H. E. Goemans

Introducing Archigos: A Dataset of Political Leaders

Scholars for a long time theorized about the role of political leaders, but empirical research has been limited by the lack of systematic data about individual leaders. Archigos is a new dataset with information on leaders in 188 countries from 1875 to 2004. We provide an overview of the main features of this data. Archigos specifically identifies the effective leaders of each independent state; it codes when and how leaders came into power, their age, and their gender, as well as their personal fate one year after they lost office. We illustrate the utility of the Archigos dataset by demonstrating how leader attributes predict other features of interest in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Crisis interactions differ depending on whether leaders face each other for the first time or have had prior interactions. Irregular leader changes can help identify political change in autocracies not apparent from data that consider only the democratic nature of institutions. Finally, transitions to democracy in the third wave are more likely to fail in instances where autocratic rulers were punished after leaving office. Our examples illustrate new empirical findings that simply could not be explored in existing data sources. Although selective, our overview demonstrates how Archigos bears considerable promise in providing answers to new and old research questions and opens up new avenues for research on individual leaders as decisionmakers.

Regime Type, the Fate of Leaders, and War

We propose and test a formal model of war and domestic politics, building on recent evidence on the relationship between regime type, the effect of war on the probability of losing office, and the consequences of losing office. The less the outcome of international interaction affects a leaders tenure and the less punitive are the consequences of losing office, the more a leader is willing to make concessions to strike a peaceful bargain. We demonstrate that our theory successfully predicts war involvement among nondemocratic regime types. Moreover, our theory offers an intuitive explanation for the democratic peace. Compared to nondemocratic leaders, the tenure of democratic leaders depends relatively little on the war outcome, and democratic leaders fare relatively well after losing office. Thus, democratic leaders should be more willing and able to avoid war, especially with other democrats.

Peace through Insecurity: Tenure and International Conflict

The literature on diversionary war has long argued that a leaders tenure considerations play an important role in international conflict behavior. However, for the diversionary use of force to be rational, international conflict must in turn affect the leaders tenure. A two-stage probit model on a new data set of all leaders between 1919 and 1992 is used to examine this reciprocal relationship between the probability of losing office and the probability of crisis initiation. Contrary to theories of the diversionary use of force, results show that an increase in the risk of losing office makes leaders less likely to initiate a crisis, and an increase in the risk of an international crisis makes leaders more likely to lose office. Results also suggest that democracies are overall less likely to initiate a crisis because of the domestic political insecurity of democratic leaders.

Which Way Out

Most of the burgeoning theoretical and empirical literature on the role of leaders in comparative politics and international relations is built on the assumption that leaders choose policies to stay in office. However, leaders can lose office in a variety of ways. Leaders can lose office as a result of ill health; they can lose office in a regular manner; or they can be removed in an irregular manner such as by a coup. How a leader loses office, moreover, significantly affects the leaders subsequent fate. A broader perspective on not just the probability, but also the manner of losing office—and its associated consequences—thus suggests an additional mechanism to explain the behavior of leaders. If policy significantly affects not just whether, but also how, leaders lose office, leaders might design policy to minimize the anticipated negative consequences of losing office. Once we unpack the manner in which leaders lose office, for example, we see that the postulated logic of diversionary war only holds for a subgroup of leaders: those who fear an irregular removal from office.

Coups and Democracy

This study uses new data on coups d’etat and elections to document a striking development: whereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1991 installed durable rules, the majority of coups after that have been followed by competitive elections. The article argues that after the Cold War, international pressure influenced the consequences of coups. In the post-Cold War era, countries that were most dependent on Western aid were the first to embrace competitive elections after their coups. This theory also helps explain the pronounced decline in the number of coups since 1991. While the coup d’etat has been (and still is) the single most important factor leading to the downfall of democratic governments, these findings indicate that the new generation of coups has been far less harmful for democracy than their historical predecessors.

