Kenneth A. Schultz

Do Democratic Institutions Constrain or Inform? Contrasting Two Institutional Perspectives on Democracy and War

How do domestic political institutions affect the way states interact in international crises? In the last decade we have witnessed an explosion of interest in this question, thanks largely to the well-known claim that democratic states do not fight wars with one another. Work on the “democratic peace†has generated a number of theoretical arguments about how practices, values, and institutions associated with democracy might generate distinctive outcomes. Although the level of interest in this topic has focused much-needed attention on the interaction between domestic and international politics, the proliferation of competing explanations for a single observation is not entirely desirable. Progress in this area requires that researchers devise tests not only to support different causal stories but also to discriminate between them.

Looking for Audience Costs

The methodological issues that arise in testing Fearons argument about domestic political audience costs and signaling in international crises are examined, in particular the difficulty of finding direct evidence (1) that escalating a crisis and then backing down jeopardizes a leaders tenure in office, and (2) that democratic leaders are more vulnerable to removal in this event than are nondemocratic leaders. Tests that seek to measure the existence and magnitude of audience costs encounter severe problems of partial observability and strategic selection: the effect of audience costs on a leaders political survival can only be detected by looking at cases in which the costs are actually incurred, but strategic choice implies that the probability of incurring audience costs is a function of their value. A formal model, brief case studies, and Monte Carlo simulations are used to show that these problems bias direct tests against supporting either of the audience cost propositions. Tests based on observed audience costs understate both the mean level of audience costs in the full population and the difference in means across regime types.

The Democratic Advantage: Institutional Foundations of Financial Power in International Competition

Despite their presumed liabilities, institutions associated with democracy serve as a source of power in prolonged international competition by increasing the financial resources that states can bring to bear. The theory of sovereign debt suggests that a states ability to raise money through public borrowing is enhanced when debtholders have mechanisms for sanctioning state leaders in the event of default. Institutions associated with liberal government provide such mechanisms. All other things being equal, states that possess these institutions enjoy superior access to credit and lower interest rates than do states in which the sovereign has more discretion to default unilaterally. Liberal states can not only raise more money from a given economic base but can also pursue tax-smoothing policies that minimize economic distortions. The ability to finance competition in a manner that is consistent with long-term economic growth generates a significant advantage in prolonged rivalries. These claims are explored by analyzing the Anglo-French rivalry (1688–1815) and the Cold War.

The Politics of Risking Peace: Do Hawks or Doves Deliver the Olive Branch?

This article explores the politics of risking international cooperation with a distrusted adversary. It develops a model in which two states attempt to learn over the course of two periods whether or not mutual cooperation is possible given their (initially unknown) preferences. In one of the states, the government is engaged in domestic political competition with an opposition party. One party is known to have more hawkish preferences than the other, on average, and voters must decide which party to elect after observing the international interaction in the first period. The model shows that, when trust is low but continued conflict is costly, cooperation is most likely to be initiated by a moderate hawk—a leader with moderate preferences from the more hawkish party. Moreover, while dovish leaders are better at eliciting cooperation in the short run, mutual cooperation is most likely to endure if it was initiated by a hawk. Some empirical implications and illustrations of the model are discussed.I gratefully acknowledge thoughtful comments received from Andrew Kydd, James Morrow, Brett Ashley Leeds, T. Clifton Morgan, Kenneth Scheve, Deborah Larson, Bruce Russett, Alex Mintz, and the anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 43rd annual meeting of the International Studies Association, March 2002.

Comparing British and French Colonial Legacies: A Discontinuity Analysis of Cameroon

Colonial institutions are thought to be an important determinates of post-independence levels of political stability, economic growth, and public goods provision. In particular, many scholars have suggested that British institutional and cultural legacies are more conducive to growth than those of France or other colonizers. Systematic tests of this hypothesis are complicated by unobserved heterogeneity among nations due to variable pre- and post-colonial histories. We focus on the West African nation of Cameroon, which includes regions colonized by both Britain and France, and use the artificial former colonial boundary as a discontinuity within a national demographic survey. We show that rural areas on the British side of discontinuity have higher levels of wealth and local public provision of piped water. Results for urban areas and centrally-provided public goods show no such effect, suggesting that post-independence policies also play a role in shaping outcomes. Though our ability to identify causal mechanisms is limited, the evidence suggests that communities on the British side benefited from a policy of indirect rule and lack of forced labor, which produced more vigorous local institutions.

