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Why did the July 1914 crisis—but not crises in 1905, 1908–9, 1911, and 1912–13—escalate to great-power war despite occurring under similar international and domestic conditions? Explanations based ...

Audience costs theory posits that domestic audiences punish political leaders who make foreign threats but fail to follow through, and that anticipation of audience costs gives more accountable leaders greater leverage in crisis bargaining. We argue, contrary to the theory, that leaders are often unaware of audience costs and their impact on crisis bargaining. We emphasise the role of domestic opposition in undermining a foreign threat, note that opposition can emerge from policy disagreements within the governing party as well as from partisan oppositions, and argue that the resulting costs differ from audience costs. We argue that a leader's experience of audience costs can trigger learning about audience costs dynamics and alter future behaviour. We demonstrate the plausibility of these arguments through a case study of the 1863–4 Schleswig-Holstein crisis. Prime Minister Palmerston's threat against German intervention in the Danish dispute triggered a major domestic debate, which undercut the credibility of the British threat and contributed to both the failure of deterrence and to subsequent British inaction. Parliament formally censured Palmerston, contributing to a learning-driven reorientation in British foreign policy.

Interdependence altered power relations between the European great powers between 1871 and 1914 in ways that both sustained the conditions for peace and, after 1911, made a European war more likely. Interdependence accelerated the development of international financial and commercial networks. Transnational social and cultural exchanges raised the costs of a general war, offered multiple channels for states and societies to exercise influence over each other, and altered power relations. The great powers pursued their interests through not only military force but also trade deals, financial loans, expert missions (teams sent to smaller states ostensibly to aid in modernization), and cultural diplomacy. They competed for influence in smaller states. Many of the crises that pockmarked this era derived from their contested interests in such strategically vital areas in Europe as the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, and the Low Countries, as well as elsewhere in the world. States that lost out in this transformation, notably Austria-Hungary and Russia, saw the militarization of their foreign policies as a way to compensate for weaknesses in other forms of power.

Although power transition theory offers a powerful model of international conflict, scholars have not adequately operationalized the theory's key variable of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the s...

Just as Thucydides hoped that his History would be a ‘possession for all time,’ Carl von Clausewitz aimed ‘to write a book that would not be forgotten after two or three years’ and that would ‘brin...

If a declining state has incentives for preventive war, the rising state should have incentives to delay a confrontation until it is stronger. We develop the theoretical paradox and examine the July 1914 crisis. Why did Russia, rising relative to Germany, not adopt a buying-time strategy? We argue that although most Russian leaders hoped to avoid a confrontation, they feared that the failure to support Serbia would lead to a loss of Russian credibility and a significant setback to Russia’s position in the Balkans, one that could not easily be reversed, even with Russia’s expected increase in relative military power.

I focus primarily on the utility of counterfactual analysis for helping to validate causal inferences in historical analysis. How can we use what did not happen but which easily could have happened...

Audience costs theory posits that domestic publics punish leaders for making an external threat and then backing down. One key mechanism driving this punishment involves the value the public places on consistency between their leaders’ statements and actions. If true, this mechanism should operate not only when leaders fail to implement threats, but also when they fail to honor promises to stay out of a conflict. We use a survey experiment to examine domestic responses to the president's decision to “back down” from public threats and “back into” foreign conflicts. We find the president loses support in both cases, but suffers more for “backing out” than “backing in.” These differential consequences are partially explained by asymmetries in the public's treatment of new information. Our findings strongly suggest that concerns over consistency undergird audience costs theory and that punishment for inconsistency will be incurred, regardless of the leader's initial policy course

Democratic foreign policy choices are a function of expected international outcomes and the preferences, power, and information of domestic actors. Studies of domestic political competition and international crisis bargaining have argued that an opposition's policy positions send credible signals of the government's intentions to adversarial target states. This paper contends that while opposition behavior may send informative signals, it can also directly constrain the policy options of the government. We relax previous assumptions that the opposition cannot directly prevent war or influence the outcomes of war (Schultz 2001). Instead, we assume that the opposition controls some political resources and attempts to influence the government's policy decisions in a way that advances its own partisan interests. To empirically demonstrate the theoretical differences in our model in comparison with previous domestic opposition models, we examine the case of the Quasi-War of 1798 between the United States and France.

