Contentious Issues, Domestic Politics, and the Probability of Militarized Conflict.

Over the last decade, scholarly literature has recognized that the probability of conflict initiation, escalation, and termination is a function, in part, of the nature of issues in contention. Yet, the explanations provided to account for the empirical findings on the relationship between issue type and conflict behavior have not gone much beyond ex post justifications. This study is an attempt to address this lacuna and provide a theoretical framework for the relationship between issues and conflict escalation. The issue literature argues that the more salient the issue at stake for a state, the more likely the bargaining failure, i.e., war, is. My concurrence with this observation notwithstanding, this paper goes beyond this oft-asserted argument and raises two central questions: What are the sources of issue salience? How does issue salience manifest itself at the bargaining table? I argue that the sources of issue salience lie in domestic politics, and issue salience affects bargaining failures by increasing or decreasing the sensitivity to the cost of fighting. Therefore, it is the interests of the winning coalition on whom leaders rely to remain in office and mobilize resources that influence the probability of conflict. The more valuable the issue in contention for the domestic winning coalition, the more salient the issue is, and the smaller the bargaining range. I further argue that the salience of particular type of issues varies systematically across different domestic institutional designs (i.e., democracy versus autocracy) and over time. I subject my propositions to empirical testing using the updated MID3 dataset and discuss the implications of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]