Ethan Bueno de Mesquita

Conciliation, Counterterrorism, and Patterns of Terrorist Violence

What causes the increase in terrorism that reportedly often follows government concessions? Given this pattern, why do governments ever conciliate terrorists? I propose a model in which terrorist organizations become more militant following concessions because only moderate terrorists accept them, leaving extremists in control. Governments nonetheless are willing to make concessions because their counterterror capabilities improve because of the collusion of former terrorists. Former terrorists undertake this collusion to insure the credibility of government promises. The model also yields hypotheses regarding the level of government investment in counterterror, when moderates accept concessions, the terms of negotiated settlements, the duration of terrorist conflicts, incentives for moderate terrorists to radicalize their followers, and incentives for governments to encourage extremist challenges to moderate terrorist leaders. The model is illustrated with an application to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.Professor Ehud Sprinzak, who died an untimely death on November 8, 2002, first introduced me to the study of terrorism. He is greatly missed. I received valuable comments from Scott Ashworth, Bob Bates, Mia Bloom, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Charles Cohen, Eric Dickson, Amanda Friedenberg, Orit Kedar, David Lake, Macartan Humphreys, Matthew Price, Todd Sandler, Ken Shepsle, David Andrew Singer, Alastair Smith, and Matthew Stephenson.

Electoral Selection, Strategic Challenger Entry, and the Incumbency Advantage

We study the comparative statics of the incumbency advantage in a model of electoral selection and strategic challenger entry. The incumbency advantage arises in the model because, on average, incumbents have greater ability than challengers. This is true for two reasons: high-ability candidates are more likely to win election (electoral selection) and high-quality incumbents deter challengers (strategic challenger entry). We show that this quality-based incumbency advantage is expected to be greater for high visibility offices, in polities with relatively small partisan tides, in unpolarized electoral environments, and in electorates that are relatively balanced in their partisan preferences.

Regime Change and Revolutionary Entrepreneurs

I study how a revolutionary vanguard might use violence to mobilize a mass public. The mechanism is informational—the vanguard uses violence to manipulate population members beliefs about the level of antigovernment sentiment in society. The model has multiple equilibria, one equilibrium in which there may be revolution and another in which there is certain not to be. In the former, structural factors influence expected mobilization, whereas in the latter they do not. Hence, the model is consistent with structural factors influencing the likelihood of revolution in some societies but not others, offering a partial defense of structural accounts from common critiques. The model also challenges standard arguments about the role of revolutionary vanguards. The model is consistent with vanguard violence facilitating mobilization and even sparking spontaneous uprisings. However, it also predicts selection effects—an active vanguard emerges only in societies that are already coordinated on a participatory equilibrium. Hence, a correlation between vanguard activity and mass mobilization may not constitute evidence for the causal efficacy of vanguards—be it through creating focal points, providing selective incentives, or communicating information.

Elections with Platform and Valence Competition

We study a game in which candidates first choose platforms and then invest in costly valences (e.g., engage in campaign spending). The marginal return to valence depends on platform polarization--the closer platforms are, the more valence affects the election outcome. Consequently, candidates without policy preferences choose divergent platforms to soften valence competition. Moreover, exogenous increases in incentives for valence accumulation lead to both increased valence and increased polarization--the latter because candidates seek to avoid the costs of extra valence. As a result, the increase in valence is smaller than it would have been with exogenous platforms. Finally, the model highlights the overlooked substantive importance of common modeling assumptions. Changing the source of uncertainty in our model from noise around the median voters ideal point to a shock to one candidates valence (as is common in the literature) leads to complete platform convergence for all parameter values.

Delivering the Goods: Legislative Particularism in Different Electoral and Institutional Settings

We analyze a model of legislative particularism to understand how the provision of constituency service responds to variations in institutional and electoral environments. We show that increased partisan balance in the electorate, single-member districts, and independent executives all increase incentives for legislators to provide constituency service. The results of the model are consistent with existing comparative-institutional empirical observations. Moreover, the model addresses over time trends in the United States that are not explained by existing models and yields novel hypotheses that are amenable to empirical evaluation.

