Sarah E Croco
Biographic Data
| ID | 1046987 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sarah E Croco |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sarah E |
| FAMILY NAME | Croco |
| SIGNATURE | CROCO S E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8345-6104 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 521 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Protests and persuasion: Partisanships effect on evaluating nonviolent tactics in the United States
How does the public respond to nonviolent resistance tactics? This survey experiment examines both approval and perceptions of legitimacy for five nonviolent tactics using a sample of American adults. We include two variations in our treatment - first examining responses to different protest tactics, then adding in the factor of co-partisanship, which we argue is a relevant identity in the US political context. In the non-partisan treatments, we …
The Face of the Problem: How Subordinates Shield Executives from Blame
Though avoiding blame is often a goal of elected officials, there are relatively few empirical examinations of how citizens assign blame during controversies. We are particularly interested in how this process works when an executive has been caught in a lie. Using two survey experiments, we examine whether subordinates can shield executives when they act as the face of a crisis. We first leverage a real-life situation involving the family separa…
Making them pay: Using the norm of honesty to generate costs for political lies
At What Cost? Reexamining Audience Costs in Realistic Settings
Scholars have argued that leaders pay domestic audience costs for backing down from a prior position. We challenge this argument theoretically and methodologically. We argue that scholars have erred by measuring "costs" exclusively through disapproval of a leader's handling of the situation when general job approval more accurately reflects audience cost theory. This distinction matters because Americans often have strong existing opinions of the…
Special Issue on “American Bias”
A “Big Tent” Issue
This, our team's penultimate issue of the Journal of Global Security Studies, demonstrates the big tent we hoped for from the journal's start. It is big in both its demonstration of our growing backlog (we are trying to pack in as much as we can to give our successors a little more editing space) and in its showcasing of our substantive, methodological, and theoretical diversity. We believe the backlog and the different article orientations toget…
Exclusion and Inclusion in Global Security Studies
Journal Article Exclusion and Inclusion in Global Security Studies Get access Deborah Avant, Deborah Avant Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bear Braumoeller, Bear Braumoeller Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Erica Chenoweth, Erica Chenoweth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sarah Croco, Sarah Croco Search for other works by this …
Teflon Don or Politics as Usual? An Examination of Foreign Policy Flip-Flops in the Age of Trump
American politics in the age of Donald Trump is characterized by negative affect toward politicians of the opposing party and a willingness on the part of citizens to forgive most sins of copartisans. Against this backdrop, we ask whether Trump's numerous high-profile reversals on foreign policy issues matter. Given our polarized political environment, we argue that there is little reason for Trump to worry about looking inconsistent. Drawing on …
Student-Run Exit Polls 101
As professors, we seek not only to impart knowledge about issues and concepts in American politics but also to engage and inspire students to become more knowledgeable and more active in politics. This article explains how a student-run exit poll conducted on Election Day 2016 accomplished both goals. Seven faculty members from four universities pooled our students and carried out an exit poll in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and …
Breadth, Conversation, and Controversy
The “big tent” mission of the Journal of Global Security Studies is well illustrated by this issue, as our first four articles explore issues from ontological security to cyber secrecy to sexual torture to traditional analyses of compellent threats. The next three articles illustrate the value of conversation between different parts of the field in their juxtaposition of arms control, humanitarianism, and empire; security governance and domestic …
Threat Perception and American Support for Torture
The Flipside of Flip-Flopping: Leader Inconsistency, Citizen Preferences, and the War in Iraq
In recent years, the term “flip-flopper” has become increasingly prominent. Politicians employ the term in an attempt to make their opponents look unattractive to voters. The question of whether this tactic works, however, remains unanswered. Existing research demonstrates that citizens do not like inconsistency as a matter of principle, but we know little about its effects in practice. In this paper, I conduct an experiment that allows me to asc…
War Outcomes and Leader Tenure
A growing body of literature argues that war outcomes affect leaders’ tenure in office. But disagreement persists over how domestic political institutions translate performance in war into leader accountability. Some scholars argue that the tenure of democratic leaders is most sensitive to war outcomes, while others posit that autocratic leaders are more likely to be punished or rewarded for the outcomes of conflicts. The authors argue that exist…
Peace at What Price: Leader Culpability and the Domestic Politics of War Termination
