Dissertation
My dissertation consists of three papers on leaders' incentives to initiate international and civil conflict.
Chapter 1: "Leader Comebacks: Accountability in the Long Term" (under review)
Previous research has treated leader careers as single-spell events, even though as many as 30\% of leaders have returned to office after a stint in the opposition. Why are some leaders able to make a comeback? I argue that military victories and high economic growth display a leader's competence, but whether such achievements will help this leader's comeback depends on the country's regime type. In authoritarian and presidential regimes they have little effect, because most leaders, regardless of their past performance, are prevented from returning to power by structural factors including term limits and post-exit punishment. In contrast, parliamentary leaders do not face such obstacles, and thus, past performance strongly influences their chances of comeback. Statistical analyses on leaders between 1875-2001 support the theory. These findings have implications for theories of war initiation and democratic consolidation as well as quantitative tests of leader reputation and accountability.
Chapter 2: "Reassessing Leader Motivations for War: Domestic Agenda Control"
I propose a theory in which war results from leaders' incentives to raise the salience of foreign affairs in domestic politics. Since national leaders manage several issue areas, citizens strongly value foreign policy competence only if there is a high chance of future conflict. For this reason, an incumbent who is more competent in foreign policy can benefit from rejecting diplomatic solutions and prolonging international disputes. Citizens re-elect the incumbent since the probability of future conflict is high. In contrast to the existing competence-signaling models of war, my theory and the accompanying quantitative analyses show that the most belligerent type of leader is one whose competence in foreign policy is already well-known.
Chapter 1: "Leader Comebacks: Accountability in the Long Term" (under review)
Previous research has treated leader careers as single-spell events, even though as many as 30\% of leaders have returned to office after a stint in the opposition. Why are some leaders able to make a comeback? I argue that military victories and high economic growth display a leader's competence, but whether such achievements will help this leader's comeback depends on the country's regime type. In authoritarian and presidential regimes they have little effect, because most leaders, regardless of their past performance, are prevented from returning to power by structural factors including term limits and post-exit punishment. In contrast, parliamentary leaders do not face such obstacles, and thus, past performance strongly influences their chances of comeback. Statistical analyses on leaders between 1875-2001 support the theory. These findings have implications for theories of war initiation and democratic consolidation as well as quantitative tests of leader reputation and accountability.
Chapter 2: "Reassessing Leader Motivations for War: Domestic Agenda Control"
I propose a theory in which war results from leaders' incentives to raise the salience of foreign affairs in domestic politics. Since national leaders manage several issue areas, citizens strongly value foreign policy competence only if there is a high chance of future conflict. For this reason, an incumbent who is more competent in foreign policy can benefit from rejecting diplomatic solutions and prolonging international disputes. Citizens re-elect the incumbent since the probability of future conflict is high. In contrast to the existing competence-signaling models of war, my theory and the accompanying quantitative analyses show that the most belligerent type of leader is one whose competence in foreign policy is already well-known.
Chapter 3: "The Economic Costs of Coups Over Time"
I test the theory that unconditional foreign aid hurts economic growth in recipient countries by attracting kleptocratic leaders to power. Since donors give unconditional aid mostly to countries with strategic importance, the drop in the number of strategically important countries at the end of the Cold War provides a natural experiment to test this theory. Consistent with my theory, I find that the decrease in unconditional aid after 1990 resulted in economically less harmful coups even when accounting for a country's level of development, resource endowment, and regime type.
Other Research
The Role of Cultural Ties in International Relations
In my paper, "Culture, Commerce and Turkish Foreign Aid" (under review), I show that Muslim nations began receiving more financial aid from Turkey only after 2002 when an Islamist government came to office for the first time. Building on this, I examine a range of culturally diverse nations to test the link between political changes in donor countries and their aid allocation. A donor's domestic politics determine which group's preferences will prevail, and thus, which cultural ties between nations will be salient.
In a second paper I expand this research to Western aid donors and show that Christian nations receive significantly more aid when a Christian Democrat party controls the donor's government. Next, I plan to apply this insight to the study of third-party interventions and test whether governments are more likely to intervene to help foreign groups that they identify with.
Regime Type and War Outcomes (under review)
"Regimes at Conflict: A Unified Theory and Test of Regime Effects on Conflict Onset and Outcomes (with Patrick Kuhn)" uses a strategic statistical estimator to simultaneously test whether (1) democracies initiate conflicts that they are likely to win, and (2) democracies fight more effectively on the battlefield.