Brandon C Prins
Biographic Data
| ID | 325026 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brandon C Prins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brandon C |
| FAMILY NAME | Prins |
| SIGNATURE | PRINS B C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tennessee at Knoxville |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 401 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Deploying to Protect: The Effect of Military Peacekeeping Deployments on Violence Against Civilians
Do UN peacekeeping forces protect civilians from harm in post-war environments? Current evidence suggests that the answer to this question is yes. But extant research mostly examines this relationship at the country-level and consequently has logical difficulty tracing decreases in civilian fatalities to actual peacekeeper activities. We would have more confidence in the ability of peacekeepers to limit harm and protect non-combatants if the redu…
Domestic Terrorism in Democratic States: Understanding and Addressing Minority Grievances
Scholars continue to disagree on the relationship between regime type and political violence, perhaps because the empirical evidence remains contradictory. To date, most studies generally explore the direct relationship between democracy and terrorism. Yet, we think the effect of regime type on terrorism is conditional on the presence of politically excluded groups whose grievances motivate them to challenge the state. We need to take into accoun…
Financing rebellion: Using piracy to explain and predict conflict intensity in Africa and Southeast Asia
A prominent explanation of the resource-conflict relationship suggests that natural resources finance rebellion by permitting rebel leaders the opportunity to purchase weapons, fighters, and local support. The bunkering of oil in the Niger Delta by quasi-criminal syndicates is an example of how the black-market selling of stolen oil may help finance anti-state groups. More systematic assessments have also shown that the risk and duration of confl…
External threat and the limits of democratic pacifism
Scholars widely recognize that democratic dyads are associated with lower hazards of armed conflict and more efficient conflict resolution. Many attempts have been made to challenge the notion of democratic pacifism, but perhaps the most significant is the argument that the Democratic Peace is epiphenomenal to territorial issues, specifically the external threats that they pose. The presence of an external threat might be the mechanism by which d…
Managing territorial conflict: An introduction to this special issue
When Political Gridlock Reigns in Presidential Foreign Policy: Policy Availability and the Role of Congress
There is an inherent connection between the party cover and policy availability theories that has been largely overlooked by the presidential use of force literature. Party cover views the president's party strength in Congress as the prominent structural source shaping presidential incentives by diffusing responsibility in foreign policy. But policy availability adds to this view by explaining how such domestic conditions shape the variety of ch…
The Homegrown Threat: State Strength, Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism
Scholars maintain that, similar to insurgency, terrorist violence is precipitated by both relative deprivation and state weakness. Yet aggrieved minority groups within a country should turn to terrorism when they are weak relative to the state rather than strong. Empirical evidence shows minority group discrimination and fragile political institutions to independently increase domestic terror attacks. But it remains unclear whether grievances dri…
The politicization of crime: Electoral competition and the supply of maritime piracy in Indonesia
Electoral competition in weak institutional settings has been shown to increase criminal violence, in particular homicides. Electoral competitiveness, by virtue of threatening the ability of incumbents to maintain informal corruption agreements with criminal networks, is argued to increase crime because of violent competition among criminal groups over future influence. We link elections to maritime piracy, a form of criminal behavior that has in…
Enforcing order: Territorial reach and maritime piracy
Existing studies of piracy focus attention on the institutional determinants of maritime piracy, but neglect variation in governments’ reach over territory. We argue that the effect of state capacity on piracy is a function of states’ ability to extend authority over the country’s entire territory. We expect that government reach—a function of geographic factors such as the distance between a country’s capital and its coastline—mediates the effec…
Searching for Sanctuary: Government Power and the Location of Maritime Piracy
Recent systematic work on the incidence of maritime piracy shows the importance of various political, economic, and geographic correlates at the country level. Yet these correlates tell us little about the determinants of piracy location off states’ coasts, despite the fact that piracy is well known to cluster locally. Conceptualizing pirates as strategic actors who consider the risk of detection and capture, this article argues that states’ abil…
Power or Posturing? Policy Availability and Congressional Influence on U.S. Presidential Decisions to Use Force
We examine two competing arguments relating to the role of Congress in explaining presidential decisions to use force from 1953 to 2000. We offer a policy availability rationale that suggests Congress matters in the decision to use force because presidents are motivated by their ability to influence legislative policy making. The models demonstrate that presidential success in Congress is the significant factor determining military action, not pa…
Opportunities and Presidential Uses of Force: A Selection Model of Crisis Decision-Making
