Steven V. Miller

Individual Identity Attachments and International Conflict The Importance of Territorial Threat

This article provides some of the first individual-level evidence for the domestic salience of territorial issues. Using survey data from more than 80,000 individual respondents in 43 separate countries, we examine how conflict affects the content of individual self-identification. We find that international conflict exerts a strong influence on the likelihood and content of individual self-identification, but this effect varies with the type of conflict. Confirming nationalist theories of territorial salience, territorial conflict leads the majority of individuals in targeted countries to identify themselves as citizens of their country. However, individuals in countries that are initiating territorial disputes are more likely to self-identify as members of a particular ethnicity, which provides support for theories connecting domestic salience to ethnic politics. That conflict has variegated effects on identity formation suggests the relationship is not endogenous. Our within-case analysis of changes in Nigerian self-identifications further demonstrates that individuals are quite susceptible to the types and locations of international conflict.

Quick Victories? Territory, Democracies, and Their Disputes

Recent scholarship suggests that democracies tend to fight shorter conflicts that can be easily won. This is most likely due to the accountability incentives that constrain democratic leaders. Fearing removal from office, democratic leaders will try to choose short conflicts against weaker opponents. The authors question this argument by presenting an alternative explanation for the connection between democracy and shorter disputes and victories. Building on prior works that have identified a territorial peace, this article argues that democracies often have few territorial issues over which to contend. In fact, rarely do democracies have territorial disputes with their neighbors. Thus, democracies have less difficult issues to resolve, and this makes conflict escalation less likely against neighbors. Without neighbors ready to attack the homeland, states at territorial peace can more easily choose favorable conflicts to escalate. This logic applies to all states at territorial peace, of which democratic states are just a subset. Analyses of directed-dispute dyads between 1816 and 2001 provide confirmation for our argument. Regime type does not predict conflict selection or victory once controls are added for issue salience.

Democracies, Territory, and Negotiated Compromises

Multiple studies have confirmed that democracies are more likely than other regime types to resolve their militarized disputes through negotiation and compromise. We argue that these findings have not controlled for the types of disputes that are most likely to involve democracies. States have often resolved their most dangerous disputes, involving territorial issues with neighbors, prior to becoming democratic. Thus, the issues involving democracies are of less salience and are more easily negotiated with compromise. Using Militarized Interstate Dispute data from Correlates of War Project, 1816 to 2001, we confirm this explanation. The pacifying effect of regime type disappears once controls are added for proximity and issue type. We find that territorial issues among contiguous states are among the most difficult issues to resolve, and democracies are unlikely to be involved in these disputes. Our findings are an advancement of the territorial peace argument and present a first step in a re-examination of the broader empirical regularities associated with democratic peace theory.

External territorial threat, state capacity, and civil war

We argue that the regional threat environment a state faces plays a consequential role in its political development and the likelihood of experiencing future intrastate wars. Challenges to a state’s territorial integrity lead governments to increase their military personnel, and the resources that support these increases most often come willingly from a public that seeks security. Territorial threats are unlike other types of threats because they challenge individual lives and livelihoods, which both connects the average citizen with the state and allows for easier government extraction of necessary resources. Thus, external territorial threats increase state capacity by unifying the state and by increasing the repressive power of the central government. We identify territorial threats as both latent and realized claims against state territories and find that the presence of an external threat to territory leads to an increase in the capacity of central governments to connect and extract from its citizens, as well as the capacity to repress potential regime dissidents. We also find that the presence of a claim against a state’s territory from a neighbor corresponds with a substantial decrease in the likelihood of intrastate conflict at both high and low levels of intensity. The effect of territorial threat is observed even in the short term after a territorial threat has been resolved. Our tests, using standard models of state capacity and insurgency models of conflict on a sample of all states from 1946 to 2007, are robust to multiple model specifications.

Individual-level expectations of executive authority under territorial threat

What makes individuals likely to support state leaders with few constraints on executive authority? Leaders who reorganize power around their position seem inimical to most individuals’ welfare. Yet in many countries these leaders receive broad popular support when citizens feel some type of threat. This study argues that territorial threat leads individuals to support this type of state leadership. Mobilization of the military for defense of territory requires discretion by the state leader, leading individuals to interpret checks and balances as obstacles to security. The results using mixed effects logit analyses show a robust connection between territorial threat and individual-level expectations of the state leader. Individuals who live in states under territorial threat are more likely to prefer a state leader unconstrained by legislative process or other checks and balances. The analyses provided in this study have important implications for the study of popular support of democracy.

Territorial disputes and the politics of individual well-being:

Multiple studies argue that the division of territory between states is a root cause of war in the international system. This is often understood as a function of the unique importance of territory at the level of the individual citizen, because the territory itself directly affects an individual’s well-being on multiple dimensions. As such, disputes over territory should also have consequences for an individual’s overall subjective appraisal of their well-being. This article argues that disputes over the allocation of territory between states do affect an individual’s subjective well-being, but not uniformly. Citizens in states routinely targeted by a territorial threat from a revisionist neighbor are generally unhappy. However, citizens in states that initiate territorial disputes are happier as a result of the aggressive foreign policy of the state leader to secure the coveted territorial good. This is first demonstrated using mixed effects modeling on data drawn from the World Values Survey and Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset. In addition, this article provides an illustration of variations in territorial threat and subjective well-being using the case of Nigeria, finding that Nigerians were happier when their state was initiating territorial threat against its neighbors and less happy during a period when Nigeria itself was the target of territorial threat. The analyses provided advance the territorial conflict research program by measuring the individual-level effects of territorial disputes. In addition, the findings add to a growing scholarship on the political determinants of an individual quality of life, sometimes considered the ‘ultimate dependent variable’ in social science.

The Effect of Terrorism on Judicial Confidence

Independent judiciaries prevent democratic reversals, facilitate peaceful transitions of power, and legitimate democracy among citizens. We believe this judicial independence is important for citizen-level judicial confidence and faith in democratic institutions. I challenge this and argue that citizens living under terror threats lose confidence in their independent judiciaries. Terror threats lead citizens to enable the state leader to provide counterterrorism for their security, which has important implications for interbranch relations between the executive and the judiciary. Citizens lose confidence in independent judiciaries that provide due process for suspected terrorists. I test my argument with mixed effects models that incorporate the Global Terrorism Database and four waves of European Values Survey. The analyses demonstrate the negative effects of terror threats on judicial confidence when interacting terror threats with measures of judicial independence. My findings have important implications for the study of democratic confidence and the liberty-security dilemma.