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. Autocracies are surprisingly resilient in the modern era. Despite a trend toward political and economic liberalization, many of the most important actors in contemporary world politics remain nondemocratic. Among their ranks are countries with massive economic and military power, such as China and Russia; countries with important natural resources, such as Iran and some Arab nations; and economically fragile countries that have nonetheless managed to develop potent weapons, such as North Korea. Goemans raises different questions about the conclusions I draw from the Argentine case. He argues that I do not engage enough with an alternative diversionary explanation for the war, namely that that General Galtieri had reason to fear severe punishment (such as death, imprisonment, or exile) if he lost office, which he expected would come at the hands of naval minister Jorge Anaya if he did not make progress on the Falklands. [44] This, he points out, is different from the more common diversionary interpretation, in which the junta went to war because it feared a domestic revolt. Downes’s commentary raises an important question about the theory, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify how I conceptualized and coded regime type. While the term “junta” typically evokes a team of military officers, I use the term slightly differently in the book. When leaders are constrained by a domestic audience, I code the regime as military versus civilian, based on whether the domestic audience was composed primarily of civilians (machines) or military officers (juntas). Therefore, by my definition, Japan is considered a junta regime when it went to war against China in 1937, even though the leader at the time, Prime Minister Konoe, was a civilian. It is clear that by that time, civilian leaders knew that their survival in office depended on the support of the military. In 1932, the civilian prime minister had been assassinated by a radical group of junior naval officers, and in early 1936, 1400 military officers attempted a takeover of the government, resulting in the death of several top civilian leaders. Although the rebellion failed, it demonstrated the domestic coercive power of the military. Moreover, civilians were outnumbered by military officers in important ministries, and were increasingly excluded from important political and military decisions. [41] For these reasons, I coded the domestic audience in Japan as stemming primarily from the military. While the book does not delve into Wilhemine Germany, Downes’s description suggests that the leadership of this period might, like Japan, be coded as a junta because of the domestic power of the military.

But it seems entirely plausible to propose that leaders value the same good differentially because it brings them different private benefits [27] of war, thereby eliminating the bargaining range. Alternatively, variation in regime type could be linked to variation in private information, incentives to misrepresent, or commitment problems. It could be argued that personalist regimes, in particular Bosses like Saddam Hussein or Stalin, make decisions in such isolation that information about their preferences and calculations is limited to a very few individuals, leaving the dictator with more private information than other authoritarian leaders. In turn, the international opponent of such a leader might also have `more’ private information about his capabilities and resolve. Any information that contradicts the leader’s beliefs about the international opponent may never reach a personalist leader who is surrounded by sycophants. Thus, even when dealing with a complicated four-way regime typology it seems by no means necessary to bypass the bargaining model of war. Explicitly building on the bargaining model of war and taking account of strategic interaction at both the domestic and international level, I would argue, might also lead to some countervailing hypotheses. Weeks writes that while “autocratic audiences may approve of the use of force if the benefits outweigh the costs, they are no less wary of the possibility of defeat than they democratic counterparts and do not see systematically greater gains from fighting” (22). In her view, such audiences by and large restrain leaders from going to war or initiating a dispute (22-23). Weeks differentiates authoritarian regimes that do not have an audience that can potentially punish the leader (personalist dictatorships) from authoritarian regimes that do have such audiences, but ignores the strategic interactions between domestic actors. As Giacomo Chiozza and I argue, it is the time-varying (an issue to which I return below) threat of domestic punishment that can make war a rational gamble for resurrection. [28] If the peacetime threat of domestic punishment is high, the use of force with the potential for political domestic rewards in the case of victory can be a rational gamble, even if defeat carries a high concomitant likelihood of punishment. The truncation of punishment is key. This suggests that the presence of an audience might prod leaders into wars they would not have selected if they had not had such an audience. 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. Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). On autocratic audience costs in the context of threats of force rather than the use of force, see Jessica L. Weeks, “Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Winter 2008): 35-64.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-04-17 16:00:32 Boxid IA40089823 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