Why do some leaders stay in wars they are unlikely to win? Why do other leaders give in to their adversaries' demands when continued fighting is still possible? Peace at What Price? strives to answer these questions by offering a new theoretical concept: leader culpability. Culpable leaders - those who can be credibly linked to the decision to involve the state in the war - face a significantly higher likelihood of domestic punishment if they fai…
Flip-Flops and High Heels: An Experimental Analysis of Elite Position Change and Gender on Wartime Public Support
We address whether politicians’ flip-flopping on support for a war is damaging to their electoral fortunes, and if the gender of the politician has a conditioning effect on this relationship. A series of survey experiments, conducted in 2010 and designed specifically for this project, allows us to examine the causal power of these two cues. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom: respondents do not fault leaders who change their minds abou…
Bringing Law to the Table: Legal Claims, Focal Points, and the Settlement of Territorial Disputes Since 1945
In this article, we argue that international law can help state leaders reach a settlement in territorial disputes by suggesting a focal point for negotiations. International law is more likely to serve as a focal point when the legal principles relevant to the dispute are clear and well established and when one of the states in the dispute has a stronger legal claim to disputed territory. When these two conditions are present, we expect the stat…
Law and the Use of Force in World Politics: The Varied Effects of Law on the Exercise of Military Power in Territorial Disputes
In this paper, we investigate how international law shapes leaders' decisions regarding the use of force in the context of territorial disputes. We argue that if the legal principles relevant to the dispute are capable of suggesting a focal point, international law will have a powerful role to play in informing leader behavior. Specifically, if a focal point exists, the state that it favors will avoid using force and prefer negotiations when cons…
Does International Law Promote the Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes? Evidence from the Study of Territorial Conflicts since 1945
In this article, we explain the role of international law in the resolution of territorial disputes from 1945 to 2000. In doing so, we focus on three outcomes of interest. First, when do states choose to revise the territorial status quo through negotiations instead of force? Second, when are states able to reach a final settlement? Third, when do states prefer a process of legal dispute resolution (i.e., adjudication or arbitration) to bilateral…
The Decider's Dilemma: Leader Culpability, War Outcomes, and Domestic Punishment
A leader's culpability for involving his state in a conflict affects both his war termination calculus and his domestic audience's willingness to punish him if he loses. I define a culpable leader as any leader who either presides over the beginning of a war, or comes to power midwar and shares a political connection with a culpable predecessor. Using a data set created specifically for this study, I find that culpable leaders are more likely tha…
Bear Any Burden? How Democracies Minimize the Costs of War
In this paper, we argue that the greater accountability of democratic leaders to their citizens creates powerful pressures on leaders to reduce the human costs of war. In an analysis of a new dataset of fatalities in interstate wars (1900 to 2005) we find that highly democratic states suffer significantly fewer military and civilian fatalities. We argue that democracies limit their war losses primarily by adopting four specific foreign and milita…
Covenants Without the Sword International Law and the Protection of Civilians in Times of War
Do the international laws of war effectively protect civilian populations from deliberate attack? In a statistical analysis of all interstate wars from 1900 to 2003 the authors find no evidence that signatories of The Hague or Geneva Conventions intentionally kill fewer civilians during war than do nonsignatories. This result holds for democratic signatories and for wars in which both sides are parties to the treaty. Nor do they find evidence tha…
Assessing the Dyadic Approach to Interstate Conflict Processes: A.k.a. “Dangerous” Dyad-Years
The “dyad” has become the analytical cornerstone of quantitative interstate conflict studies. Stuart Bremer, in no small part due to his “Dangerous Dyads” article, has been identified with the dyadic/dyad-year approach. We think this has come at the expense of his interest in “process models” of interstate conflict. Our examination of his writings on The Process of War indicate that multilateral conflict processes are most probably misspecified b…
The Decider's Dilemma: Leader Culpability, War Outcomes, and Domestic Punishment
A leader's culpability for involving his state in a conflict affects both his war termination calculus and his domestic audience's willingness to punish him if he loses. I define a culpable leader as any leader who either presides over the beginning of a war, or comes to power midwar and shares a political connection with a culpable predecessor. Using a data set created specifically for this study, I find that culpable leaders are more likely tha…
Bear Any Burden? How Democracies Minimize the Costs of War
In this paper, we argue that the greater accountability of democratic leaders to their citizens creates powerful pressures on leaders to reduce the human costs of war. In an analysis of a new dataset of fatalities in interstate wars (1900 to 2005) we find that highly democratic states suffer significantly fewer military and civilian fatalities. We argue that democracies limit their war losses primarily by adopting four specific foreign and milita…