Politics and the Suboptimal Provision of Counterterror

I present a model of interactions between voters, a government, and a terrorist organization. The model focuses on a previously unexplored conceptualization of counterterrorism as divided into tactic-specific observable and general unobservable tactics. When there is divergence between voters and government preferences, strategic substitution among different modes of attack by terrorists and agency problems between the voters and government create a situation in which the politically optimal counterterrorism strategy pursued by the government in response to electoral and institutional incentives is quite different from the security maximizing counterterrorism strategy. In particular, in response to electoral pressure, the government allocates resources to observable counterterror in excess of the social optimum. This problem is particularly severe when governments put great weight on rent-seeking or care less about counterterror than do voters and when terrorists have a large set of tactics from which to choose. Voters can decrease the magnitude of the agency problem by increasing the benefits of reelection by, for example, slackening requirements for nonsecurity related public goods. I have received valuable comments and advice from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Randy Calvert, Martin Cripps, James Fearon, Amanda Friedenberg, Robert Powell, Matthew Stephenson, and Barbara Walter. I thank the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University for financial support.

Disentangling Accountability and Competence in Elections: Evidence from U.S. Term Limits

We exploit variation in U.S. gubernatorial term limits across states and time to empirically estimate two separate effects of elections on government performance. Holding tenure in office constant, differences in performance by reelection-eligible and term-limited incumbents identify an accountability effect: reelection-eligible governors have greater incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of voters. Holding term-limit status constant, differences in performance by incumbents in different terms identify a competence effect: later-term incumbents are more likely to be competent both because they have survived reelection and because they have experience in office. We show that economic growth is higher and taxes, spending, and borrowing costs are lower under reelection-eligible incumbents than under term-limited incumbents (accountability), and under reelected incumbents than under first-term incumbents (competence), all else equal. In addition to improving our understanding of the role of elections in...

The Terrorist Endgame

The author models the relationship between a government and former terrorists as a game with both moral hazard and learning. The government is uncertain about both the former terrorists’ ability and skill at providing counterterrorism aid. The government has the option—after observing the success or failure of counterterrorism—of replacing the former terrorist leadership with a new negotiating partner. This study demonstrates that the threat of replacement, in addition to promised concessions, provides incentives for former terrorists to exert counterterrorism effort, particularly when the potential replacements are of moderate ability. Furthermore, the author identifies conditions under which governments are likely to replace the former-terrorist leadership with which it has been negotiating. The model also has implications for the effect of counterterrorism successes on future concessions and the impact of the government’s ability to consider replacing the former terrorists on concessions and counterterrorism.The author models the relationship between a government and former terrorists as a game with both moral hazard and learning. The government is uncertain about both the former terrorists’ ability and skill at providing counterterrorism aid. The government has the option—after observing the success or failure of counterterrorism—of replacing the former terrorist leadership with a new negotiating partner. This study demonstrates that the threat of replacement, in addition to promised concessions, provides incentives for former terrorists to exert counterterrorism effort, particularly when the potential replacements are of moderate ability. Furthermore, the author identifies conditions under which governments are likely to replace the former-terrorist leadership with which it has been negotiating. The model also has implications for the effect of counterterrorism successes on future concessions and the impact of the government’s ability to consider replacing the former terrorists on concessions and counterterrorism.

Regulatory Quality Under Imperfect Oversight

We analyze the positive and normative implications of regulatory oversight when the policymaking agency can improve the quality of regulation through effort, but only some kinds of effort are observable by the overseer, and the overseers only power is the ability to veto new regulation. Such oversight can increase the quality of agency regulation, but it also introduces inefficiencies—the agency underinvests in unobservable effort and overinvests in observable effort. Agencies have no incentive to conceal their activities from the overseer; the reforms that are likely to reduce inefficiency are therefore those that improve overseer expertise or lower the costs of agency disclosure, not those that compel disclosure. The normative implications depend on the relative severity of bureaucratic drift and slack problems. When slack is paramount, an overseer that is more anti-regulation than the agency or society improves social welfare, as long as it does not deter the agency from regulating entirely. When drift is paramount, oversight improves social welfare only when it deters regulation. In this case, regulatory oversight is weakly dominated by one of two alternatives: eliminating oversight or banning regulation.

Informative Party Labels With Institutional and Electoral Variation

We study a model of party formation in which the informativeness of party labels and inter-party ideological heterogeneity are endogenously and jointly determined in response to electoral incentives. Parties use screening to increase the cost of affiliation for politicians whose ideal points diverge from the party platform. Because affiliation decisions are endogenous, increased screening decreases ideological heterogeneity, improving the informativeness of the party label. The model allows us to examine how the level of screening responds to changes in both the institutional and electoral environments. We find that screening (and, consequently, the informativeness of the party label and ideological homogeneity) is decreasing in the power of the executive branch, the polarization of party platforms, and the average size of partisan tides.