Peace at What Price?: Domestic Politics, Settlement Costs and War Termination.

Abstract

In my dissertation I examine the following question: why do some leaders stay in costly wars that are unlikely to end in victory while other leaders willingly capitulate to their adversary’s demands when resistance remains an option? To explain this variation, I argue, the settlement costs associated with a leader’s personal culpability for involving the state in the conflict must be recognized. Leaders who can be linked to the decision to bring the state to war (culpable leaders) will feel more pressure to secure a favorable outcome and, consequently, will be more tolerant of the costs of war and more likely to “gamble for resurrection” if the war is going poorly. Although the extant war termination literature addresses the notion of settlement costs, pressures specific to individual leaders are often overlooked, obscuring the powerful effect a leader’s culpability has on his war termination calculus. The pressures associated with culpability have implications for both theory and policy because their presence creates a dysfunctional relationship between a democratic leader and his citizens in times of war. I use a multiple methods approach (analyzed an original dataset of all warring leaders from 1816-1990, a national survey experiment funded by Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS)) to evaluate this theory, and find broad support for my hypotheses.