Covenants Without the Sword International Law and the Protection of Civilians in Times of War
Do the international laws of war effectively protect civilian populations from deliberate attack? In a statistical analysis of all interstate wars from 1900 to 2003 the authors find no evidence that signatories of The Hague or Geneva Conventions intentionally kill fewer civilians during war than do nonsignatories. This result holds for democratic signatories and for wars in which both sides are parties to the treaty. Nor do they find evidence tha…
Does International Law Promote the Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes? Evidence from the Study of Territorial Conflicts since 1945
In this article, we explain the role of international law in the resolution of territorial disputes from 1945 to 2000. In doing so, we focus on three outcomes of interest. First, when do states choose to revise the territorial status quo through negotiations instead of force? Second, when are states able to reach a final settlement? Third, when do states prefer a process of legal dispute resolution (i.e., adjudication or arbitration) to bilateral…
Threat Perception and American Support for Torture
War Outcomes and Leader Tenure
A growing body of literature argues that war outcomes affect leaders’ tenure in office. But disagreement persists over how domestic political institutions translate performance in war into leader accountability. Some scholars argue that the tenure of democratic leaders is most sensitive to war outcomes, while others posit that autocratic leaders are more likely to be punished or rewarded for the outcomes of conflicts. The authors argue that exist…
Bringing Law to the Table: Legal Claims, Focal Points, and the Settlement of Territorial Disputes Since 1945
In this article, we argue that international law can help state leaders reach a settlement in territorial disputes by suggesting a focal point for negotiations. International law is more likely to serve as a focal point when the legal principles relevant to the dispute are clear and well established and when one of the states in the dispute has a stronger legal claim to disputed territory. When these two conditions are present, we expect the stat…
At What Cost? Reexamining Audience Costs in Realistic Settings
Scholars have argued that leaders pay domestic audience costs for backing down from a prior position. We challenge this argument theoretically and methodologically. We argue that scholars have erred by measuring "costs" exclusively through disapproval of a leader's handling of the situation when general job approval more accurately reflects audience cost theory. This distinction matters because Americans often have strong existing opinions of the…
Flip-Flops and High Heels: An Experimental Analysis of Elite Position Change and Gender on Wartime Public Support
We address whether politicians’ flip-flopping on support for a war is damaging to their electoral fortunes, and if the gender of the politician has a conditioning effect on this relationship. A series of survey experiments, conducted in 2010 and designed specifically for this project, allows us to examine the causal power of these two cues. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom: respondents do not fault leaders who change their minds abou…
Teflon Don or Politics as Usual? An Examination of Foreign Policy Flip-Flops in the Age of Trump
American politics in the age of Donald Trump is characterized by negative affect toward politicians of the opposing party and a willingness on the part of citizens to forgive most sins of copartisans. Against this backdrop, we ask whether Trump's numerous high-profile reversals on foreign policy issues matter. Given our polarized political environment, we argue that there is little reason for Trump to worry about looking inconsistent. Drawing on …
Law and the Use of Force in World Politics: The Varied Effects of Law on the Exercise of Military Power in Territorial Disputes
In this paper, we investigate how international law shapes leaders' decisions regarding the use of force in the context of territorial disputes. We argue that if the legal principles relevant to the dispute are capable of suggesting a focal point, international law will have a powerful role to play in informing leader behavior. Specifically, if a focal point exists, the state that it favors will avoid using force and prefer negotiations when cons…
Assessing the Dyadic Approach to Interstate Conflict Processes: A.k.a. “Dangerous” Dyad-Years
The “dyad” has become the analytical cornerstone of quantitative interstate conflict studies. Stuart Bremer, in no small part due to his “Dangerous Dyads” article, has been identified with the dyadic/dyad-year approach. We think this has come at the expense of his interest in “process models” of interstate conflict. Our examination of his writings on The Process of War indicate that multilateral conflict processes are most probably misspecified b…
The Flipside of Flip-Flopping: Leader Inconsistency, Citizen Preferences, and the War in Iraq
In recent years, the term “flip-flopper” has become increasingly prominent. Politicians employ the term in an attempt to make their opponents look unattractive to voters. The question of whether this tactic works, however, remains unanswered. Existing research demonstrates that citizens do not like inconsistency as a matter of principle, but we know little about its effects in practice. In this paper, I conduct an experiment that allows me to asc…
Protests and persuasion: Partisanships effect on evaluating nonviolent tactics in the United States
