Benjamin Valentino

Bear Any Burden? How Democracies Minimize the Costs of War

In this paper, we argue that the greater accountability of democratic leaders to their citizens creates powerful pressures on leaders to reduce the human costs of war. In an analysis of a new dataset of fatalities in interstate wars (1900 to 2005) we find that highly democratic states suffer significantly fewer military and civilian fatalities. We argue that democracies limit their war losses primarily by adopting four specific foreign and military policies. First, democracies generate higher military capabilities than nondemocracies in times of war. Second, democracies are more likely to augment their national capabilities by joining more powerful coalitions of states during war. Third, democracies are more likely than other states to utilize battlefield military strategies that minimize their fatalities. Finally, democracies are more likely to fight wars on battlefields that are not contiguous to their home territories, thereby shielding their civilian populations from the fighting.

Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons

How strong are normative prohibitions on state behavior? We examine this question by analyzing anti-nuclear norms, sometimes called the “nuclear taboo,” using an original survey experiment to evaluate American attitudes regarding nuclear use. We find that the public has only a weak aversion to using nuclear weapons and that this aversion has few characteristics of an “unthinkable” behavior or taboo. Instead, public attitudes about whether to use nuclear weapons are driven largely by consequentialist considerations of military utility. Americans’ willingness to use nuclear weapons increases dramatically when nuclear weapons provide advantages over conventional weapons in destroying critical targets. Americans who oppose the use of nuclear weapons seem to do so primarily for fear of setting a negative precedent that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons by other states against the United States or its allies in the future.

Lost in Transition: A Critical Analysis of Power Transition Theory

In this paper we identify and critique the key propositions of power transition theory. We find little support for any of power transition theory’s main empirical implications. Contrary to most versions of the theory, we fin d that the European and international systems almost never have been characterized by hegemony. No state has achieved a position that allowed it for any extended period to order the international system to suit its interests at the expense of the other major powers. Power transitions are remarkably rare, they seldom occur as the result of differential rates of economic growth, and have most often occurred peacefully. Power transitions are more often the results of wars, rather than the causes of them. Wars between rising and dominant powers are infrequent and are not waged by either side primarily in the effort to defend or revise the international order in their favor. Finally, we find that war rarely resolves the fundamental conflicts of interest caused by power transitions.

Still Standing By: Why America and the International Community Fail to Prevent Genocide and Mass Killing

On April 22, 1993, President Bill Clinton addressed a crowd of 10,000 people gathered for the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He reminded the audience that “this museum is not for the dead alone…. [I]t is perhaps most of all for those of us who were not there at all: to learn the lessons, to deepen our memories and our humanity, and to transmit these lessons from generation to generation.” One of the principal lessons of the Holocaust, he suggested, was that the United States and other countries should have done more to prevent it or to rescue more victims from the Nazi killing machine: Even as our fragmentary awareness of crimes grew into indisputable facts, far too little was done. Before the war even started, doors to liberty were shut. And even after the United States and the Allies attacked Germany, rail lines to the camps within miles of militarily significant targets were left undisturbed…. The evil represented in this museum is incontestable. But as we are its witness, so must we remain its adversary in the world in which we live, so we must stop the fabricators of history and the bullies as well. Left unchallenged, they would still prey upon the powerless; and we must not permit that to happen again. Bureau of Public Affairs 1993, 322.

Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants

Numerous polls demonstrate that U.S. public approval of President Harry Trumans decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has declined significantly since 1945. Many scholars and political figures argue that this decline constitutes compelling evidence of the emergence of a “nuclear taboo” or that the principle of noncombatant immunity has become a deeply held norm. An original survey experiment, recreating the situation that the United States faced in 1945 using a hypothetical U.S. war with Iran today, provides little support for the nuclear taboo thesis. In addition, it suggests that the U.S. publics support for the principle of noncombatant immunity is shallow and easily overcome by the pressures of war. When considering the use of nuclear weapons, the majority of Americans prioritize protecting U.S. troops and achieving American war aims, even when doing so would result in the deliberate killing of millions of foreign noncombatants. A number of individual-level traits—Republican Party identification, older age, and approval of the death penalty for convicted murderers—significantly increase support for using nuclear weapons against Iran. Women are no less willing (and, in some scenarios, more willing) than men to support nuclear weapons use. These findings highlight the limited extent to which the U.S. public has accepted the principles of just war doctrine and suggest that public opinion is unlikely to be a serious constraint on any president contemplating the use of nuclear weapons in the crucible of war.

An inflated view of the facts? How preferences and predispositions shape conspiracy beliefs about the Deflategate scandal:

Beliefs in conspiracy theories about controversial issues are often strongly influenced by people’s existing beliefs and attitudes. We leverage a prominent football-related controversy – the US National Football League’s “Deflategate” scandal – to investigate how factual perceptions and conspiracy beliefs vary by fan loyalties to sports teams. Using an original survey sample, we explore two key drivers of conspiratorial beliefs about the scandal. First, we analyze how beliefs about Deflategate vary by respondents’ loyalties towards the New England Patriots. We find that beliefs are not only highly polarized by team loyalty but that the gaps are largest among more interested and knowledgeable fans, suggesting that individuals are processing the information they receive in a highly motivated fashion. Second, we find that individuals who endorse unrelated political conspiracy theories are also more likely to endorse two key conspiratorial claims about Deflategate. However, priming group solidarity and elite resentment – two possible motivations for the prevalence of conspiracy theories around controversial issues like Deflategate – does not have a significant effect.

FINAL SOLUTIONS , Further Puzzles

BEYOND attempting to forward a theoretical perspective on the causes of genocide and mass killing, one of my central purposes in writing Final Solutions was to encourage the further study of these important subjects in the fields of international relations and security studies. For this reason, I am grateful that John Mueller, Michael Desch, and Stathis Kalyvas, three prominent political scientists with interests in international security, have taken the time in these pages to reflect at length on the book. Until recently, few scholars in any academic discipline chose to study genocide and mass killing as general class of events in the way that social scientists approach phenomena such as wars or revolutions. Most scholarship on these subjects was (and continues to be) produced by historians and is concerned with elucidating the details of individual historical episodes of genocide, especially the Holocaust. Beginning in the 1980s, a small number of scholars did begin exploring the causes of genocide in more general terms. The great majority of this work, however, was produced by sociologists and psychologists. Not surprisingly, when searching for the causes or preconditions for this kind of violence, these scholars tended to focus on the social structures or collective psychology of the societies in which genocide occurs. This work pointed to a number of important recurring patterns across cases of genocide and offered some important insights into its causes. Yet, as a student of international security, I found many of the concerns and conclusions of the existing scholarship foreign and inconsonant with much of my training. The study of the causes of war by scholars of international relations, for example, has been much more concerned with questions of strategy and decision making among elites than it has with the psychology of the individual soldiers who actually do the fighting and the dying, or even the broad social structures of the societies that engage in war.