Political vulnerability is thought to influence the opportunities available to the US president to engage in uses of force abroad. Conventional theories linking economic misfortune and partisan opposition to presidential uses of force detail the incentives and constraints facing the president in decisions to use force. In contrast, these theories’ strategic counterparts focus on the ability of US adversaries to respond to the president’s vulnerab…
Territory, River, and Maritime Claims in the Western Hemisphere: Regime Type, Rivalry, and MIDs from 1901 to 2000
Issues remain at the core of armed conflict. Territory, in particular, appears to increase substantially the probability of inter-state violence and is concluded by many to be one of the most critical correlates of war onset. While scholars have called for an issue-based approach to the study of international relations for some time, recent data collection efforts allow the emergence and management of contentious issues over time to be studied mo…
Senate Influence or Presidential Unilateralism: An Examination of Treaties and Executive Agreements from Theodore Roosevelt and George W. Bush
Treaty-making involves the constitutional struggle for policy control. Both the Executive and Senate are defined as official actors in establishing international commitments and both closely guard their constitutionally defined roles.Yet most research concludes that Congress rarely matters when defining US commitments abroad.We explore the Senate's role in treaty-making during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt (1901—1909) and the first te…
Committed To Peace: Liberal Institutions and the Termination of Rivalry
Rivalry is characterized by mutual mistrust, anger and fear, and becomes increasingly intractable as confrontations between rivals militarize. The empirical record confirms that rivalries account for the vast number of militarized interstate disputes and wars in the international system. Although considerable attention has been spent on the initiation, duration or termination of rivalries, to date no comprehensive theoretical framework for their …
Taming the Leviathan: Examining the Impact of External Threat on State Capacity
This article argues that the systemic security environment influences the structure of domestic political and economic institutions. If states have been primarily created to protect one group from predation by another, then the state may visibly change as external threats rise and fall. The authors argue that political elites respond to threatening environments by enhancing the ability of the state to extract resources from society in order to pr…
Strategic Position Taking and Presidential Influence in Congress
The rise and fall of presidential success in Congress remains a central puzzle in the literature. We model success as two interrelated processes: presidential position taking and Congress's decision to support or oppose the president. The analysis emphasizes the importance of strategic position taking in determining presidential success. We show that presidential approval significantly influences success, not only because it affects congressional…
Enduring Rivals: Presidential Success and Support in the House of Representatives
We compare presidents' legislative support and success at the vote level of analysis. In so doing, we remind readers that these two outcomes measures, collected by Congressional Quarterly, Inc., may or may not reflect presidential agenda preferences. Success refers to a victory for the president on his vote positions, while support refers to margin of legislators taking the same position on the vote as the president. The vote level provides numer…
Interstate Rivalry and the Recurrence of Crises: A Comparison of Rival and Nonrival Crisis Behavior,1918-1994
Research on enduring rivalry has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the last few years. As scholars begin to relax assumptions regarding event independence and historical memory, rivalry has emerged to explain dependencies across countries and over time. Despite the evidence to date, some scholars challenge the rivalry distinction and suggest that a stochastic model may explain the distribution of militarized disputes eq…
Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force
Scholars have argued for some time that the rally ’round the flag phenomenon creates incentives for political leaders to use military force to divert attention away from domestic turmoil. It is hypothesized that a state’s strategic or historical context conditions its use of military force abroad, and that the probability of diversionary uses of force is higher in opportunity-rich environments of enduring rivalry. Empirical analyses lend support …
Institutional Instability and the Credibility of Audience Costs: Political Participation and Interstate Crisis Bargaining, 1816-1992
While considerable empirical evidence shows democratic dyads to be less prone to violence than other types of regime pairs, disagreement still exists on the causal factors inhibiting conflict among democratic states. Some scholars have concluded that increased attention needs to be given to identifying specific characteristics of democratic states that might mitigate or incite coercive foreign policy actions. This article begins to pull apart the…
The Pendulum of Congressional Power: Agenda Change, Partisanship and the Demise of the Post-World War II Foreign Policy Consensus
Many scholars contend that Congress rarely matters in the realm of foreign policy. The source of this collective impotence is often explained by the weaknesses in congressional institutions vis-a-vis the president, as well as a general inability to respond effectively to a dynamic international political environment. We contend that the debate over congressional activism has not adequately addressed the role of agenda change. We analyze all roll …
Congressional Support of the President: A Comparison of Foreign, Defense, and Domestic Policy Decision Making during and after the Cold War