As an example, let me discuss the details of one case about which Weeks and I disagree. In Chapter 5, Weeks dismisses diversionary explanations for Argentine behavior leading up to the 1982 Falklands War. The narrative is not fully convincing, however, since it does not drill all the way down into the mechanisms and evidence on the central points of contention of those who have argued that this was indeed an instance of diversionary conflict. Thus, Weeks dismisses fears of punishment as a motivator in Argentinean Junta leader General Galtieri’s decision making, pointing out that few of his direct predecessors in Argentina and his contemporary colleagues from Latin America suffered from punishment after they lost office. I would point out that Galtieri was indeed imprisoned. Relying on Archigos 2.9 [32], we also see that between 1945 and 1982, 121 South American leaders lost office. Of those, 60% lost office in a regular manner, and only about 10% of those suffered punishment in the form of exile. Roughly 38%, however, lost office in an irregular manner [33], and 76% of those faced severe punishment in the form of exile (52%), imprisonment (15%) and/or death (2%). Two lost office as a result of suicide. With such numbers in recent history, it seems eminently plausible that Galtieri feared an irregular removal from office and subsequent severe punishment. As Levy and Vakili and Chiozza and I have argued, Galtieri’s diversionary motives stemmed largely from a fear of an overthrow by Junta members, specifically Naval Minister Jorge L. Anaya. [34] This is a different line of argument to link the Falklands War to the survival of Galtieri, in office and beyond, than the standard fear of a popular revolt. It is not discussed in the book. [35] Overall, there is too little detail in the empirical chapters on both the novel mechanisms and on the mechanisms of the competing explanations to draw strong conclusions about the superiority of Weeks’s approach. Overcoming the societally ingrained belief that all non-democratic regimes are alike, Weeks shows the striking differences between them not just internally, but externally. These factors are related in her argument and she makes a convincing case. Although I am personally not fond of positivism in the humanities as a methodology, she uses it adequately to show the differences of conflict occurrence between regime types in her admittedly limited example pool.

The Generalizability of IR Experiments Beyond the U.S." (with Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Chagai Weiss, and Jonathan Renshon) In other words, evaluation of the explanatory power of a Boss-type regime’s decisions for the use of force must also compare the Boss’s behavior against the behavior of a democracy, a Strongman-, a Junta-, and a Machine-regime in similar circumstances. Such a systematic evaluation of counterfactuals is missing. Case studies are a useful tool in tracing causal mechanisms, and in her book Weeks innovates relative to her earlier published work not just through an analysis of the factors that influence war outcome and post-conflict punishment in Chapter Three but also through presenting new qualitative evidence. She is particularly strong on detailing the relevant consultative processes. However, the case studies have a hard time nailing down the specific mechanism that leads a regime to the use of force. Since the four factors mentioned earlier neatly organize themselves into four regime types, it is not really possible to evaluate which factors drive decisions for conflict. Which of the four factors makes the Machines more peaceful than the Juntas? Is it cost of defeat, the benefits of winning, the costs of fighting, or the likelihood of winning? If it is all four of them together, how do they relate in the specific cases? Since there are no counterfactuals in the case studies to evaluate the explanatory power of the regime typology, there is no way to assess the underlying factors that drive the behavior of the different regimes. Strongmen and Straw Men: Authoritarian Regimes and the Initiation of International Conflict,” American Political Science Review May 2012 (106.2) Wilhelmine Germany is another important case that seems to elude Weeks’s categorization. The structure of the German government in the years prior to World War I has long defied easy description. There were elections and universal manhood suffrage, but the Chancellor served at the pleasure of the Kaiser and did not require the support of a majority of the Reichstag. Moreover, command of the armed forces and the conduct of foreign policy were the sole prerogative of the throne rather than parliament. In addition to these regime characteristics, Wilhelmine Germany is perhaps the signature case of military autonomy in the literature. Brooks argues that civilian and military leaders shared power in the Wilhelmine system: “the German army…had substantial latent power and constituted a major force within the kaiser’s coalition.” [13] At a minimum, civilian officials had no input on the formation of military strategy and it was unclear who had the authority to make strategic commitments on behalf of Germany. Hein E. Goemans, Kristian S. Gleditsch, and Giacomo Chiozza, “Introducing Archigos: A Dataset of Political Leaders,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 46, No. 2 (March 2009): 269-83. Of the 501 irregularly removed leaders for whom it is possible to code a specific manner of e