, of course: a reputation for resolve is hardly a bad thing to carry around. However, a new leader’s opponents also have an interest in testing her, ratcheting up tensions on their own, hoping to force her to reveal either hawkishness or dovishness in response. You’d like to get as much as you can out of your opponent, after all, but if you can do it without a war, so much the better. As a result, knowledge over a new leader’s resolve is actually quite valuable—the sooner you know it, the more easily you can calibrate tomorrow’s demands to maximize concessions at a lower risk of war—but the only way to uncover an opponent’s true resolve is, again, forcing her to respond with costly or risky actions, because (as we saw above) she’s got no incentive to just tell you honestly that she’s a dove.

What does this mean? Well, both sides in this interaction—the new leader and her opponent—have every incentive to ratchet up tensions; in a very real sense, they’re trapped by their own incentives into taking actions that increase the risk of war. New leaders want to prove their mettle, and their opponents want to test them, and sometimes the only way to do so is to get closer and closer to the brink—yet neither side finds it in its interest to change strategies. Why forego the chance to prove your resolve and prevent needless challenges in the future? Why forego the chance to exploit dovish new incumbents when challenging them might reveal that they’re ripe for it? It’s a difficult trap to escape from.

What does this mean for tensions on the peninsula? Let’s note first that both North and South Korea have relatively new incumbents, with Park Geun-hye in particular having just been inaugurated in February. Kim Jong Un has been involved in occasional bursts of bellicosity since taking office, perhaps to demonstrate his own resolve, but the most recent escalation of tensions has coincided with the emergence of new South Korean leadership, precisely when we’d think the North would like to poke and prod their neighbor to the South to see whether they’ve got a hawk or a dove on their hands. So we’ve got two new leaders with dual incentives to ratchet up tensions on the peninsula.

In fact, recent North Korean provocations haven’t all been mere talk: we’ve also seen increased levels of military readiness, including a substantial increase in fighter patrols, which entail both direct and opportunity costs (since the military and its personnel also play a large role in the North Korean economy), the conduct of and preparations for additional nuclear tests (provoking tighter international sanctions and the disapprobation of China), the severing of a high-level military hotline (one of the few direct lines of communication between erstwhile enemies), and—most recently—threats to shut down an industrial park jointly operated with the South that provides one of North Korea’s few sources of cold, hard cash. In other words, they’re upping the ante, perhaps hoping to see what the South (and its American ally) will do in response—part which that has been the publicly announced inclusion of B-2 stealth bombers in recent joint US-ROK military exercises, an expensive and rare step in the context of otherwise routine joint exercises.

What does all this mean? First, it need not portend war, even if raising tensions really does say something more meaningful than mere cheap talk; both sides merely want to demonstrate how willing they are to countenance it, not actually get into a scrape. In fact, costly signaling and reputation-building are designed to produce more favorable peaceful outcomes. However, actions like this often come with a price tag of some elevated (albeit from a very low baseline) risk of conflict. Once each side learns a sufficient amount about the other, though, we should expect to see tensions winding down—barring, of course, any other shocks to the system. (How’s that for academic equivocation?)

Second, and more importantly, this is not a story about North Korea alone; what we’re seeing right now is the manifestation of an underlying strategic story about domestic politics, leadership change, and reputation-building that occurs any time that leadership turns over in states with enemies, which raises the risk of new international crises and, as recent research suggests, arms races as well. I think we’d do well not to lose sight of this in both explaining the current tensions on the Korean Peninsula and trying to predict their consequences.

I’ve presented this paper around quite a bit (see here and here)—and since it’s under review, I’m not going to put it up here—but the essential point is that coalition partners—specifically, the desire to ensure their cooperation—can have a profound impact on bargaining, signals, and the probability of war. Against strong targets, the desire to keep a skittish partner in the fold discourages a coalition leader from bluffing; so, although its partner “waters down” the threat, it helps discourage war. Against weak targets, preserving military cooperation discourages a coalition leader from signaling its resolve; instead, it acts like an irresolute state, tempting the coalition’s target to risk war. As it happens, this pattern shows up pretty strongly in the data (which, trust me, was no small relief), and while the empirics aren’t in the version currently under review, I’m sure they’ll show up somewhere eventually…

And it appears that Buffalo’s going to be a bit, ah, chilly:

Damn it.

