Michaela Mattes

Alliance Politics during the Cold War: Aberration, New World Order, or Continuation of History?

Scholars have often wondered whether the nature of alliance politics fundamentally changed during the bipolar nuclear era characterized by the Cold War. The extension of the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset to include the years from 1815 to 2003 allows us the ability to evaluate systematically whether the Cold War period was an aberration, different both from the periods that preceded it and those that followed it, the beginning of a new alliance politics that has continued in the post—Cold War era, or similar in dynamics to eras both before and since. We begin this descriptive project here. While we find some evidence of the distinctness of the Cold War era, what is more notable in the design of alliances is a trend over time away from “reactive alliances” (which are designed to deal with specific crises) and toward “standing alliances” (which are broader and more enduring). In terms of the effects of alliances, we do find evidence that Cold War dynamics are distinct from those of prior eras. In a replication of a well-known study by Russett and Oneal (2001), we reinforce the finding that shared alliance commitments are related to peace during the Cold War, but not in earlier eras. In addition, we demonstrate that the effect of shared alliances on peace depends on the type of alliance commitment.

Reputation, Symmetry, and Alliance Design

There is significant variation in the design of military alliances but scholars currently do not have a good understanding of when members choose one design over another. This article argues that alliance design is motivated, at least in part, by reliability considerations. If concerns about opportunism are high—when prospective members have a history of alliance violation—the signatories should be more willing to implement costly reliability-enhancing provisions such as greater precision in when alliance obligations apply, issue linkage, and increased institutionalization. However, this should be more likely in symmetric alliances where members of similar power levels rely on the support of their partners and thus sensitivity to opportunism is high. In asymmetric alliances, major powers may not find reliability-enhancing provisions necessary and minor powers, who do worry about the reliability of their partners, are unable to force more costly alliance designs given their limited bargaining power. The theoretical expectations are tested using data on bilateral alliances between 1919 and 2001 and the results are generally supportive of the hypotheses.

Contracting for Peace: Do Nonaggression Pacts Reduce Conflict?

Nonaggression pacts are often concluded between states with conflicting interests, and we consider their use as conflict management devices. Because nonaggression pacts raise domestic and international audience costs for aggressors, they should reduce the likelihood of conflict. We test this proposition while taking into account possible selection bias in the conclusion of nonaggression pacts, and we find that nonaggression pacts indeed seem to reduce conflict between signatories. Our finding lends support to the liberal institutionalist argument that institutions can constrain state behavior and also suggests that nonaggression pacts are an effective conflict management tool.

Measuring change in source of leader support

This article introduces the CHISOLS (Change in Source of Leader Support) dataset, which identifies which leadership changes within countries bring to power a new leader whose primary support is drawn from different societal groups than those who supported her predecessor. The dataset covers all countries of the world with populations greater than 500,000 from 1919 to 2008. We discuss the underlying rationale of our data collection, provide some brief information about the coding rules and procedures, and share some descriptive statistics. We find that changes in sources of leader support are more common in democracies than non-democracies, but also that changes in sources of leader support often occur without irregular leader transitions or large institutional changes, even within non-democracies. CHISOLS can be productively combined with other datasets like POLITY, Archigos, and DPI that provide information about political institutions, modes of leader transition, and placement on a left–right policy continuum, but CHISOLS also provides something new that was not previously available. These data allow researchers to study the extent to which different types of policy change are associated with all leader transitions, with changes in political institutions, or with changes in the set of interests that leaders most closely represent; CHISOLS facilitates comparing the effect of leaders, interests, and institutions on policy change across a wide spatial temporal domain.

When Do They Stop? Modeling the Termination of War

This paper deals with war termination. We develop a formal model based on the logic of domestic political accountability. We assume that leaders seek to maximize the likelihood that they will stay in office and that their decisions regarding war termination are responsive to their winning coalitions expectations and sensitivity to costs and to the costs of war. Our model generates predictions about when state leaders will prefer to terminate an ongoing war, given specific terms of settlement. By applying these results to both sides in a war, we can use the model to develop propositions regarding the terms of settlement and the duration of war given varying expectations, costs, and sensitivity to costs.

“Chipping Away at the Issues”: Piecemeal Dispute Resolution and Territorial Conflict

Disputants might resolve their disagreements in a piecemeal fashion, addressing a subset of the issues at a time. How viable is such a strategy? I argue that partial settlements signal the desire to resolve disagreements and can lay the foundation for additional cooperation by building trust and/or demonstrating the benefits of dispute resolution. As a result, partial settlements should be associated with the resolution of remaining disagreements. Yet, scholars have questioned whether pursuing a piecemeal approach may be more harmful than helpful, and a systematic empirical test of these competing predictions is necessary. Using data from worldwide territorial claims between 1919 and 2001, I find a strong positive correlation between partial settlements and comprehensive dispute resolution. In the shorter run, partial settlements are also associated with an increased likelihood for peaceful negotiations, but there is only limited evidence that they reduce conflict before all aspects of the claim are resolved.