Established in 1964, the Journal of Peace Research ( JPR) celebrates 50 years. This anniversary special issue of the journal offers broad reviews of research areas that have been central both to the journal and to the field of peace and conflict research generally. An opening article co-authored by long-time editor Nils Petter Gleditsch offers a historical view on peace research and tracks trends in the use of ‘peace’ and ‘violence’ in titles of JPR across the first 49 volumes of the journal. Opening the review article section, two contributions address key thematic areas for the journal. Few if any subjects have attracted more attention in the study of international relations during the second half of JPR’s first 50 years than the democratic peace, and in the extension of this subject, the broader debate about the liberal peace. Additional articles review the status and propose future developments in the study of war and its relationship with territory, ethnicity, ideology and natural resources. Another key historical topic associated with the journal concerns the economic cost of military conflict, while more recent research fields covered include terrorism and human rights, topics that have grown to become major JPR niches. Reflecting the methodological contributions by JPR, two articles focus on challenges of contemporary quantitative political analysis and progress in peace and conflict data collection. Finally, this special issue includes a review of research on international mediation in armed conflicts.

The debate on the waning of war has recently moved into higher gear. This forum contributes to that debate. Steven Pinker observes that a decline in war does not require a romantic theory of human nature. In fact, it is compatible with a hardheaded view of human violent inclinations, firmly rooted in evolutionary biology. Homo sapiens evolved with violent tendencies, but they are triggered by particular circumstances rather than a hydraulic urge that must periodically be discharged. And, although our species evolved with motives that can erupt in violence, it also evolved motives that can inhibit violence, including self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, and open-ended cognitive mechanisms that can devise technologies for reducing violence. Bradley Thayer argues that the decline of war thesis is flawed because the positive forces identified by these authors do not rule outside of the West or even fully inside of it. Their analysis also neglects the systemic causes of conflict and its insights for increasingly intense security competition between China and the United States. Jack Levy and William Thompson question some of the theoretical arguments advanced to explain the historical pattern of declining violence. They argue that cultural and ideational explanations for the decline in interstate war underestimate the extent to which those factors are endogenous to material and institutional variables. Arguments about the pacifying effects of the rise of the state and of commerce fail to recognize that in some historical contexts, those factors have contributed to the escalation of warfare. The introduction to the symposium outlines briefly some of the major issues: nature versus nurture, the reliability of the data, how broadly violence should be defined, whether there is more agreement on the phenomenon than on its causes, and finally whether the future will be like the past.

Audience cost theory suggests that the ability of domestic publics to punish political leaders for failing to implement their earlier threats creates additional incentives for leaders to stand firm...

The ConflictSpace framework begins with the assumption that the factors leading a war to spread are different from the factors leading to the initiation of war. I argue that the presumed analytic separation of the initiation and spread of war is misleading because leaders’ expectations of how a war might spread have a significant effect on their decisions to initiate war. I demonstrate this for the July 1914 crisis, and in the process I question Vasquez et al.’s argument that the key to the outbreak of the war lies in the Austro-Serbian relationship. I end by suggesting that the impact of the anticipated spread of war on the initiation of war probably varies across cases and constitutes an empirical question to investigate. Historians and international relations scholars have each given far more attention to the initiation of war than to either the vertical escalation of war to higher levels of violence or the horizontal expansion of war to include additional states. This omission has impeded our understanding of the conditions under which and the processes through which bilateral wars become multilateral wars. Vasquez et al. (2011) construct an innovative framework for the analysis of the spread of war by integrating social network analysis, spatial analysis, and key variables from steps-to-war theory (Vasquez 2009). They make an important contribution by situating specific foreign policy decisions within a broader context of system structures and bilateral relationships and by demonstrating the utility of the ConflictSpace framework in explaining the spread of the First World War. A central motivating factor underlying the ConflictSpace framework is the authors’ belief that ‘‘the factors that bring about a war in the first place are likely to be different from the factors that make it spread.’’ On one level, this is almost certainly true. As the other essays in the forum make abundantly clear, new states involve new causes. For both belligerents and other states, the initiation of war creates a new set of military threats and opportunities. The outbreak of war also creates new domestic environments, vested bureaucratic interests, and psychological mindsets and commitments. These new factors (and altered values of old factors) influence subsequent decisions of both belligerent and nonbelligerent states on whether to expand or join the ongoing war. 1 Assessing the causal weight of these new factors—relative to that of pre-existing conditions, relationships, and processes contributing to the initiation of war—is an important task for research.

Preventive war is a state strategy to use military force to forestall an adverse shift in the distribution of power between two states. It is driven by the perception of a rising adversary, the ant...