Recent research on congressional‐executive relations has concluded that partisan and ideological forces explaining decision making in domestic policy have also become dominant in the realm of foreign policy. Accordingly, scholars have inferred the effective demise of the two‐presidencies. In this analysis, the authors compare models explaining bipartisan congressional support of the president on domestic issues with that of foreign and defense. A…
Domestic politics and interstate disputes: Examining US mid involvement and reciprocation, 1870–1992
Increasingly scholars have become interested in conflict behavior that falls short of war. Chan (1997), for example, has insisted that a concern for less intense engagements is crucial for fully understanding the conflict‐proneness of different regimes. Chan (1997) furthermore noted that scholars have generally failed to account for whether a state was the initiator or target of a dispute. Such a distinction, however, is crucial for discriminatin…
Beyond Territorial Contiguity: Issues at Stake in Democratic Militarized Interstate Disputes
Scholars of international politics have been slow to address the fundamental issues that ground interstate conflict. Territory has frequently been cited as a primary source of contention among states, but it remains only one issue and not even the one most prevalent in the post‐World War II time period. We take the first step toward understanding the broader theoretical link between regime type, issues, and militarized conflict by collecting new …
Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force
Scholars have argued for some time that the rally ’round the flag phenomenon creates incentives for political leaders to use military force to divert attention away from domestic turmoil. It is hypothesized that a state’s strategic or historical context conditions its use of military force abroad, and that the probability of diversionary uses of force is higher in opportunity-rich environments of enduring rivalry. Empirical analyses lend support …
Beyond Territorial Contiguity: Issues at Stake in Democratic Militarized Interstate Disputes
Scholars of international politics have been slow to address the fundamental issues that ground interstate conflict. Territory has frequently been cited as a primary source of contention among states, but it remains only one issue and not even the one most prevalent in the post‐World War II time period. We take the first step toward understanding the broader theoretical link between regime type, issues, and militarized conflict by collecting new …
Congressional Support of the President: A Comparison of Foreign, Defense, and Domestic Policy Decision Making during and after the Cold War
Recent research on congressional‐executive relations has concluded that partisan and ideological forces explaining decision making in domestic policy have also become dominant in the realm of foreign policy. Accordingly, scholars have inferred the effective demise of the two‐presidencies. In this analysis, the authors compare models explaining bipartisan congressional support of the president on domestic issues with that of foreign and defense. A…
Institutional Constraints, Political Opposition, And Interstate Dispute Escalation: Evidence from Parliamentary Systems, 1946-89
Research on the `democratic peace' has received considerable attention in the last few years. Democracies, though, are often thrown together when examining the propensity of different regime types to become engaged in international conflict. Yet, democratic governments vary dramatically across nation-states. Whether it be presidential versus parliamentary, or multi-party versus single-party, democratic states clearly differ in the structure of th…
Territory, River, and Maritime Claims in the Western Hemisphere: Regime Type, Rivalry, and MIDs from 1901 to 2000
Issues remain at the core of armed conflict. Territory, in particular, appears to increase substantially the probability of inter-state violence and is concluded by many to be one of the most critical correlates of war onset. While scholars have called for an issue-based approach to the study of international relations for some time, recent data collection efforts allow the emergence and management of contentious issues over time to be studied mo…
Institutional Instability and the Credibility of Audience Costs: Political Participation and Interstate Crisis Bargaining, 1816-1992
While considerable empirical evidence shows democratic dyads to be less prone to violence than other types of regime pairs, disagreement still exists on the causal factors inhibiting conflict among democratic states. Some scholars have concluded that increased attention needs to be given to identifying specific characteristics of democratic states that might mitigate or incite coercive foreign policy actions. This article begins to pull apart the…
Domestic Terrorism in Democratic States: Understanding and Addressing Minority Grievances
Scholars continue to disagree on the relationship between regime type and political violence, perhaps because the empirical evidence remains contradictory. To date, most studies generally explore the direct relationship between democracy and terrorism. Yet, we think the effect of regime type on terrorism is conditional on the presence of politically excluded groups whose grievances motivate them to challenge the state. We need to take into accoun…
Deploying to Protect: The Effect of Military Peacekeeping Deployments on Violence Against Civilians
Do UN peacekeeping forces protect civilians from harm in post-war environments? Current evidence suggests that the answer to this question is yes. But extant research mostly examines this relationship at the country-level and consequently has logical difficulty tracing decreases in civilian fatalities to actual peacekeeper activities. We would have more confidence in the ability of peacekeepers to limit harm and protect non-combatants if the redu…