First, my article co-authored with Johannes Urpelainen and Terry Chapman, titled “International bargaining, endogenous domestic constraints, and democratic accountability,” hit the web today as part of the April issue of the Journal of Theoretical Politics. In this piece, we endogenize the patterns of rewards and punishments that define constraints on leaders in international bargaining; in other words, rather than assuming that some leaders are constrained and some aren’t, we wrap an theory of how domestic audiences choose to reward/punish their leaders up into an examination of the effects of those constraints. I won’t belabor the results, but one of the primary ones is that the effect of domestic constraints in one state depend on the level of constraint in the other—making absolute claims about the effects of domestic politics more problematic than we realized before.

Second, at SXSW this week, I came across a Dutch band, traumahelikopter, who, in addition to a pretty great name, have a song called—you guessed it—”Wolf”. Check it out below, complete with all the howling one should expect.

Of course, I’m not clear on all the lyrics, so if you find something odd in there, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you…

I’ll be presenting “National Leaders, Political Survival, and International Military Coalitions”, (co-authored with Emily Ritter), which tries to explain a specific type of cooperation: when and with whom states build military coalitions during crises (here are the slides). It’s part of a broader project that understands coalitions as crisis-specific instances of military cooperation, where building a coalition yields military benefits but requires that partners be compensated for their efforts. In this paper, we analyze how political survival incentives affect this tradeoff. We show that politically insecure leaders will be more willing than secure leaders to make side payments at the expense of the public interest to reduce the risk of defeat—which harms their chances of retaining office. Thus, insecure leaders are both more willing to build coalitions and less selective about the partners they choose, compromising a larger share of the public interest in the pursuit of retaining office.

As a side note, I’ll also be live-tweeting conference highlights at @nocodecub using the hashtag #TexasTriangle. It’s my first such attempt at live-tweeting, so I make no promises as to the consistency and quality of the effort, but if it helps publicize what I think is a pretty strong group of IR scholars in the state, then we’ll call it a win.

Whether Maduro, Chavez’s handpicked successor, wins the next round of elections or someone else does, we can already say quite a bit about what we can expect from a new Venezuelan leader by knowing only two things: first, the risk of losing office in a coup or revolution, and, second, the simple fact that whoever takes office will be new. Unfortunately, it’s possible that these things add up to a more belligerent foreign policy, at least with respect to regional rivals. (Bizarre fantasies aside, the prospects for war against the US are really pretty damned low.)

Let’s start with the first question. Giacomo Chiozza and Hein Goemans have shown that, while the risk of losing an election doesn’t do much to encourage leaders to fight, the risk of losing office through a coup or a revolution certainly does. So, if Maduro or some long-shot successor finds the risk of being toppled violently high enough, war might be the best way to ensure survival—by sending plotters to the front, cracking down on dissent, or disrupting bases of rebel or dissident support. Whatever the specific strategy, it does seem that an increased risk of a coup or revolution—more so than losing an election, which is easy to survive—also increases the risk of international conflict.

On the second issue, Venezuela will—no matter what—be led by a new executive whose resolve (or willingness to use force) is more or less unknown to Venezuela’s rivals. How does one demonstrate resolve? Words won’t do it, but fighting will. How do one’s rivals gauge one’s resolve? You guessed it: pressing them to see if they’ll fight. I call this “the turnover trap,” in which new leaders have an incentive to demonstrate resolve, hoping to cultivate a reputation for toughness, and their opponents have an incentive to test them—a potentially dangerous combination, both for the escalation of disputes and, as Toby Rider recently discovered, arms races.

So, regardless of who’s in office, Venezuela’s new leader is likely to be a bit more belligerent than a longer-serving leader, to the extent that (a) Venezuelan politics is a violent place (particularly for toppled leaders) and (b) there are opportunities to cultivate a reputation for resolve with one’s rivals. Here’s the good news, though. Not only is the probability of war at any given time pretty damned low, I’d wager that its neighbors, including Colombia, Guyana, and Dominica (all of which have ongoing border disputes with Venezuela) would be more likely targets of any conflict that does break out than the big superpower country way up North. (Rhetoric aside, of course.)

Now, given the recent Wonderlic fallout, Doyel’s reaction is totally reasonable. (And for the record, I’m a big fan of Doyel’s work; his “Hate Mail” columns are priceless.) Who wants to take a test and run the risk of getting humiliated? *If* the players *could* band together and refuse to take these tests, then the league *would* be stuck, and it *would* have to accept the new reality; with the league unable to refuse to draft or sign anyone, the players would likely carry the day.

Maybe they *should*, but they likely *won’t*, because—if, as professionals, they care about their careers—individual players have no incentive to band together like this. Yes, this comes at the cost of low scorers getting mocked, but there’s just no real collective incentive to band together.