Scholars often interpret balance of power theory to imply that great powers almost always balance against the leading power in the system, and they conclude that the absence of a counterbalancing coalition against the historically unprecedented power of the United States after the end of the Cold War is a puzzle for balance of power theory. They are wrong on both counts. Balance of power theory is not universally applicable. Its core propositions about balancing strategies and the absence of sustained hegemonies apply to the European system and perhaps to some other autonomous continental systems but not to the global maritime system. Sea powers are more interested in access to markets than in territorial aggrandizement against other great powers. Consequently, patterns of coalition formation have been different in the European system and in the global maritime system during the last five centuries. An empirical analysis demonstrates that counterhegemonic balancing is frequent in Europe but much less frequent in the global system. Higher concentrations of power in the global system lead to fewer and smaller rather than more frequent and larger balancing coalitions, as well as to more frequent and larger alliances with the leading sea power than against it.

The study of international rivalry is a thriving research program in international relations, but it focuses primarily on strategic rivalries and generally neglects both commercial rivalries and the impact of domestic politics. We examine commercial rivalry and the causal paths through which it can escalate to war. After identifying alternative theoretical explanations, we focus on the Anglo-Spanish rivalry of the 1730s and the processes through which it escalated to the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48). We examine both balance of power and dyadic trade rivalry explanations, and then give special attention to domestic politics in Britain. We argue that the commercial rivalry was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the war of 1739. The Walpole ministry was opposed to war, and the rivalry would not have escalated in the absence of domestic pressures from mercantile interests, a xenophobic public, a politically opportunistic parliamentary opposition, and a divided cabinet.

Ripsman and Levy’s argument merits attention for at least two related reasons. The arst is the renewal of interest in appeasement within the international relations and security studies aelds. Piqued by the repeated use (or misuse) of the appeasement analogy by the administration of George W. Bush, several scholars have recently turned their attention to the international politics of the 1930s to assess what lessons should be drawn from the events of the period for today’s decisionmakers. 2 More speciacally, they question whether appeasement is sometimes justiaed or is always misguided. The second reason is that many of these scholars embrace what might be called a “rational

The most famous intelligence mission in biblical times failed be cause actors made conscious decisions to deliberately distort the information they passed on to their superiors. The 12 spies that Moses sent to the land of Canaan concluded unanimously that the land was good. But estimates by 10 of them that the enemy was too strong and popular pressure by the Israelites who wanted to avoid the risk of fighting a stronger enemy led the 10 spies to consciously change their assessment, from a land that "floweth with milk and honey" to "a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof."1 This biblical precedent has been lost among contemporary intelligence analysts, who have traditionally given insufficient attention to the role of de liberate distortion as a source of intelligence failure. Influenced by Roberta Wohlstetter's classic study of the American failure to anticipate the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, by the increasing emphasis in political psychology on motivated and unmotivated biases, and by the literature on bureaucratic poli tics and organizational processes, students of intelligence failure have em phasized some combination of a noisy and uncertain threat environment, unconscious psychological biases deriving from cognitive mindsets and emo tional needs, institutional constraints based on bureaucratic politics and orga nizational processes, and strategic deception by the adversary.2

Scholars typically define appeasement as a policy of satisfying grievances through one-sided concessions to avoid war for the foreseeable future and, therefore, as an alternative to balancing. They traditionally interpret British appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s as a naïve attempt to maintain peace with Germany by satisfying his grievances. The standard conceptualization of appeasement and the empirical treatment of the 1930s, however, are theoretically limiting and historically incorrect. Appeasement is a strategy of sustained, asymmetrical concessions with the aim of avoiding war, at least in the short term. There are three distinct variations of appeasement: (1) resolving grievances (to avoid war for the foreseeable future); (2) diffusing secondary threats (to focus on a greater threat); and (3) buying time (to rearm and/or secure allies against the current threat). British appeasement was primarily a strategy of buying time for rearmament against Germany. British leaders understood the Nazi menace and did not expect that appeasement would avoid an eventual war with Germany. They believed that by the time of the Rhineland crisis of 1936 the balance of power had already shifted in Germany's favor, but that British rearmament would work to reverse the balance by the end of the decade. Appeasement was a strategy to delay an expected confrontation with Germany until the military balance was more favorable.

Alexander George was a towering figure who made path breaking and enduring contribu tions to political psychology, international relations, and social science methodology. I focus on George's closely related research programs on deterrence and coercive diplomacy, with special attention to the importance of the asymmetry of motivation, strategies for "designing around" a deterrent threat, the controllability of risks, images of the adversary, signaling, the sequential failure of deterrence, the role of positive inducements along with coercive threats, and the need for actor-specific models of the adversary. In the process, I highlight other elements of George's theoretically and methodologically integrated research program: his conceptions of the proper role of theory; his emphasis on the infeasibility of a universal theory and the need for conditional generalizations that are historically grounded, sensitive to context, bounded by scope conditions, and useful for policy makers; and the indispensability of process tracing in theoretically driven case

I define the concept of preventive war, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and examine numerous conceptual issues that confound theoretical and empirical analyses of prevention. I then consider the argument that democracies rarely if ever adopt preventive war strategies because such strategies are contrary to the preferences of democratic publics and to the values and identities of democratic states. I examine a number of historical cases of anticipated power shifts by democratic states, and analyze the motivations for war and the mobilization of public support for war. The evidence contradicts both the descriptive proposition that democracies do not adopt preventive war strategies and causal propositions about the constraining effects of democratic institutions and democratic political cultures.