The Making of the Territorial Order: New Borders and the Emergence of Interstate Conflict

We argue that new international borders are rarely new. We propose that when states choose new borders they use previous administrative frontiers to solve a difficult short-term bargaining problem and a long-term coordination problem. With a unique new set of data collected specifically for this project, we systematically examine the new international borders of the twentieth century resulting from secession, partition, and the use of force. New international borders, we find, are drawn not according to principles of “nationalism” or defensible borders, but rather according to previous administrative frontiers. How borders are drawn has important consequences for international stability: borders drawn along previously existing internal or external administrative frontiers experience fewer future territorial disputes and have a much lower risk of militarized confrontation if a dispute emerges.

Avoiding Diversionary Targets

This article identifies three common flaws in the empirical literature on the diversionary use of force. First, while theoretical models of the diversionary use of force are built on the motivations of leaders to stay in power, the great majority of empirical studies employ datasets with the country or countryyear as their unit of analysis. Second, while theories of the diversionary use of force strongly suggest a reciprocal relationship between the probabilities of losing office and international conflict, almost no studies have explicitly modeled such a reciprocal relationship. Third, most empirical studies ignore how the diversionary incentives of leaders might affect the strategic calculus of their potential foreign opponents. This article explicitly addresses these common flaws by using a dataset with the leader-year as the unit of analysis and by employing a two-stage probit model to examine a reciprocal relationship between the probabilities of losing office and becoming a target, thus focusing on targets. The authors find only qualified support for the modified strategic theory of diversionary conflict. On the one hand, as the risk of losing office increases, leaders become less likely to be targets in an international crisis. On the other hand, however, the risk of becoming a target in an international crisis does not affect the probability of losing office.

Risky but Rational: War as an Institutionally Induced Gamble

We present and process-trace a complete information model of diversionary war. In our model, leaders must retain the support of some fraction of a selectorate whose response in turn depends on the outcome of an international conflict. The need to retain the loyalty of a segment of the selectorate generates institutionally induced risk preferences in leaders. Under specified conditions, this in turn results in the leaders’ choice of risky options and war emerges as a rational gamble. We analyze when the leader prefers to impose such a gamble, what the optimal gamble would be, and its effect on crisis bargaining between two leaders. We find that when leaders have institutionally induced risk preferences, whether leaders rationally choose to initiate or continue a war can depend on which selectorate cares most about the outcome of the conflict. A reexamination of the bargaining over a settlement to end the First World War in December 1916–January 1917 and Germanys contemporaneous consideration of unrestricted submarine warfare allows us to demonstrate the empirical relevance of the model.

The temporal dynamics of new international borders

Borders are perhaps the most significant institutions in international relations. A massive literature demonstrates that border disputes fundamentally affect the character of relations between disputants, often escalating to violent and persistent conflict. However, the literature has barely begun to explore and identify the exact mechanisms that produce disputes and whereby these disputes escalate. Recent research demonstrates that how borders are drawn affects the probability of subsequent conflict and suggests that borders will be peaceful when they effectively and efficiently coordinate the actors on either side, thereby creating stable and predictable patterns of interactions. This research, however, ignores the obvious temporal component implied by theory. We develop the temporal component of an institutional theory of borders, starting from the argument that whether new international borders become more stable over time depends upon whether actors on both sides learn to coordinate on new jurisdictional international borders. We build on this idea to argue that the effect of time is significantly influenced by the manner in which the new border is drawn. We find that new borders that follow previous administrative frontiers become stable institutions much faster than than those drawn otherwise. In other words, stable and peaceful coordination on new borders occurs much faster when those new borders follow previous administrative frontiers.

International Trade and Coordination: Tracing Border Effects

Abstract:This article examines how the institutional design of borders affects international trade. The explore variation in the effects of borders by comparing new international borders that follow precedent and thus have a prior institutional history with new international borders that lack such an institutional history. The former minimally disrupt—or restore—previous economic networks, while the latter fundamentally disrupt existing economic networks. A variety of empirical tests show that, consistent with this institutional perspective on borders, new international boundaries that follow precedent are associated with significantly faster recovery and greater increase in subsequent trade flows. By contrast, when new international borders are truly new, they disrupt local economic networks, introduce new transaction costs, and impose higher adjustment costs on states, which the authors show to have long-term deleterious effects on trade.