Branislav L. Slantchev

The Principle of Convergence in Wartime Negotiations

If war results from disagreement about relative strength, then it ends when opponents learn enough about each other. Learning occurs when information is revealed by strategically manipulable negotiation behavior and nonmanipulable battlefield outcomes. I present a model of simultaneous bargaining and fighting where both players can make offers and asymmetric information exists about the distribution of power. In the Markov perfect sequential equilibrium, making and rejecting offers has informational value that outweighs the one provided by the battlefield. However, states use both sources of information to learn and settle before military victory. The Principle of Convergence posits that warfare ceases to be useful when it loses its informational content and that belief in defeat (victory) is not necessary to terminate (initiate) hostilities. Thus, the standard puzzle in international relations that seeks to account for prewar optimism on both sides may not be that relevant.

The Power to Hurt: Costly Conflict with Completely Informed States

Because war is costly and risky, states have incentives to negotiate and avoid conflict. The common rationalist explanation is that war results from private information and incentives to misrepresent it. By modeling warfare as a costly bargaining process, I show that inefficient fighting can occur in equilibrium under complete information and very general assumptions favoring peace. Specifically, I assume that peace can be supported in equilibrium and that fighting brings no benefits to either state, only costs. Although there exist agreements that Pareto-dominate the final settlement, states may prefer to fight. The result turns on the ability of states to impose costs on their opponents and bear costs in return. The existence of a range of acceptable settlements and the threat to revert to particularly disadvantageous ones make inefficient equilibria possible. A diminished ability to hurt the enemy, not simply military victory, is a major reason to stop fighting.This article is a shorter version of the first chapter of my dissertation. I thank Randall Stone, Curt Signorino, John Duggan, and Robert Westbrooke for valuable comments. Previous versions were presented to the Peace Science Society, October 2001, and the Midwest Political Science Association, April 2002.

Military Coercion in Interstate Crises

Military mobilization simultaneously sinks costs, because it must be paid for regardless of the outcome, and ties hands, because it increases the probability of winning should war occur. Existing studies neglect this dualism and cannot explain signaling behavior and tacit bargaining well. I present a formal model that incorporates both functions and shows that many existing conclusions about crisis escalation have to be qualified. Contrary to models with either pure sunk costs or tying-hands signaling, bluffing is possible in equilibrium. General monotonicity results that relate the probability of war to an informed players expected payoff from fighting do not extend to this environment with its endogenous distribution of power. Peace may involve higher military allocations than war. Rational deterrence models also assume that a commitment either does or does not exist. Extending these, I show how the military instrument can create commitments and investigate the difficulties with communicating them.

The Political Economy of Simultaneous Transitions: An Empirical Test of Two Models

Traditional political economy emphasizes the difficulty of conducting simultaneous transitions toward market economy and democratic government. There are two major theories that seek to explain why some reform programs are never fully implemented or are reversed shortly after their inception. The J-Curve model (JCM) (Przeworski 1993) implicates the short-term losers from reform as the major opposition, and the Partial Reform Equilibrium model (PREM) (Hellman 1998) implicates the winners. I subject the models to empirical analysis with data from 25 post-communist countries and find that the data do not support the contention of the JCM. High unemployment rates do not threaten the survival of reform programs, and government instability does not necessarily translate into bad economic policies. These results suggest that the common concern that socially costly economic reforms endanger the consolidation of democratic norms may be misplaced.

Probabilistic Causality, Selection Bias, and the Logic of the Democratic Peace

Rosato (2003) claims to have discredited democratic peace theories. However, the methodological approach adopted by the study cannot reliably generate the conclusions espoused by the author. Rosato seems to misunderstand the probabilistic nature of most arguments about democratic peace and ignores issues that an appropriate research design should account for. Further, the studys use of case studies and data sets without attention to selection-bias produces examples that actually support theories it seeks to undermine. These problems place in doubt the articles findings.

Borrowed power: Debt finance and the resort to arms

Military expenditures are often funded by debt, and sovereign borrowers are more likely to renege on debt-service obligations if they lose a war than if they win one or if peace prevails. This makes expected debt service costlier in peace, which can affect both crisis bargaining and war termination. I analyze a complete-information model where players negotiate in the shadow of power, whose distribution depends on their mobilization levels, which can be funded partially by borrowing. I show that players can incur debts that are unsustainable in peace because the opponent is unwilling to grant the concessions necessary to service them without fighting. This explanation for war is not driven by commitment problems or informational asymmetries but by the debt-induced inefficiency of peace relative to war. War results from actions that eliminate the bargaining range rather than from inability to locate mutually acceptable deals in that range.