I focus on the role of case studies in developing causal explanations. I distinguish between the theoretical purposes of case studies and the case selection strategies or research designs used to advance those objectives. I construct a typology of case studies based on their purposes: idiographic (inductive and theory-guided), hypothesis-generating, hypothesis-testing, and plausibility probe case studies. I then examine different case study research designs, including comparable cases, most and least likely cases, deviant cases, and process tracing, with attention to their different purposes and logics of inference. I address the issue of selection bias and the “single logic” debate, and I emphasize the utility of multi-method research.

Although many decisions involve a stream of payoffs over time, political scientists have given little attention to how actors make the required tradeoffs between present and future payoffs, other than applying the standard exponential discounting model from economics. After summarizing the basic discounting model, we identify some of its leading behavioral anomalies—declining discount rates; preference reversals; higher discount rates for smaller payoffs than for larger payoffs and for gains than for losses; framing effects based on expectations; and a preference for ascending rather than descending sequences. We examine the leading alternative models of discounting and then apply a quasi-hyperbolic discount model to the problem of cooperation in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma games. We demonstrate that if actors display the widely observed tendency to highly discount the immediate future, then cooperation in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game is more difficult than Axelrod suggests.

The author accepts the basic argument that recent advances in qualitative methods have had an uneven impact on the three major empirical fields in political science. He emphasizes that scholars in all three fields have made significant contributions to qualitative methodology, but these contributions have a more profound impact on the practice of qualitative work in comparative and international politics than in American politics. The author argues that the differences between qualitative and quantitative or formal research are less pronounced than some would believe. In particular, the author argues that scholars have overstated the argument that qualitative researchers are significantly more skeptical of universal generalizations, more inclined to incorporate scope conditions into their theories, and more complex in their views of social reality than are quantitative and formal researchers.

The central proposition of balance-of-power theory (albeit one that has never been tested systematically) is that great powers balance against hegemonic threats. This article argues that this proposition applies to hegemonic concentrations of land-based military power in autonomous continental systems, but not necessarily to hegemonic concentrations of sea power in maritime systems. With a focus on continental systems, this article develops and tests several hypotheses linking military concentration, capability changes, and alliance responses for the European system from 1495 to 1999. Judging from existing data on army concentrations and a new database of great-power alliances since 1495, European great powers have demonstrated a strong propensity to balance when one state has acquired a third or more of the total military capabilities in the system, but not at lower concentrations of power; higher concentrations of power usually lead to larger balancing coalitions. Great powers do not always balance, how...

Ever since Thucydides suggested that the Athenian expedition to conquer Sicily in 415 bc was driven in part by Alcibiades' attempt to use a foreign victory to promote his own political fortunes (Thucydides 1996:Book VI), observers have noted attempts by political elites to bolster their domestic positions through adventurous foreign policies and wars. Shakespeare suggested to statesmen that “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds/With foreign quarrels,” and Bodin argued that “the best way of preserving a state, and guaranteeing it against sedition, rebellion, and civil war is to…find an enemy against whom [the subjects] can make common cause” (cited in Levy 1989). The tendency for foreign crises and wars to generate “rally-‘round-the-flag” effects that increase popular support for political leaders is often explained in terms of the “in-group/out-group”(or “conflict-cohesion”) hypothesis (Coser 1956). Conflict with an out-group increases the cohesion of the in-group and support for the group leader. Anticipating this, leaders beset by domestic problems may be tempted to engage in hostile action against an external adversary. The “diversionary theory of war” is now a major research program in the field, and a good example of how a combination of statistical, formal-theoretic, and case study research can contribute significantly to the cumulation of knowledge. The theory posits strategic behavior by the governing elite and a nearly automatic surge of popular enthusiasm and support, but gives little, if any, attention to the role of organized political opposition to the government.2 In focusing on the political incentives of the government and neglecting those of the opposition, scholars have missed an important implication of diversionary theory. Just as political leaders sometimes use military force to advance their domestic interests, the domestic opposition sometimes actively opposes war and tries to prevent the government from initiating it because the opposition expects …

IN THEIR DEFENSE of the town of Grave against a siege by the Dutch and their allies in 1674, the French, concerned that the town was dangerously overstuffed with ammunition from other fortresses th...