Showing Restraint, Signaling Resolve: Slides

I’m headed to SUNY Buffalo this week for a min-conference on Mathematical Modeling of Political Behavior (thanks for the invite, Phil Arena), and to help tie my hands against spending all my time editing them, I’m putting the slides for my presentation, “Showing Restraint, Signaling Resolve,” up here on the blog.

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.

A new article and a theme song for the blog

This post isn’t going to be long on substance, but I’ve got two updates for the interested reader.

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…

Scouting combines, the Wonderlic, and game theory

It looks as though the NFL is adding a new mental aptitude test to evaluate players at the scouting combine. Why put that on a blog about political science? Well, because Gregg Doyel’s Twitter response below lets us think hard about some basic problems that plague cooperation across varying contexts, whether political, environmental/ecological, or—in this case—economic. Here’s what Doyel says:

GreggDoyelCBSCollege players should band together and refuse to take the Wonderlic, etc. If the results get leaked, and low scorers mocked, why take it?2/17/13 4:29 PM

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.

International security, week 3

Following up on last week’s treatment of the bargaining approach to war, we continued the discussion this week about the (unfortunately?) time-honored dispute over the link between the distribution of power and the probability of war. I won’t belabor the substance of the discussions too much, but two things stood out to me that I thought worth noting today. [Arm raised over dying horse...]

IS week 2 follow-up: how we model war

With some time on my hands before watching Kentucky brutalize LSU down in Baton Rouge, I want to return to another topic we covered in international security this week: specifically, the choices we make when we model war. This will be a long-running discussion, I think, but we had a question asked about how relevant the group of models we read—which treat war as a costly lottery—are for something other than interstate war.

In line with Thursday’s post, I’d consider that a question worth thinking about. I asked the class what every model we read assumed about a war, and we came down on three things:

1. war is costly
2. the outcome is probabilistic
3. bargaining stops once war begins

When you’re talking about costly lottery models, that’s pretty much it, no? We’ll spend more time during the semester on what it means to relax assumptions 1 (in the leader-centric weeks) and 3 (in the war-as-costly-process week), but we can still say a lot about what the costly lottery assumptions get us in terms of, say, civil/intrastate or extra-state war.

The answer, I think, is quite a lot, though as always it depends on what we’re asking the model to tell us. To the extent that intrastate wars have these features—especially their costliness and the probabilistic nature of the outcome—then we’d expect to see similar dynamics in their causes. That is, discrepancies between the distribution of benefits and the distribution of power, shifting power, private information with incentives to lie—all these things—can lead players to fight a war that has the features of a costly lottery.

Now, there are many differences between the belligerents that fight interstate and intra-state wars, sure—agency problems, enforcement problems, etc. maybe differ across them—and to the extent that we’re interested in those features of intrastate wars, we’d want to model them explicitly. But unless they’d give us profoundly different answers about the effects of, say, shifting power and incentives to misrepresent—and in some cases they very well might—we’ve no need to complicate our models with them unnecessarily. Insurgencies, for example, may have the flavor of players bargaining before a decisive third audience—the public—or wars may have varying degrees of the risk of pure stalemate, etc., and if we want to know about the effects of those features, we build them in…

…but until we get to that point, there’s little wrong with seeing just how much we can translate from one context to another based on the extent to which one simple set of assumptions characterizes both.

International security, week 2

Today I taught session two of international security, where, if you saw the syllabus I posted here last week, we focused on bargaining and war. I tried to structure today’s readings and discussion around what I see as the arc of thinking about war as a bargaining process—from a useful analogy to way of identifying concrete causal mechanisms and, eventually, closer to developing solid hypotheses. As with last week, I’m not going to run down everything that happened in class, but I will touch on a couple of notable things that came out of discussion. More, as usual, after the jump.

International security, week 1

I taught the first session of International Security yesterday (see this post of the syllabus and the rationale behind it), and we spent a lot of time, as promised, on the role and promise of assumptions in theory-building and testing. I can go on at (too great a) length about these things, as I’m sure my students discovered, but it allowed for some good, in-depth discussions of a few critical points that I think are worth repeating here. Note that this isn’t an exhaustive outline of what we covered, but just some points I want to revisit. Below the break, of course…

On the (non) obsolescence of industrial war

Some years ago, I read Gen. Rupert Smith’s semi-memoir/discourse on “war amongst the people,” The Utility of Force. Most notable among some rather sweeping claims was that what he called “industiral war”—or war between states with standing armies, using mechanized forces that engage one another on the battlefield—is obsolete, that war has fundamentally changed to now involve something involving military forces against non-state groups organized to use violence. Quite apart from the rather strange invalid inferential logic used to justify this claim—i.e., just because we’ve not seen something in a while, it won’t come back—this line of reasoning really bothers me. In fact, we can see that it commits the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent:

1. If industrial war were obsolete, we wouldn’t see it occur.
2. We haven’t seen industrial war in a while.
3. Therefore, industrial war is obsolete.