Why We Needed Audience Costs and What We Need Now

Audience costs are not unlike the “dark matter” of international relations: they are hard to observe directly—we occasionally get indirect glimpses—but postulating their existence turns out to be very useful. Audience costs provided an answer to fundamental puzzles in the study of international conflict, and the idea opened a number of productive avenues of research. The article by Trachtenberg, together with recent contributions by Snyder and Borghard (S&B) and Downes and Sechser (D&S), raises concerns about the evidentiary basis for certain claims associated with the audience cost argument.1 As IR scholars move forward on these issues, it will be important to remember why we needed audience costs in the first place and to consider how the field can move forward productively.

What’s in a Claim? De Jure versus De Facto Borders in Interstate Territorial Disputes

This note uses a new data set on international territorial disputes and boundary agreements to explore whether and how legal commitments affect state behavior. Do border treaties reduce subsequent conflict simply through their effect on the distribution of the disputed good, or do treaties have legal and political implications such that a given distribution of territory has different effects depending on whether it is de facto or de jure? There are three main results. First, among states that have homeland territory disputes, the adoption of a legally binding border is associated with a significant reduction in the likelihood of future militarized conflict over the territory. Second, this effect is the same regardless of whether the treaty transfers territory or converts a de facto or contested border into a de jure border without changing the status quo distribution. Third, there is no equivalent reduction in conflict when states create explicitly provisional borders that allow them to retain their claims to areas that they do not possess. These findings suggest that border treaties do more than simply specify the distribution of territory and provide for transfers. By requiring states to renounce claims to territories that they do not receive, treaties generate ex ante costs of signing and/or ex post costs for reneging that explain their association with subsequent peace.

The Politics of Territorial Claims: A Geospatial Approach Applied to Africa

Why do states make claims to some border areas and not others? We articulate three models of territorial claims and test them using a novel geospatial data set that precisely maps disputed and undisputed border segments in post-independence Africa. The geospatial approach helps eliminate problems of aggregation by permitting an analysis of variation both within and between dyadic borders. We find that ethnic political considerations are the most important driver of territorial claims in Africa, while institutional features of the border play a secondary role. Border segments that partition ethnic groups are at greatest risk of being challenged when the partitioned groups are politically powerful in ethnically homogeneous societies. Border segments that follow well-established and clear focal principles such as rivers and watersheds are significantly less likely to be disputed, while changes to the border in the colonial period created opportunities for later disputes to arise. Power considerations or resources play only a minor role in explaining the location of territorial claims.

Mapping Interstate Territorial Conflict A New Data Set and Applications

This article describes a new data set consisting of precise digital maps of regions that were the subject of interstate territorial disputes in the period 1947 to 2000. Each dispute identified by Huth and Allee is rendered as a polygon corresponding to the area subject to overlapping claims. After describing the data collection procedures and presenting some descriptive statistics, this article develops three novel results that demonstrate the potential of geospatial data to advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of territorial conflict. In particular, I use the data to (1) show how different measurements of the geographic extent of disputes can help unpack the mechanisms through which they dampen international trade, (2) cast doubt on the role of oil deposits in fueling territorial conflict by analyzing the relationship at a finer level of spatial resolution than previously possible, and (3) examine the harmful legacy of territorial conflict on local development in formerly contested regions along the El Salvador-Honduras border.

Domestic Political Competition and Transparency in International Crises

On November 4, 1898, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain was triumphant. Under strong pressure from his government, France had agreed to vacate the outpost of Fashoda in the Sudan. The crisis, which had begun when a small French band occupied the site, had nearly brought the two countries to war. The British public had been outraged by the incursion into “their” territory, and politicians all across the political spectrum united behind the government’s position that France had only two choices: unconditional withdrawal or war. Though this threat had been backed by the mobilization of the navy, Chamberlain later bragged that Britain’s victory was due “as much to the spectacle of a united nation … as it was to those military and naval armaments about which the foreign press talks so much and knows so little.”1