Territory and Commitment: The Concert of Europe as Self-Enforcing Equilibrium

The pattern of cooperative behavior seen in the Concert of Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century resulted from a commitment to uphold the settlement, which hinged on the credibility of enforcement threats and a distribution of benefits commensurate with military capabilities. The equilibrium was self-enforcing because the powers that could oppose an alteration of the system had incentives to do so, and the powers that could upset it did not have incentives to do so. This behavior is markedly different from eighteenth-century practices, although no change in state preferences is necessary to explain the change in behavior.

The Guardianship Dilemma: Regime Security through and from the Armed Forces

American Political Science Review Page 1 August 2015 doi:10.1017/S0003055415000337 Erratum The Guardianship Dilemma: Regime Security through and from the Armed Forces—ERRATUM R. BLAKE MCMAHON and BRANISLAV L. SLANTCHEV University of California–San Diego doi:10.1017/S0003055415000131, Published by Cambridge University Press 23, April 2015 O wing to an editorial oversight, the citation and reference for Piplani and Talmadge (2015) was deleted twice on page 307 of the May 2015 issue of American Political Science Review. The citations should read as follows: In this context, it is useful to consider the empirical results of two studies that find that the probability of coups is lower if the country is involved in a war (Piplani and Talmadge, 2015) and even in a crisis (Arbatli and Arbatli, 2014). The explanatory mechanisms these studies offer are different (although not necessarily incompatible): Piplani and Talmadge (2015) argue that when the military is engaged in a war there are fewer opportunities for a coup and more uncertainty about who will join it, whereas Arbatli and Arbatli (2014) argue that crises allow rulers to commit credibly to transfers to the military and to generate rally-around-the-flag effects. Also, owing to a printer’s error on page 305, Qaddafi is misspelled as Qaddaf. We regret these errors. REFERENCES Arbatli, Cemal Eren, and Ekim Arbatli. 2014. “External Threats and Political Survival: Can Dispute Involvement Deter Coup At- tempts?” Conflict Management and Peace Science. McMahon, R. Blake, and Branislav L. Slantchev. 2015. “The Guardianship Dilemma: Regime Security through and from the Armed Forces.” American Political Science Review 109 (2): 297– 313. doi:10.1017/S0003055415000131. Piplani, Varun, and Caitlin Talmadge. 2015. “When War Helps Civil–military Relations: Prolonged Interstate Conflict and the Reduced Risk of Coups.” Journal of Conflict Resolution. DOI:

Audience Cost Theory and Its Audiences

Security Studies, 21:376–382, 2012 Copyright

On the Proper Use of Game-Theoretic Models in Conflict Studies

As I stand here today, I am suddenly keenly aware that I am a theorist in the clutches of a bunch of empiricists. Perhaps that should not matter. After all, most of us here would agree that the ideal dissertation consists of a theory (perhaps formalized, perhaps not), hypotheses derived from that theory, and an empirical assessment, preferably multidimensional (large-N statistical analyses, case studies, process-tracing, experiments), of these hypotheses. Me might also agree that the theory should be internally consistent: its assumptions do not contradict each other and its conclusions follow from its premises. Some might even agree that formal modeling could be helpful in ensuring that last part. So one big happy family, right? Well, obviously not quite right or else I would not be here talking about that. As a practicing theorist who uses applied formal game-theoretic models – and these, by the way, are the ones I will be exclusively talking about today – I cannot help but notice a serious divergence between this supposed ideal and the reality of the discipline. Now, there are good reasons not to have that ideal: it’s indefensible as an approach to science. But the underlying problem is more fundamental: there is serious disagreement about the role of theory in general, and formal models in particular, in the advancement of knowledge. Today I wish to suggest that a lot of this disagreement stems from misunderstanding about what models can and cannot do. And that it is both proponents of the use of models and their critics that are perpetuating this misunderstanding. Proponents often play fast and loose with wonderfully protean terminology, and critics often latch onto some specific meaning of that terminology to attack the entire enterprise. Moreover, many proponents are, I believe, thoroughly confused about what it is that they are doing, and as a result their bombastic claims are turning others into critics of the approach. So today, I would like to take a first step toward lifting some of the fog that is clouding our communication. There are two main ideas I would like to convey today (along with the subsidiary points that constitute arguments to support them):