Elizabeth N. Saunders

Transformative Choices: Leaders and the Origins of Intervention Strategy

When and why do great powers seek to transform foreign institutions and societies through military interventions What role does executive leadership play in influencing the choice of intervention strategy, especially the degree to which an intervention interferes in the domestic institutions of the target state A typology of political leaders based on whether they believe that the internal characteristics of other states are the ultimate source of threats indicates that these threat perceptions shape the cost-benefit calculation leaders make when they confront intervention decisions; they also have important consequences for how states intervene. A comparison of the beliefs of President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as their decision-making during the Vietnam War, illustrates how the theory operates.

War and the Inner Circle: Democratic Elites and the Politics of Using Force

Much of the literature on domestic politics and war assumes that open political debate, and especially the role of public opinion, is a key distinguishing feature of democracies in the international arena. Yet scholarship on political behavior demonstrates that the public is uninformed about foreign policy and tends to take cues from elites. This paper argues that the importance of elite cues gives democratic elites a crucial and often-overlooked role in democratic foreign policymaking. Four features of an elite audience—different preferences, concentrated power, informational advantages, and small coalition size—mean that the political logic of facing an elite audience is distinct from the public-driven logic of traditional models. These features give democratic leaders strategic incentives to bargain with, accommodate, or co-opt key elites, and to manage information flow among elites themselves. These elite political dynamics yield different insights than a voter-driven model and have significant implications for theories of democracies and war. This paper explores these dynamics in the Vietnam War, arguing that Lyndon Johnsons main domestic political task was to manage elites as he pursued escalation.

No Substitute for Experience: Presidents, Advisers, and Information in Group Decision Making

Despite advances in the study of individuals in international relations, we still know little about how the traits and biases of individuals aggregate. Most foreign policy decisions are made in groups, usually by elites with varying degrees of experience, which can have both positive and negative psychological effects. This paper addresses the aggregation problem by exploring how the balance of foreign policy experience among leaders and advisers affects decision making in war, using a principal-agent framework that allows the relative experience of leaders and advisers to vary. A leaders experience affects decision making and, ultimately, the risks associated with conflict, through three mechanisms. First, experience influences a leaders ability to monitor advisers. Second, a leaders experience affects the credibility of delegation to experienced advisers and, in turn, the nature and extent of information gathering. Third, experience affects whether leaders are able to diversify advice, as well as their preference for policies that appear certain. I illustrate the argument using two cases that hold an unusual number of factors constant: the 1991 and 2003 Iraq Wars. George W. Bushs inexperience exacerbated the biases of his advisers, whereas his fathers experience cast a long shadow over many of the same officials. Understanding the experience and biases of any one individual is insufficient—the balance of experience within a group is also important. Experience is therefore not fungible: a seasoned team cannot substitute for an experienced leader.

Transparency without Tears: A Pragmatic Approach to Transparent Security Studies Research

Research transparency is an idea that is easy to love in principle. If one accepts the logic behind emerging transparency and replication standards in quantitative research, it is hard not to agree that such standards should also govern qualitative research. Yet the challenges to transparency in qualitative research, particularly on security studies topics, are formidable. This article argues that there are significant individual and collective benefits to making qualitative security studies research more transparent but that reaping these benefits requires minimizing the real and expected costs borne by individual scholars. I focus on how scholars can meet emerging standards for transparency without incurring prohibitive costs in time or resources, an important consideration if transparency is to become a norm in qualitative security studies. In short, it is possible to achieve transparency without tears, but only if perfection is not the enemy of the good. The article proceeds by first briefly reviewing trends in qualitative security studies scholarship that hint at the promise of transparency and even elements of replication, before turning to the potential benefits and limitations of transparency. I then address practical concerns, arguing that data access is a key first step and that pragmatism is crucial if scholars are to accept and invest in transparency as a norm. Although there are many important concerns about transparency in qualitative research—including human subjects and other ethical concerns, copyright issues, and questions about the interpretive nature of qualitative research—they have been discussed elsewhere.1 I thus concentrate instead on practical and logistical considerations,

The Political Origins of Elite Support for War: How Democratic Leaders Manage Public Opinion

In the last few decades, a significant body of research in international relations has linked the behavior of democracies in the international arena to electoral mechanisms, notably the prospect that democratic leaders face of being voted out of office. Indeed, in the US context, presidents often worry about public opinion when making foreign policy choices. At the same time, however, scholars of American politics emphasize that voters typically do not know much about foreign policy, and tend to take their cues on foreign policy from elites. To reconcile these perspectives, I argue that we can better understand the nature of democratic foreign policymaking by focusing on elite competition. If presidents are able to earn and retain the support of other important elites - such as Congress, key members of the bureaucracy, and high-ranking members of the military - then public opinion can be effectively managed and presidents can try to inoculate themselves against electoral consequences. For practical purposes in many cases, then, the relevant domestic audience for foreign policy choices may be other elites, rather than the mass public. Important implications follow for our understanding of the foreign policies of democracies more generally, as well as international relations theories that rely on regime type as a key variable. If leaders in a democratic state frequently worry most proximately about the political reactions of other elites, then in many cases the relevant domestic audience is likely to be far smaller than theories of democratic foreign policymaking typically assume. Focusing on the use of force, the paper outlines an elite-centered framework for understanding how democratic leaders manage public opinion, and illustrates the theory with two cases of presidential deliberations over whether to escalate an ongoing military intervention.