How does the public respond to nonviolent resistance tactics? This survey experiment examines both approval and perceptions of legitimacy for five nonviolent tactics using a sample of American adults. We include two variations in our treatment - first examining responses to different protest tactics, then adding in the factor of co-partisanship, which we argue is a relevant identity in the US political context. In the non-partisan treatments, we …
Exclusion and Inclusion in Global Security Studies
Journal Article Exclusion and Inclusion in Global Security Studies Get access Deborah Avant, Deborah Avant Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bear Braumoeller, Bear Braumoeller Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Erica Chenoweth, Erica Chenoweth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sarah Croco, Sarah Croco Search for other works by this …
Student-Run Exit Polls 101
As professors, we seek not only to impart knowledge about issues and concepts in American politics but also to engage and inspire students to become more knowledgeable and more active in politics. This article explains how a student-run exit poll conducted on Election Day 2016 accomplished both goals. Seven faculty members from four universities pooled our students and carried out an exit poll in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and …
Assessing the Dyadic Approach to Interstate Conflict Processes: A.k.a. “Dangerous” Dyad-Years
The “dyad” has become the analytical cornerstone of quantitative interstate conflict studies. Stuart Bremer, in no small part due to his “Dangerous Dyads” article, has been identified with the dyadic/dyad-year approach. We think this has come at the expense of his interest in “process models” of interstate conflict. Our examination of his writings on The Process of War indicate that multilateral conflict processes are most probably misspecified b…
Covenants Without the Sword International Law and the Protection of Civilians in Times of War
Do the international laws of war effectively protect civilian populations from deliberate attack? In a statistical analysis of all interstate wars from 1900 to 2003 the authors find no evidence that signatories of The Hague or Geneva Conventions intentionally kill fewer civilians during war than do nonsignatories. This result holds for democratic signatories and for wars in which both sides are parties to the treaty. Nor do they find evidence tha…
Bear Any Burden? How Democracies Minimize the Costs of War
In this paper, we argue that the greater accountability of democratic leaders to their citizens creates powerful pressures on leaders to reduce the human costs of war. In an analysis of a new dataset of fatalities in interstate wars (1900 to 2005) we find that highly democratic states suffer significantly fewer military and civilian fatalities. We argue that democracies limit their war losses primarily by adopting four specific foreign and milita…
Does International Law Promote the Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes? Evidence from the Study of Territorial Conflicts since 1945
In this article, we explain the role of international law in the resolution of territorial disputes from 1945 to 2000. In doing so, we focus on three outcomes of interest. First, when do states choose to revise the territorial status quo through negotiations instead of force? Second, when are states able to reach a final settlement? Third, when do states prefer a process of legal dispute resolution (i.e., adjudication or arbitration) to bilateral…
The Decider's Dilemma: Leader Culpability, War Outcomes, and Domestic Punishment
A leader's culpability for involving his state in a conflict affects both his war termination calculus and his domestic audience's willingness to punish him if he loses. I define a culpable leader as any leader who either presides over the beginning of a war, or comes to power midwar and shares a political connection with a culpable predecessor. Using a data set created specifically for this study, I find that culpable leaders are more likely tha…
Law and the Use of Force in World Politics: The Varied Effects of Law on the Exercise of Military Power in Territorial Disputes
In this paper, we investigate how international law shapes leaders' decisions regarding the use of force in the context of territorial disputes. We argue that if the legal principles relevant to the dispute are capable of suggesting a focal point, international law will have a powerful role to play in informing leader behavior. Specifically, if a focal point exists, the state that it favors will avoid using force and prefer negotiations when cons…
Bringing Law to the Table: Legal Claims, Focal Points, and the Settlement of Territorial Disputes Since 1945
In this article, we argue that international law can help state leaders reach a settlement in territorial disputes by suggesting a focal point for negotiations. International law is more likely to serve as a focal point when the legal principles relevant to the dispute are clear and well established and when one of the states in the dispute has a stronger legal claim to disputed territory. When these two conditions are present, we expect the stat…
Flip-Flops and High Heels: An Experimental Analysis of Elite Position Change and Gender on Wartime Public Support
We address whether politicians’ flip-flopping on support for a war is damaging to their electoral fortunes, and if the gender of the politician has a conditioning effect on this relationship. A series of survey experiments, conducted in 2010 and designed specifically for this project, allows us to examine the causal power of these two cues. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom: respondents do not fault leaders who change their minds abou…
Peace at What Price: Leader Culpability and the Domestic Politics of War Termination