Why wouldn’t players want to cooperate here? Well, it depends on what players care about—their career or other players’ feelings. Here’s what I mean. Imagine that those who take it get treated better (say, signed to higher salaries or signed at all) than those who don’t. True, if none take these tests, the league can’t do anything, *but* what’s to stop one or a few people from thinking “Well, if I take it and the others don’t, I’m in a great position with the league after the combine.” Sure, the ones who maintain solidarity are made worse off—because the league can single them out with smaller or no contracts, which it couldn’t do if they all cooperated—but the ones who *do* take the tests have more of the pie to share amongst themselves. So if everyone else isn’t taking the tests, it benefits any given player to take it and prove his willingness to “play ball” (pun intended) with the league. And here’s the kicker (an unintended, but surely better, pun)—there’s no incentive to be left out, so if you know that the other guys are taking it, then you have to as well if you don’t want the punitive contract (or, again, no contract at all). Yes, you’re all back in the situation you were in before, but that’s better than not getting *anything*, which is what you get if you’re one of the few that doesn’t take the test.

So what does this all mean? To the extent that players are ambitious and care about their careers (which, presumably, is what professionalism is about), most if not all will take the Wonderlic and associated tests—despite the fact that it comes with all the bad stuff Doyel hits on, and despite the fact that *if* all the players refused, they all might be collectively happier. But, ultimately, if the league rewards those who take it over those who won’t, then this tragic outcome—the result of what is essentially a multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma—will be the most likely outcome, and we won’t see much of a change in how things work, however much better the alternative that Doyel points out might be.

First, on the issue of isolation, let’s say that I want to develop a theory of how some factor—say, leadership change—affects temporal patterns of international conflict. If I’m interested in whether there can be a valid link between leadership tenure and war (that is, a valid argument from premises to conclusion), what do I need to do? Let’s say, for example, that my hunch is that new leaders know more about their own willingness to use force than their opponents, such that they take office with private information over their resolve. How should I model this? Well, two things I’d want to do immediately are assume that, while consecutive leaders of the same state can differ in their resolve, there is no other source of variation in preferences that occurs with leader change, and, second, without leadership change, war would not occur in the theory. Do I think either of these are true? Well, of course not. First, partisan change, state-society dynamics, and time until the next election (in democracies) can also produce changes in state preferences across leadership transitions. Second, wars can of course happen for other reasons (if they didn’t, I’d be the first person with a valid argument about the causes of war, and while I’m a little arrogant, I ain’t that bad). But if I want to see what the independent effect leader change is, I can (and should, at this stage of model-building) strip these other things away—so that if war does happen in my model, I’ll know the mechanism driving it. (Put more pithily, if outcomes are overdetermined in your theory, you really can’t say much about the things you’re presumably interested in. And whether they are overdetermined in your theory is totally up to you.)

My next step, of course, is to analyze the model. This amounts to seeing what valid conclusions follow from my premises (assumptions)—no more, no less. Let’s say that I analyze the model and find that, indeed, when new leaders’ personal resolve is private information, we see turnover-driven cycles of reputation-building and conflict. But what do I really have here, if I’ve assumed away all these other sources of potential changes in state preferences? Well, I’ve got a somewhat parsimonious theory of leader change, tenure, and conflict behavior driven by a particular mechanism—reputation dynamics. I don’t have a theory of every possible cause of war, but what I do have is a sense of exactly what patterns my independent variable of interest (time in office) should have on some outcome variables of interest. I have this, notably, because nothing else apart from the proposed mechanism could have caused war in my theoretical model. My model isn’t the world, nor is it the historical record, and when it comes time to take my predictions to the data—to test them against the historical record—I’ll know some important things to control for on the right hand side of my regression: all the things I assumed away. Particularly, those things I believe will affect both temporal changes in state preferences and war should go into the empirical model as controls. That’s pretty useful, as far as I’m concerned. So by being intimately aware of what my theory assumes and what it doesn’t, I have strong expectations about the independent effects of my independent variables, controlling for other relevant factors, and I have an equally strong sense of what I need to control for. And by isolating the factors around my particular proposed causal mechanism/independent variable, I can also be sure that my proposed mechanism can do independent work on its own and the precise conditions under which I expect it to play out. With less precise (or, worse, hidden or implicit) assumptions—that is, with multiple things that could cause war under the same conditions—that would be much more (and unnecessarily) difficult.

