Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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The goal, as stated in Table 1.3, is nothing less than to explain the initiation of conflict, the probability of defeat, the probability of (post-conflict) punishment of the leader and/or regime members after a defeat, and the decision-making process in different authoritarian regimes (35). Building on Dan Slater’s conceptualization of regime types – e.g., distinguishing Bosses, Strongmen, Machines, and Juntas – Weeks argues that leaders of these different regimes systematically come to different conclusions about the combination of four central factors in decisions about war. [21] “First, actors form views about the benefits of winning compared to continuing on a nonmilitary pathway. … second, actors form perceptions of the costs of fighting, regardless of the outcome of the conflict. …. third, in addition to generic views about force, audiences and leaders have perceptions of the costs of defeat in a military challenge. …. finally, actors form estimates of the likelihood of winning a military contest” (15—16). Since these factors come together coherently, Weeks can use them to rank regimes from least to most likely on each of the proposed dependent variables, with for example Strongmen having the highest, Bosses, the second highest, Juntas the second lowest and Machines the lowest probability of conflict initiation. [22] urn:lcp:dictatorsatwarpe0000week:epub:af74d3a2-89d9-4f8a-bf36-f5a06f823f33 Foldoutcount 0 Grant_report Arcadia #4281 Identifier dictatorsatwarpe0000week Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1zd8j12z Invoice 2089 Isbn 9780801452963 The Generalizability of IR Experiments Beyond the U.S." (with Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Chagai Weiss, and Jonathan Renshon)

An alternative view holds that domestic politics do play an important role in dictatorships, but that the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy is unique to each country. For example, some have argued that in modern China, public nationalism plays a major role in foreign policy decisions. ⁴ Others have argued that Iranian attempts to pursue nuclear weapons are driven in part by domestic political concerns. Countless country specialists have studied the foreign policies of individual authoritarian states and have provided valuable insights about the specific policies of particular countries.⁵ However, most country-specific analyses treat individual countries as sui generis cases rather than seeking to develop more general insights. Research that focuses on individual countries such as China or Iran is not usually designed to detect patterns in the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy across different authoritarian regimes. In fact, partly as a result of focusing on individual countries, observers sometimes conclude that the domestic politics of war are mostly idiosyncratic. They dismiss the notion that domestic regime type might systematically shape how states behave. Answering these questions is important for those tasked with understanding the behavior of authoritarian regimes. Yet current scholarship provides few systematic answers. As a result, scholars and policymakers have several competing but incorrect views of how domestic politics affect the foreign policy behavior of dictatorships. In her excellent book, Jessica Weeks advances a clear and generally compelling argument about how important variations among autocracies affect decisions about the use of force. International relations scholars have long been interested in the implications of democracy for foreign policy, whether in classical realist arguments that democracies are ill-suited to the effective conduct of power politics or in more recent arguments that democracies are both good at managing their relations with one another and particularly effective at war. [36] In this discussion, non-democracies have constituted a residual category, collecting together countries as varied as Tsarist Russia, communist China, and contemporary Somalia. It is only recently, however, that systematic analyses of variation among autocracies have emerged. Weeks’s argument also differs from a second model of civil-military relations developed in the military effectiveness literature. Risa Brooks’ theory of strategic assessment focuses on the balance of power between civilian leaders and military leaders (civilian dominance, military dominance, or shared power) and the extent of preference divergence between the two groups (high versus low). [7] When civilians are firmly in charge and civilian and military officials have congruent preferences, states will be able to assess their strategic environment accurately and are likely to have positive military outcomes. When civilians share power with the military—that is, when the military can threaten the tenure of the leader directly or indirectly (in Weeks’s terms, the military constitutes an audience)—and the two sides have strongly divergent preferences, then strategic assessment will be very bad. [8] Because they are competing for power, both civilian and military officials are reluctant to share information with each other, which in turn makes it difficult to coordinate strategic plans with political goals. Moreover, the military tends to focus on its internal rival, undermining its ability to assess its own (and its external adversary’s) strengths and weaknesses, and it is unclear who has the final say on military strategy. Such states are prone to major strategic mistakes. Jessica Weeks is Associate Professor and Trice Faculty Scholar in the department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell University Press, 2014), she has published in journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and International Organization. She received a B.A. in political science summa cum laude from The Ohio State University, an M.A. in International History from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland and a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.Hein Goemans is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. His first book, War and Punishment, was published by Princeton University Press (2000), and focuses on the role of leaders in war termination–with an empirical focus on World War I. His second book, Leaders and International Conflict, co-authored with Giacomo Chiozza, was published by Cambridge University Press (2011) and focuses on the role of leaders in war initiation. It was awarded the Joseph Lepgold Prize (Georgetown University) for best book in International Relations in 2011. His teaching focuses on international relations, with an emphasis on conflict and international relations history.

Her argument also makes other suggestions. Regarding the problem of Russian aggression under President Vladimir Putin, Russian aggression could be substantially constrained if the Russian elite found a means of putting constraints on the power of the Russian president, even if such constraints fall short of effecting a full democratic transition. The U.S. also might view a nuclear Iran as posing a lesser threat, assuming that one views Iran as a Machine dictatorship, run by a constrained, civilian dictator. I will begin by responding to comments about the theory. Alexander Downes focuses much of his discussion on the book’s typology of authoritarian regimes. As he notes, I differentiate regimes around two dimensions: first, whether or not the leader faces a powerful domestic audience, and second, whether the key decisionmakers in the regime are civilians or military officers. Leaders of personalist boss and strongman regimes do not face powerful domestic audiences and therefore face relatively few domestic constraints in their foreign policy decisions, while leaders of nonpersonalist civilian machines and military juntas are accountable to politically important domestic groups that shape their decisions about war and peace. Reprinted in Nonproliferation Policy and Nuclear Posture: Causes and Consequences for the Spread of Nuclear Weapons; Routledge (2016) A second problem with using selectorate theory to explain differences among authoritarian regimes is its assumption that, conditional on coalition size, all actors perceive the world in the same way. ¹⁴ This assumption overlooks the great uncertainty that exists in decisions about international relations. If different types of regimes systematically empower actors with different perceptions of the costs and benefits of war, this could affect international bargaining in ways not explained by selectorate theory. What explains these divergent paths? Why do some dictators make such risky, and in some eyes foolhardy, decisions about the use of force, whereas others are much more cautious in their decisions to exercise military power? Why do some authoritarian leaders limit themselves to winnable wars, whereas others embroil their countries in defeats that could surely have been avoided? And why do some dictators weather defeat, whereas others are ousted within days of losing a war?How Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Transforms Public Support for War" (with Michael Tomz and Kirk Bansak) PNAS-Nexus 2023