Joe Clare

Domestic Audiences and Strategic Interests

A number of recent studies assumes that international threats issued by democratic states are more credible because their leaders face domestic punishment for failing to carry them out. Yet this argument is ultimately premised on an invariant willingness of the domestic audience to punish an incumbent for reneging on a threat. I relax this assumption and instead allow for the audiences preferences to vary according to its evaluation of the salience of the interests at stake. This theoretical modification generates several novel predictions that are strongly supported in the empirical tests. The analysis shows that democratic leaders engage in bluffs and even back down if their bluff is called. It also specifies the conditions under which democratic threats are considered credible or not, as well as the critical interplay between domestic costs and strategic interests that may lead to war.

Multiple Audiences and Reputation Building in International Conflicts

Reputational theory of conflict behavior dates back to Schelling’s seminal work on bargaining and continues to find both its advocates and critics to date. The authors do not take sides in this debate about the relevance of reputation for bargaining behavior but rather take a modified approach to reputations for resolve and probe some aspects that were largely underexplored in past research. The authors develop the argument that, if facing multiple strategic rivals and having failed in past disputes, a state has an incentive to invest in its reputation for resolute behavior by initiating and escalating conflicts. Their focus is then on both general and immediate deterrence, and while it was standard to tie reputation to a deterrer’s past, the authors direct the attention to the challenger’s reputation as a potential motivator for its conflictual behavior. This new focus is validated, and the related expectations supported, in the findings from their empirical analysis of strategic rivalries from 1816 to 1999.

Reputation for Resolve, Interests, and Conflict

Schelling’s work laid the foundation for a reputational theory of conflict behavior, claiming that a state’s reputation for resolve, as established through its past behavior, should provide it with bargaining leverage in future conflicts. This argument is scrutinized both theoretically and empirically in this study and also juxtaposed to an alternative framework that modifies the impact of “face-saving” stakes with those of a more inherent nature, such as the interests in a dispute. We advance an argument about the interplay between a state’s reputation from past behavior and its current interests in order to predict its crisis behavior. Our empirical expectations are subsequently tested in a quantitative analysis of deterrence crises for the period 1895–1985. The findings indicate that, while reputation matters, its impact is indirect at best and contingent on a state’s interests. Given the strong empirical support, we expect the interaction between reputation and interests as specified in our analysis to further contribute to a better understanding of conflict behavior.

Global Power Transitions and Regional Interests

A number of studies have examined and largely validated power transitions as necessary conditions for war, yet the second critical element of power transition (PT) theory—a challengers dissatisfaction with the status quo—has been analyzed to a much lesser degree. This paper is intended to address this research gap. Global power transitions between major powers can indeed be destabilizing, potentially triggering major conflicts, but we also argue that violent conflict is unlikely unless there is a clash of interests between the global contenders in the critical regions of their vital interests. Our study thus provides a modification of the original PT theory by identifying its two essential elements—(1) relative power and (2) attitude toward the status quo—at two different structural levels. Power transitions between major powers are still seen as critical at the global level, as originally stated by Organski and Kugler, whereas dissatisfaction with the status quo concerns the regional context of their interests. The paper provides a theoretical link between these two levels and quantitatively tests the argument, with suggested implications for further refinements of PT theory.

Hawks, Doves, and International Cooperation

How does the hawkish or dovish nature of the domestic opposition in one state influence its own, as well as an international opponent’s, negotiating behavior? I show that doves, when negotiating in the presence of a hawkish opposition, have more bargaining leverage in international negotiations. The key is to understand an international opponent’s preference to deal with a dove rather than a hawk in future negotiations. I argue that adversaries have an incentive to concede more in negotiations to doves in order to sustain them in office, because failing to give concessions may lead to their replacement by less conciliatory (more hawkish) governments in the future. For this reason, doves are more likely than hawks to extract critical concessions from adversaries. The empirical results support this argument, which altogether suggests that doves are more successful in international negotiations not because they are more conciliatory, but rather because, for domestic reasons, they have greater bargaining leverage to extract counter-concessions from adversaries.

Me, myself, and allies: Understanding the external sources of power

As far back as Thucydides, scholars have hypothesized that power affects the onset of conflict. Despite its importance, power remains a difficult concept to measure, and scholars have primarily relied on material measures that quantify the internal resources available to a state. This concentration on internal sources of power, however, excludes an important power resource available to a state: its external relations. It is reasonable to expect that when a state estimates the power of a potential opponent it looks not only at the internal resources but also at the power of states that would likely join the conflict. In this article, we develop a new measure of external power that explicitly accounts for the external sources of state power. Unlike previous studies that aggregate a state’s expected alliance contributions, our measure is based on the expected contribution of all states, allies and non-allies alike. We conduct a preliminary test of this new measure on dispute onset, and our results provide support for power preponderance over balance of power theories. External power parity contributes to dispute onset rather than deterrence. In addition, we show that examining the combined, rather than individual, effects of external and internal power produces some intriguing results, suggesting that one state’s internal power preponderance can be offset by another state’s preponderance of external power. These results altogether suggest that further studies examining the role of external power can produce fruitful results.