Why do some leaders stay in wars they are unlikely to win? Why do other leaders give in to their adversaries' demands when continued fighting is still possible? Peace at What Price? strives to answer these questions by offering a new theoretical concept: leader culpability. Culpable leaders - those who can be credibly linked to the decision to involve the state in the war - face a significantly higher likelihood of domestic punishment if they fai…
The Flipside of Flip-Flopping: Leader Inconsistency, Citizen Preferences, and the War in Iraq
In recent years, the term “flip-flopper” has become increasingly prominent. Politicians employ the term in an attempt to make their opponents look unattractive to voters. The question of whether this tactic works, however, remains unanswered. Existing research demonstrates that citizens do not like inconsistency as a matter of principle, but we know little about its effects in practice. In this paper, I conduct an experiment that allows me to asc…
War Outcomes and Leader Tenure
A growing body of literature argues that war outcomes affect leaders’ tenure in office. But disagreement persists over how domestic political institutions translate performance in war into leader accountability. Some scholars argue that the tenure of democratic leaders is most sensitive to war outcomes, while others posit that autocratic leaders are more likely to be punished or rewarded for the outcomes of conflicts. The authors argue that exist…
Breadth, Conversation, and Controversy
The “big tent” mission of the Journal of Global Security Studies is well illustrated by this issue, as our first four articles explore issues from ontological security to cyber secrecy to sexual torture to traditional analyses of compellent threats. The next three articles illustrate the value of conversation between different parts of the field in their juxtaposition of arms control, humanitarianism, and empire; security governance and domestic …
Threat Perception and American Support for Torture
Special Issue on “American Bias”
A “Big Tent” Issue
This, our team's penultimate issue of the Journal of Global Security Studies, demonstrates the big tent we hoped for from the journal's start. It is big in both its demonstration of our growing backlog (we are trying to pack in as much as we can to give our successors a little more editing space) and in its showcasing of our substantive, methodological, and theoretical diversity. We believe the backlog and the different article orientations toget…
Exclusion and Inclusion in Global Security Studies
Journal Article Exclusion and Inclusion in Global Security Studies Get access Deborah Avant, Deborah Avant Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bear Braumoeller, Bear Braumoeller Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Erica Chenoweth, Erica Chenoweth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sarah Croco, Sarah Croco Search for other works by this …
Teflon Don or Politics as Usual? An Examination of Foreign Policy Flip-Flops in the Age of Trump
American politics in the age of Donald Trump is characterized by negative affect toward politicians of the opposing party and a willingness on the part of citizens to forgive most sins of copartisans. Against this backdrop, we ask whether Trump's numerous high-profile reversals on foreign policy issues matter. Given our polarized political environment, we argue that there is little reason for Trump to worry about looking inconsistent. Drawing on …
Student-Run Exit Polls 101
As professors, we seek not only to impart knowledge about issues and concepts in American politics but also to engage and inspire students to become more knowledgeable and more active in politics. This article explains how a student-run exit poll conducted on Election Day 2016 accomplished both goals. Seven faculty members from four universities pooled our students and carried out an exit poll in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and …
The Face of the Problem: How Subordinates Shield Executives from Blame
Though avoiding blame is often a goal of elected officials, there are relatively few empirical examinations of how citizens assign blame during controversies. We are particularly interested in how this process works when an executive has been caught in a lie. Using two survey experiments, we examine whether subordinates can shield executives when they act as the face of a crisis. We first leverage a real-life situation involving the family separa…
Making them pay: Using the norm of honesty to generate costs for political lies
At What Cost? Reexamining Audience Costs in Realistic Settings
Scholars have argued that leaders pay domestic audience costs for backing down from a prior position. We challenge this argument theoretically and methodologically. We argue that scholars have erred by measuring "costs" exclusively through disapproval of a leader's handling of the situation when general job approval more accurately reflects audience cost theory. This distinction matters because Americans often have strong existing opinions of the…
Protests and persuasion: Partisanships effect on evaluating nonviolent tactics in the United States
How does the public respond to nonviolent resistance tactics? This survey experiment examines both approval and perceptions of legitimacy for five nonviolent tactics using a sample of American adults. We include two variations in our treatment - first examining responses to different protest tactics, then adding in the factor of co-partisanship, which we argue is a relevant identity in the US political context. In the non-partisan treatments, we …
Political science (22 works) · Law (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (9 works) · Law and economics (8 works)