Robert Trager
Biographic Data
| ID | 1418280 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Trager |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Trager |
| SIGNATURE | TRAGER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6201-2811 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 351 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
International governance of advancing artificial intelligence
New technologies with military applications may demand new modes of governance. In this article, we develop a taxonomy of technology governance forms, outline their strengths, and red-team their weaknesses. In particular, we consider the challenges and opportunities posed by advancing artificial intelligence, which is likely to have substantial dual-use properties. We conclude that subnational governance, though prevalent and mitigating some risk…
Leader age and international conflict: A regression discontinuity analysis
Does leader age matter for the likelihood of interstate conflict? Many studies in biology, psychology, and physiology have found that aggression tends to decline with age throughout the adult lifespan, particularly in males. Moreover, a number of major international conflicts have been attributed to young leaders, including the conquests of Alexander the Great and the ambitious military campaigns of Napoleon. However, the exact nature of the rela…
Uncertainty, Information, and Risk in International Technology Races
A formal model reveals how the information environment affects international races to implement a powerful, dangerous new military technology, which may cause a “disaster” affecting all states. States implementing the technology face a tradeoff between the safety of the technology and performance in the race. States face unknown, private, and public information about capabilities. More decisive races, in which small performance leads produce larg…
How Women Shape the Course of War: Women’s Suffrage and the Election of 1916
Studies have shown that across time and place, women, on average, are less supportive of the use of force than men. This implies that extensions of the franchise to women provide an opportunity to evaluate theories of democratic constraint on foreign policy decision making. In this article, we theorize democratic constraint on war and peace, arguing that it is a common latent constraint on elite actions and an active constraint when one party is …
The Security Governance Challenge of Emerging Technologies
Concessions for Concession’s Sake: Injustice, Indignation, and the Construction of Intractable Conflict in Israel–Palestine
In intractable conflicts, what factors lead populations to accept negotiated outcomes? To examine these issues, we conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of the Jewish Israeli population and a companion experiment on a representative sample of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. We find that holding the negotiated settlement outcome constant, approval of the settlement is strongly influenced by whether it is framed as a negoti…
The prejudice first model and foreign policy values: Racial and Religious Bias Among Conservatives and Liberals
Scholars who study public opinion and American foreign policy have accepted what Rathbun et al. (2016) call the “Vertical Hierarchy Model,” which says that policy attitudes are determined by more abstract moral ideas about right and wrong. This article turns this idea on its head by introducing the Prejudice First Model, arguing that foreign policy preferences and orientations are driven by attitudes toward the groups being affected by specific p…
The Suffragist Peace
Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women: across a variety of contexts, women generally prefer more peaceful options and are less supportive of making threats and initiating conflict. But how do these preferences affect states’ decisions for war and patterns of conflict at the international level, such as the democratic peace? Women have increasingly participated in political decision making over the…
Things You Can See From There You Can't See From Here: Blind Spots in the American Perspective in IR and Their Effects
How do the limitations of the American perspective in international relations (IR) affect the accuracy of theorizing? We show that assumptions about the relationship between domestic and international politics that underlie significant segments of American IR scholarship are unwarranted. Publics around the world do not respond to United Nations’ and other intergovernmental organizations’ criticism of their governments in the same way that America…
Is There a War Party? Party Change, the Left–Right Divide, and International Conflict
Are leaders from certain parties particularly likely to engage in military conflict? This question is difficult to answer because of selection bias. For example, countries may be more likely to elect right-wing leaders if their publics are more hawkish or if the international system is particularly dangerous. Put simply, who comes to power is not random, which makes causal inference difficult. We overcome this problem by using a regression discon…
Diplomacy: Communication and the Origins of International Order
How do adversaries communicate? How do diplomatic encounters shape international orders and determine whether states go to war? Diplomacy, from alliance politics to nuclear brinkmanship, almost always operates through a few forms of signaling: choosing the scope of demands on another state, risking a breach in relations, encouraging a protégé, staking one's reputation, or making a diplomatic approach all convey specific sorts of information. Thro…
A Preference for War: How Fairness and Rhetoric Influence Leadership Incentives in Crises