Strategic Position Taking and Presidential Influence in Congress
The rise and fall of presidential success in Congress remains a central puzzle in the literature. We model success as two interrelated processes: presidential position taking and Congress's decision to support or oppose the president. The analysis emphasizes the importance of strategic position taking in determining presidential success. We show that presidential approval significantly influences success, not only because it affects congressional…
Committed To Peace: Liberal Institutions and the Termination of Rivalry
Rivalry is characterized by mutual mistrust, anger and fear, and becomes increasingly intractable as confrontations between rivals militarize. The empirical record confirms that rivalries account for the vast number of militarized interstate disputes and wars in the international system. Although considerable attention has been spent on the initiation, duration or termination of rivalries, to date no comprehensive theoretical framework for their …
Taming the Leviathan: Examining the Impact of External Threat on State Capacity
This article argues that the systemic security environment influences the structure of domestic political and economic institutions. If states have been primarily created to protect one group from predation by another, then the state may visibly change as external threats rise and fall. The authors argue that political elites respond to threatening environments by enhancing the ability of the state to extract resources from society in order to pr…
Financing rebellion: Using piracy to explain and predict conflict intensity in Africa and Southeast Asia
A prominent explanation of the resource-conflict relationship suggests that natural resources finance rebellion by permitting rebel leaders the opportunity to purchase weapons, fighters, and local support. The bunkering of oil in the Niger Delta by quasi-criminal syndicates is an example of how the black-market selling of stolen oil may help finance anti-state groups. More systematic assessments have also shown that the risk and duration of confl…
The Homegrown Threat: State Strength, Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism
Scholars maintain that, similar to insurgency, terrorist violence is precipitated by both relative deprivation and state weakness. Yet aggrieved minority groups within a country should turn to terrorism when they are weak relative to the state rather than strong. Empirical evidence shows minority group discrimination and fragile political institutions to independently increase domestic terror attacks. But it remains unclear whether grievances dri…
Searching for Sanctuary: Government Power and the Location of Maritime Piracy
Recent systematic work on the incidence of maritime piracy shows the importance of various political, economic, and geographic correlates at the country level. Yet these correlates tell us little about the determinants of piracy location off states’ coasts, despite the fact that piracy is well known to cluster locally. Conceptualizing pirates as strategic actors who consider the risk of detection and capture, this article argues that states’ abil…
Domestic politics and interstate disputes: Examining US mid involvement and reciprocation, 1870–1992
Increasingly scholars have become interested in conflict behavior that falls short of war. Chan (1997), for example, has insisted that a concern for less intense engagements is crucial for fully understanding the conflict‐proneness of different regimes. Chan (1997) furthermore noted that scholars have generally failed to account for whether a state was the initiator or target of a dispute. Such a distinction, however, is crucial for discriminatin…
Fighting Fire With Water: Partisan Procedural Strategies and the Senate Appropriations Committee
While White (1989) thoroughly examined the House Appropriations Committee after the congressional reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, we begin to offer an updated picture of the counterpart committee in the Senate. We find that there has been considerable change in the behavior of appropriators in the postreform era. Specifically, partisanship within the Senate has increased substantially, but even more interesting is the rise of partisanship within …
Power or Posturing? Policy Availability and Congressional Influence on U.S. Presidential Decisions to Use Force
We examine two competing arguments relating to the role of Congress in explaining presidential decisions to use force from 1953 to 2000. We offer a policy availability rationale that suggests Congress matters in the decision to use force because presidents are motivated by their ability to influence legislative policy making. The models demonstrate that presidential success in Congress is the significant factor determining military action, not pa…
Opportunities and Presidential Uses of Force: A Selection Model of Crisis Decision-Making
Political vulnerability is thought to influence the opportunities available to the US president to engage in uses of force abroad. Conventional theories linking economic misfortune and partisan opposition to presidential uses of force detail the incentives and constraints facing the president in decisions to use force. In contrast, these theories’ strategic counterparts focus on the ability of US adversaries to respond to the president’s vulnerab…
Senate Influence or Presidential Unilateralism: An Examination of Treaties and Executive Agreements from Theodore Roosevelt and George W. Bush
Treaty-making involves the constitutional struggle for policy control. Both the Executive and Senate are defined as official actors in establishing international commitments and both closely guard their constitutionally defined roles.Yet most research concludes that Congress rarely matters when defining US commitments abroad.We explore the Senate's role in treaty-making during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt (1901—1909) and the first te…