Second—and I saved this one because it’s shorter—assumptions really are all we bring to the table when we build theories and try to explain things. If a model is just an argument, then assumptions are just premises—-i.e., things said for the sake of argument. Now, it’s true that if our assumptions can never hold (in my running example, if leaders are all the same in their resolve and it’s always well and publicly known) then my proposed mechanism won’t explain observed phenomena. Sure. That’s trivially true. But let’s think about the elements of our theory/argument; what’s it made up of? Premises, some logical connections drawn between them, and conclusions; in other words, assumptions, some logical connections drawn between them, and implications/hypotheses. The implications depend on the premises and the logic, so I’m clearly not adding hypotheses directly, and logic is, well, pretty much given; so my only contribution—the source of our creativity and power and, in very real sense, our ability to explain—are the premises I use as inputs into my theoretical construct.

That means I value my assumptions pretty highly—again, since I’m not trying to re-write the rules of logic, that’s what I’m really contributing here, and that’s as it should be. My goal in the not-so-hypothetical model above was to see how a particular factor influenced a particular outcome, independently of other factors, if at all; I wanted to know what would have to be true for the proposed relationship to exist. If I didn’t make a ton of false assumptions along the way, I’d get nowhere. But here’s the thing—everything I assumed away that could be related to both IV and DV must come back if I’m going to build an empirical model that controls for potential confounds or sources of spuriousness—but it’s just not necessary (or prudent) to include in the theoretical model I designed for my particular research question.

The more complex the thing you're writing about, the more precise your language has to be. Academic writing is *not* onomatopoeia.

—
Scott Wolford (@nocodecub) November 15, 2012

It’s tough to remember—and even tougher to put into practice when you think you’ve found a way to say something that turns out to be too clever by half—so let’s just call this another public commitment for my own work.

• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.

Public commitment at blogging best. Let’s see how I do.

* for more Orwell, check out this running transcription of his diaries 1938-1942, in “real time” seventy years later.

I’m going to argue, below the jump, that the UN’s “best” hope is to alter the course of the fighting, ensuring one side’s victory, rather than attempt to put together an unworkable settlement short of military victory.

Let’s start with the war. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s probably useful to think of it in terms of commitment problems: the rebels don’t trust any power-sharing agreement that leaves Assad in power, nor does Assad likely think he’d be well-treated if he yields any political power. The result? A long war where nothing short of military victory is acceptable for either side. So while diplomats like to talk about “diplomatic rather than military solutions,” there’s little reason to believe that any solution that would leave both sides standing would be mutually acceptable. This is why the Annan Plan failed, and why any agreement that would in principle allow Assad’s folks to continue to wield some kind of power (which they can use for retribution, further repression, etc.) is unlikely to work. The most likely outcome of this conflict in isolation, then, is a protracted war in which neither side will settle for less than, as much as possible, eliminating the other.

Given that, what would a non-”paralyzed” Security Council be able to do? First, at a maximum, it could authorize some kind of intervention designed to tip the balance in favor of one side or the other, as happened in Libya. This could, indeed, shorten the war, but it’s not obvious that there’s a lot of support for it amongst the countries that would likely intervene (i.e. the Western democracies), and even if they decided to support *some* kind of SC action, Russia and China are very unlikely to go for *that*. Second, it could try some kind of robust peacemaking mission to be followed by peacekeeping, but whatever peacekeepers might do is limited to *after* the fighting stops. And that, as mentioned above, will be no mean task. So let’s set peacemaking and -keeping aside for the moment. There’s also the possibility that through some kind of threats or subsidies—again, unlikely to be approved by the UNSC—or that oft-invoked about “pressure,” a temporary agreement would be put in place, but its success would depend solely on the continued commitment of the P5 to supporting it, and not on having solved the problems that got the fighting started in the first place.

Finally, the UN could impose tighter economic sanctions on the Syrian regime, but given the logic of the war—that fighting on in hopes of victory is better than compromise and near certain punishment or death for the leadership, or “gambling for survival“—the only way sanctions might bring things to a quicker end is to facilitate the military collapse of the government. It will *not*, I suspect, push the sides to the table for any meaningful negotiations, because altering the government’s military prospects doesn’t solve the commitment problem at the heart of the war—that is, sharing power or demobilizing will open one side up to victimization that the other side can’t promise not to engage in.

And that commitment problem is the real reason negotiations aren’t likely to happen, much less produce a workable settlement, in the near term, and why Mr. Brahimi is right in calling his task “nearly impossible.” That said, a solution *will* be possible when one side collapses or abdicates in the light of certain defeat, and if we’re to see the UN make strides on bringing about a peaceful solution, it may be because it (a) recognizes why the war has taken on this particular form and (b) alters the military fortunes of the side it prefers to see win out. Otherwise, all the talk about “diplomatic solutions” will remain just that: talk.