We conduct a survey experiment to examine the effects of international compromise, war, and foreign government rhetoric on presidential approval. We find that, in certain conflicts, popular approval tracks fairness heuristics—leaders seeking to maximize voter approval prefer equitable divisions of disputed goods and are risk acceptant for divisions below this threshold. Moreover, aggressive rhetoric by a foreign leader increases domestic leaders’…
The Diplomacy of War and Peace
Two broad traditions of scholarship can be distinguished in the vast literature on the diplomacy of conflict. The diplomatic communication tradition takes the difficulty of credible communication between adversaries as its central problem and analyzes the conditions for informative costly, costless, and inadvertent signals as well as the effects on conflict processes of these different forms of communication. A body of empirical work, focused par…
Diplomatic Signaling among Multiple States
Despite the difficulty of communicating with adversaries, scholars have described a variety of signaling mechanisms that relate to bilateral negotiations between states. This article demonstrates that when more than two states are involved, states have additional, costless means of communicating their intentions. In particular, statements of a third party to a dispute on behalf of a "protégé" are credible because of the effect these statements ha…
How the scope of a demand conveys resolve
How does the scope of costless threats convey information about resolve to adversaries? Analysis of a model similar to Fearon demonstrates that higher demands increase perceptions of a state’s resolve to fight for more favorable outcomes when bargaining is such that both sides share in the benefits of avoiding conflict, in contrast to the ultimatum game, and making a credible high demand does not lead to a favorable outcome with certainty. Intere…
Long-Term Consequences of Aggressive Diplomacy: European Relations after Austrian Crimean War Threats
There is a large literature on the impacts of explicit threats on the outcomes of crises between states, but the longer-term impacts of threats on dyadic state relationships and on international outcomes have been much less studied because of the difficulty of establishing causal connections between events separated in time. By comparing nearly identical foreign policy contexts before and after the Austrian Crimean War ultimata to Russia, this ar…
Multidimensional Diplomacy
States often negotiate with each other over more than one issue at the same time. This article presents a model of multidimensional international crisis bargaining. Unlike unidimensional bargaining, with two issue dimensions states can send costless signals about their resolve that have dramatic effects on other states' beliefs and actions. One reason is that when states claim a willingness to fight over an issue they in fact are not willing to f…
The Political Costs of Crisis Bargaining: Presidential Rhetoric and the Role of Party
We analyze the first large-scale, randomized experiment to measure presidential approval levels at all outcomes of a canonical international crisis-bargaining model, thereby avoiding problems of strategic selection in evaluating presidential incentives. We find support for several assumptions made in the crisis-bargaining literature, including that a concession from a foreign state leads to higher approval levels than other outcomes, that the mag…
Diplomatic Calculus in Anarchy: How Communication Matters
When states come to believe that other states are hostile to their interests, they often reorient their foreign policies by realigning alliance commitments, building arms, striking first, mobilizing troops, or adopting policies to drain the resources of states that menace them. This article presents a crisis bargaining model that allows threatened states a wider array of responses than the choice to back down or not. Two implications are that (1)…
Deterring Terrorism: It Can Be Done
Many scholars and policymakers argue that deterrence strategies have no significant role to play in counterterrorism. The case against deterrence rests on three pillars: terrorists are irrational; they value their political ends far above anything deterring states could hold at risk; and they are impossible tofind. Each pillar is either incorrect or its implications for deterrence have been misunderstood. Under certain conditions, deterrence is p…
Deterring Terrorism: It Can Be Done
Entangled Values: The First Amendment in the 1990s
Entangled Values: The First Amendment in the 1990s Get access Robert Trager Robert Trager 1University of Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 45, Issue 1, March 1995, Pages 163–170, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1995.tb00722.x Published: 07 February 2006
The Whole Truth: The First Amendment, Cultural Studies, and Comparative Law
The Political Costs of Crisis Bargaining: Presidential Rhetoric and the Role of Party
We analyze the first large-scale, randomized experiment to measure presidential approval levels at all outcomes of a canonical international crisis-bargaining model, thereby avoiding problems of strategic selection in evaluating presidential incentives. We find support for several assumptions made in the crisis-bargaining literature, including that a concession from a foreign state leads to higher approval levels than other outcomes, that the mag…
Diplomatic Calculus in Anarchy: How Communication Matters
When states come to believe that other states are hostile to their interests, they often reorient their foreign policies by realigning alliance commitments, building arms, striking first, mobilizing troops, or adopting policies to drain the resources of states that menace them. This article presents a crisis bargaining model that allows threatened states a wider array of responses than the choice to back down or not. Two implications are that (1)…
A Preference for War: How Fairness and Rhetoric Influence Leadership Incentives in Crises