Straightforwardly, we can see that the conclusion, (3), doesn’t follow from the premises. Why? Because there are any number of reasons that (3) might be true without (1) and (2) being true: unipolarity, economic strain, a working great power concert, military technology, etc.

In fact, periods of peace between the great powers have certainly existed in the past, and just because we’re not seeing war between them now, I can’t imagine that this also implies that states with modern militaries in the future won’t have disputes that they might settle by force—force involving the instruments of industrial warfare. More after the fold, including my thoughts on why tanks are just as important when they’re not in use as when they are.

Three arguments that impacted me

Phil Arena started this exercise of answering a few questions about what ideas or concepts have had an impact on us as scholars (and as people), and I think it’s a good idea—as evidenced by the fact that I’ve been thinking way too hard about my answers. Without further ado, let’s jump into it.

Q: Of all the arguments/findings/concepts you’ve learned in political science, which one has had the greatest impact on how you think about the world in your daily life? 

I’d say it’s sequential rationality, which gets us to ideas of subgame perfection and the credibility of promises or threats. The idea here is that I shouldn’t expect someone else to react to my actions down the road in a way that wouldn’t be in her interest. Sounds almost trivial when you put it that way, but the idea is that we’d like our theories of political action to rule out incredible threats. In other words, we would find an equilibrium implausible if someone threatened to blow us both up with a hand grenade if I don’t cough up a dollar and, as a result, I give her the dollar. If I say no, and she has to weigh the option of not having a dollar versus being dead, well, she’s unlikely to choose the latter.

Why is this useful? For me, it was instructive in my thinking about how politics works—say, why certain bargaining situations end up the way they do—and also how I thought about causality. What happens off the equilibrium path—every dog that doesn’t bark, every war that doesn’t happen (like World War III in the 1960s, the Second Korean War of 1994, the war between Russia and Wilhemine Germany in 1935), every election in the 1990s not involving Ross Perot—has a lot to tell us about what actually does happen, and breaking out of the linear A-follows-B narrative mode of thinking about political history was a big one for me.

Q: Of all the arguments/findings/concepts you’ve learned in political science, which one has had the greatest impact on your own research? 

This one’s tough. Thanks, Phil.

But I think it’s going to be my realization, some years ago, that “assumption” isn’t a four-letter word (it’s a nine-letter word, if you’re keeping score at home). Rather, assumptions are either useful for a particular question or not—no more, no less. They’re the means by which we keep track of what’s a moving part and what isn’t, by which we can isolate the effect of one thing we’re interested in from others. In fact, since the rules of logic are pretty much set, assumptions are about all we have in terms of contributions to theory. They’re nothing more than the premises of the arguments that make up our theories, but they’re also the the entry point for creativity and insight. They simplify, they restrict, and in so doing they give us power, leverage, and answers—as long as we’re explicit, everywhere and always, about what they are.

And once I realized that, I think I got better at writing down models, at tailoring them to my questions, and at understanding what they taught me. No small thing, that.

Q: Of all the arguments/findings/concepts you’ve learned in political science, which one did you most underestimate at first? 

I’m agreeing with Phil on this one. The unitary actor assumption. It’s easy to over-complicate a model with realism, but some theories—like most of my newer stuff on coalitions and multilateral bargaining—can be pretty powerful even as states are treated like billiard balls. (They’re also much easier to solve and explicate, but that’s another issue entirely.) But for the rest, I’ll direct you to Phil’s prior discussion.

More on conference expansion…

Saw this telling passage quoting South Carolina’s president today (which was a bit of relief, given the haste with which I typed out the last conference expansion post and the need I had for some kind of validation for my Prisoners’ Dilemma talk):

“I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” Pastides recalled. “I didn’t want to be the only one left out.”

Neither do any of his peers, which has led in part to the ongoing changes in college football.

Pastides understands he and other like-minded leaders might not be able to slow the expansion train once it leaves the station — as was the case with A&M — but he would like to limit how far it goes.

And it’s pretty telling. If everyone else is expanding—setting a new bar for financial viability—then being left in the cold with bad TV markets or with ridiculously long and expensive road trips is just not what a conference wants.

We’ve seen some slowdown in expansion/elimination talk with reaffirmations from the Big XII and Big East, but you’ve got to wonder how much of it had to do with UT’s unique situation involving the Longhorn Network, which makes moving unattractive to both UT and any conference that might have to adjust its rules. (And who could blame UT for looking out for its own revenue?)

Has it all stopped? I wouldn’t bet on it, because we all breathed a sigh of relief last year, too, when only Colorado and Nebraska planned moves out of big conferences. My gut tells me this isn’t yet over. But see this post for some thoughts on why, at the end of the day, it might not matter all that much for the sport…