We conduct a survey experiment to examine the effects of international compromise, war, and foreign government rhetoric on presidential approval. We find that, in certain conflicts, popular approval tracks fairness heuristics—leaders seeking to maximize voter approval prefer equitable divisions of disputed goods and are risk acceptant for divisions below this threshold. Moreover, aggressive rhetoric by a foreign leader increases domestic leaders’…
Is There a War Party? Party Change, the Left–Right Divide, and International Conflict
Are leaders from certain parties particularly likely to engage in military conflict? This question is difficult to answer because of selection bias. For example, countries may be more likely to elect right-wing leaders if their publics are more hawkish or if the international system is particularly dangerous. Put simply, who comes to power is not random, which makes causal inference difficult. We overcome this problem by using a regression discon…
The Diplomacy of War and Peace
Two broad traditions of scholarship can be distinguished in the vast literature on the diplomacy of conflict. The diplomatic communication tradition takes the difficulty of credible communication between adversaries as its central problem and analyzes the conditions for informative costly, costless, and inadvertent signals as well as the effects on conflict processes of these different forms of communication. A body of empirical work, focused par…
Diplomatic Signaling among Multiple States
Despite the difficulty of communicating with adversaries, scholars have described a variety of signaling mechanisms that relate to bilateral negotiations between states. This article demonstrates that when more than two states are involved, states have additional, costless means of communicating their intentions. In particular, statements of a third party to a dispute on behalf of a "protégé" are credible because of the effect these statements ha…
The Suffragist Peace
Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women: across a variety of contexts, women generally prefer more peaceful options and are less supportive of making threats and initiating conflict. But how do these preferences affect states’ decisions for war and patterns of conflict at the international level, such as the democratic peace? Women have increasingly participated in political decision making over the…
Multidimensional Diplomacy
States often negotiate with each other over more than one issue at the same time. This article presents a model of multidimensional international crisis bargaining. Unlike unidimensional bargaining, with two issue dimensions states can send costless signals about their resolve that have dramatic effects on other states' beliefs and actions. One reason is that when states claim a willingness to fight over an issue they in fact are not willing to f…
Deterring Terrorism: It Can Be Done
Things You Can See From There You Can't See From Here: Blind Spots in the American Perspective in IR and Their Effects
How do the limitations of the American perspective in international relations (IR) affect the accuracy of theorizing? We show that assumptions about the relationship between domestic and international politics that underlie significant segments of American IR scholarship are unwarranted. Publics around the world do not respond to United Nations’ and other intergovernmental organizations’ criticism of their governments in the same way that America…
How the scope of a demand conveys resolve
How does the scope of costless threats convey information about resolve to adversaries? Analysis of a model similar to Fearon demonstrates that higher demands increase perceptions of a state’s resolve to fight for more favorable outcomes when bargaining is such that both sides share in the benefits of avoiding conflict, in contrast to the ultimatum game, and making a credible high demand does not lead to a favorable outcome with certainty. Intere…
Long-Term Consequences of Aggressive Diplomacy: European Relations after Austrian Crimean War Threats
There is a large literature on the impacts of explicit threats on the outcomes of crises between states, but the longer-term impacts of threats on dyadic state relationships and on international outcomes have been much less studied because of the difficulty of establishing causal connections between events separated in time. By comparing nearly identical foreign policy contexts before and after the Austrian Crimean War ultimata to Russia, this ar…
The prejudice first model and foreign policy values: Racial and Religious Bias Among Conservatives and Liberals
Scholars who study public opinion and American foreign policy have accepted what Rathbun et al. (2016) call the “Vertical Hierarchy Model,” which says that policy attitudes are determined by more abstract moral ideas about right and wrong. This article turns this idea on its head by introducing the Prejudice First Model, arguing that foreign policy preferences and orientations are driven by attitudes toward the groups being affected by specific p…
Deterring Terrorism: It Can Be Done
Many scholars and policymakers argue that deterrence strategies have no significant role to play in counterterrorism. The case against deterrence rests on three pillars: terrorists are irrational; they value their political ends far above anything deterring states could hold at risk; and they are impossible tofind. Each pillar is either incorrect or its implications for deterrence have been misunderstood. Under certain conditions, deterrence is p…
Concessions for Concession’s Sake: Injustice, Indignation, and the Construction of Intractable Conflict in Israel–Palestine
In intractable conflicts, what factors lead populations to accept negotiated outcomes? To examine these issues, we conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of the Jewish Israeli population and a companion experiment on a representative sample of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. We find that holding the negotiated settlement outcome constant, approval of the settlement is strongly influenced by whether it is framed as a negoti…
Leader age and international conflict: A regression discontinuity analysis
Does leader age matter for the likelihood of interstate conflict? Many studies in biology, psychology, and physiology have found that aggression tends to decline with age throughout the adult lifespan, particularly in males. Moreover, a number of major international conflicts have been attributed to young leaders, including the conquests of Alexander the Great and the ambitious military campaigns of Napoleon. However, the exact nature of the rela…
Uncertainty, Information, and Risk in International Technology Races
A formal model reveals how the information environment affects international races to implement a powerful, dangerous new military technology, which may cause a “disaster” affecting all states. States implementing the technology face a tradeoff between the safety of the technology and performance in the race. States face unknown, private, and public information about capabilities. More decisive races, in which small performance leads produce larg…
Entangled Values: The First Amendment in the 1990s
Entangled Values: The First Amendment in the 1990s Get access Robert Trager Robert Trager 1University of Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 45, Issue 1, March 1995, Pages 163–170, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1995.tb00722.x Published: 07 February 2006
The Whole Truth: The First Amendment, Cultural Studies, and Comparative Law
Deterring Terrorism: It Can Be Done
Deterring Terrorism: It Can Be Done
Many scholars and policymakers argue that deterrence strategies have no significant role to play in counterterrorism. The case against deterrence rests on three pillars: terrorists are irrational; they value their political ends far above anything deterring states could hold at risk; and they are impossible tofind. Each pillar is either incorrect or its implications for deterrence have been misunderstood. Under certain conditions, deterrence is p…
Diplomatic Calculus in Anarchy: How Communication Matters
When states come to believe that other states are hostile to their interests, they often reorient their foreign policies by realigning alliance commitments, building arms, striking first, mobilizing troops, or adopting policies to drain the resources of states that menace them. This article presents a crisis bargaining model that allows threatened states a wider array of responses than the choice to back down or not. Two implications are that (1)…
Multidimensional Diplomacy
States often negotiate with each other over more than one issue at the same time. This article presents a model of multidimensional international crisis bargaining. Unlike unidimensional bargaining, with two issue dimensions states can send costless signals about their resolve that have dramatic effects on other states' beliefs and actions. One reason is that when states claim a willingness to fight over an issue they in fact are not willing to f…
The Political Costs of Crisis Bargaining: Presidential Rhetoric and the Role of Party
We analyze the first large-scale, randomized experiment to measure presidential approval levels at all outcomes of a canonical international crisis-bargaining model, thereby avoiding problems of strategic selection in evaluating presidential incentives. We find support for several assumptions made in the crisis-bargaining literature, including that a concession from a foreign state leads to higher approval levels than other outcomes, that the mag…
Long-Term Consequences of Aggressive Diplomacy: European Relations after Austrian Crimean War Threats
There is a large literature on the impacts of explicit threats on the outcomes of crises between states, but the longer-term impacts of threats on dyadic state relationships and on international outcomes have been much less studied because of the difficulty of establishing causal connections between events separated in time. By comparing nearly identical foreign policy contexts before and after the Austrian Crimean War ultimata to Russia, this ar…
How the scope of a demand conveys resolve
How does the scope of costless threats convey information about resolve to adversaries? Analysis of a model similar to Fearon demonstrates that higher demands increase perceptions of a state’s resolve to fight for more favorable outcomes when bargaining is such that both sides share in the benefits of avoiding conflict, in contrast to the ultimatum game, and making a credible high demand does not lead to a favorable outcome with certainty. Intere…
Diplomatic Signaling among Multiple States
Despite the difficulty of communicating with adversaries, scholars have described a variety of signaling mechanisms that relate to bilateral negotiations between states. This article demonstrates that when more than two states are involved, states have additional, costless means of communicating their intentions. In particular, statements of a third party to a dispute on behalf of a "protégé" are credible because of the effect these statements ha…
A Preference for War: How Fairness and Rhetoric Influence Leadership Incentives in Crises
We conduct a survey experiment to examine the effects of international compromise, war, and foreign government rhetoric on presidential approval. We find that, in certain conflicts, popular approval tracks fairness heuristics—leaders seeking to maximize voter approval prefer equitable divisions of disputed goods and are risk acceptant for divisions below this threshold. Moreover, aggressive rhetoric by a foreign leader increases domestic leaders’…
The Diplomacy of War and Peace
Two broad traditions of scholarship can be distinguished in the vast literature on the diplomacy of conflict. The diplomatic communication tradition takes the difficulty of credible communication between adversaries as its central problem and analyzes the conditions for informative costly, costless, and inadvertent signals as well as the effects on conflict processes of these different forms of communication. A body of empirical work, focused par…
Diplomacy: Communication and the Origins of International Order
How do adversaries communicate? How do diplomatic encounters shape international orders and determine whether states go to war? Diplomacy, from alliance politics to nuclear brinkmanship, almost always operates through a few forms of signaling: choosing the scope of demands on another state, risking a breach in relations, encouraging a protégé, staking one's reputation, or making a diplomatic approach all convey specific sorts of information. Thro…
Things You Can See From There You Can't See From Here: Blind Spots in the American Perspective in IR and Their Effects
How do the limitations of the American perspective in international relations (IR) affect the accuracy of theorizing? We show that assumptions about the relationship between domestic and international politics that underlie significant segments of American IR scholarship are unwarranted. Publics around the world do not respond to United Nations’ and other intergovernmental organizations’ criticism of their governments in the same way that America…
Is There a War Party? Party Change, the Left–Right Divide, and International Conflict
Are leaders from certain parties particularly likely to engage in military conflict? This question is difficult to answer because of selection bias. For example, countries may be more likely to elect right-wing leaders if their publics are more hawkish or if the international system is particularly dangerous. Put simply, who comes to power is not random, which makes causal inference difficult. We overcome this problem by using a regression discon…
The Suffragist Peace
Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women: across a variety of contexts, women generally prefer more peaceful options and are less supportive of making threats and initiating conflict. But how do these preferences affect states’ decisions for war and patterns of conflict at the international level, such as the democratic peace? Women have increasingly participated in political decision making over the…
Concessions for Concession’s Sake: Injustice, Indignation, and the Construction of Intractable Conflict in Israel–Palestine
In intractable conflicts, what factors lead populations to accept negotiated outcomes? To examine these issues, we conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of the Jewish Israeli population and a companion experiment on a representative sample of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. We find that holding the negotiated settlement outcome constant, approval of the settlement is strongly influenced by whether it is framed as a negoti…
The prejudice first model and foreign policy values: Racial and Religious Bias Among Conservatives and Liberals
Scholars who study public opinion and American foreign policy have accepted what Rathbun et al. (2016) call the “Vertical Hierarchy Model,” which says that policy attitudes are determined by more abstract moral ideas about right and wrong. This article turns this idea on its head by introducing the Prejudice First Model, arguing that foreign policy preferences and orientations are driven by attitudes toward the groups being affected by specific p…
How Women Shape the Course of War: Women’s Suffrage and the Election of 1916
Studies have shown that across time and place, women, on average, are less supportive of the use of force than men. This implies that extensions of the franchise to women provide an opportunity to evaluate theories of democratic constraint on foreign policy decision making. In this article, we theorize democratic constraint on war and peace, arguing that it is a common latent constraint on elite actions and an active constraint when one party is …
The Security Governance Challenge of Emerging Technologies
Uncertainty, Information, and Risk in International Technology Races
A formal model reveals how the information environment affects international races to implement a powerful, dangerous new military technology, which may cause a “disaster” affecting all states. States implementing the technology face a tradeoff between the safety of the technology and performance in the race. States face unknown, private, and public information about capabilities. More decisive races, in which small performance leads produce larg…
Leader age and international conflict: A regression discontinuity analysis
Does leader age matter for the likelihood of interstate conflict? Many studies in biology, psychology, and physiology have found that aggression tends to decline with age throughout the adult lifespan, particularly in males. Moreover, a number of major international conflicts have been attributed to young leaders, including the conquests of Alexander the Great and the ambitious military campaigns of Napoleon. However, the exact nature of the rela…
International governance of advancing artificial intelligence
New technologies with military applications may demand new modes of governance. In this article, we develop a taxonomy of technology governance forms, outline their strengths, and red-team their weaknesses. In particular, we consider the challenges and opportunities posed by advancing artificial intelligence, which is likely to have substantial dual-use properties. We conclude that subnational governance, though prevalent and mitigating some risk…
Law (21 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (17 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Economics (11 works) · Law and economics (9 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (9 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (8 works)