The Pendulum of Congressional Power: Agenda Change, Partisanship and the Demise of the Post-World War II Foreign Policy Consensus
Many scholars contend that Congress rarely matters in the realm of foreign policy. The source of this collective impotence is often explained by the weaknesses in congressional institutions vis-a-vis the president, as well as a general inability to respond effectively to a dynamic international political environment. We contend that the debate over congressional activism has not adequately addressed the role of agenda change. We analyze all roll …
Enforcing order: Territorial reach and maritime piracy
Existing studies of piracy focus attention on the institutional determinants of maritime piracy, but neglect variation in governments’ reach over territory. We argue that the effect of state capacity on piracy is a function of states’ ability to extend authority over the country’s entire territory. We expect that government reach—a function of geographic factors such as the distance between a country’s capital and its coastline—mediates the effec…
Interstate Rivalry and the Recurrence of Crises: A Comparison of Rival and Nonrival Crisis Behavior,1918-1994
Research on enduring rivalry has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the last few years. As scholars begin to relax assumptions regarding event independence and historical memory, rivalry has emerged to explain dependencies across countries and over time. Despite the evidence to date, some scholars challenge the rivalry distinction and suggest that a stochastic model may explain the distribution of militarized disputes eq…
External threat and the limits of democratic pacifism
Scholars widely recognize that democratic dyads are associated with lower hazards of armed conflict and more efficient conflict resolution. Many attempts have been made to challenge the notion of democratic pacifism, but perhaps the most significant is the argument that the Democratic Peace is epiphenomenal to territorial issues, specifically the external threats that they pose. The presence of an external threat might be the mechanism by which d…
The politicization of crime: Electoral competition and the supply of maritime piracy in Indonesia
Electoral competition in weak institutional settings has been shown to increase criminal violence, in particular homicides. Electoral competitiveness, by virtue of threatening the ability of incumbents to maintain informal corruption agreements with criminal networks, is argued to increase crime because of violent competition among criminal groups over future influence. We link elections to maritime piracy, a form of criminal behavior that has in…
Enduring Rivals: Presidential Success and Support in the House of Representatives
We compare presidents' legislative support and success at the vote level of analysis. In so doing, we remind readers that these two outcomes measures, collected by Congressional Quarterly, Inc., may or may not reflect presidential agenda preferences. Success refers to a victory for the president on his vote positions, while support refers to margin of legislators taking the same position on the vote as the president. The vote level provides numer…
Beyond Territorial Contiguity: Issues at Stake in Democratic Militarized Interstate Disputes
Scholars of international politics have been slow to address the fundamental issues that ground interstate conflict. Territory has frequently been cited as a primary source of contention among states, but it remains only one issue and not even the one most prevalent in the post‐World War II time period. We take the first step toward understanding the broader theoretical link between regime type, issues, and militarized conflict by collecting new …
Fighting Fire With Water: Partisan Procedural Strategies and the Senate Appropriations Committee
While White (1989) thoroughly examined the House Appropriations Committee after the congressional reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, we begin to offer an updated picture of the counterpart committee in the Senate. We find that there has been considerable change in the behavior of appropriators in the postreform era. Specifically, partisanship within the Senate has increased substantially, but even more interesting is the rise of partisanship within …
Institutional Constraints, Political Opposition, And Interstate Dispute Escalation: Evidence from Parliamentary Systems, 1946-89
Research on the `democratic peace' has received considerable attention in the last few years. Democracies, though, are often thrown together when examining the propensity of different regime types to become engaged in international conflict. Yet, democratic governments vary dramatically across nation-states. Whether it be presidential versus parliamentary, or multi-party versus single-party, democratic states clearly differ in the structure of th…
Congressional Support of the President: A Comparison of Foreign, Defense, and Domestic Policy Decision Making during and after the Cold War
Recent research on congressional‐executive relations has concluded that partisan and ideological forces explaining decision making in domestic policy have also become dominant in the realm of foreign policy. Accordingly, scholars have inferred the effective demise of the two‐presidencies. In this analysis, the authors compare models explaining bipartisan congressional support of the president on domestic issues with that of foreign and defense. A…
Domestic politics and interstate disputes: Examining US mid involvement and reciprocation, 1870–1992
Increasingly scholars have become interested in conflict behavior that falls short of war. Chan (1997), for example, has insisted that a concern for less intense engagements is crucial for fully understanding the conflict‐proneness of different regimes. Chan (1997) furthermore noted that scholars have generally failed to account for whether a state was the initiator or target of a dispute. Such a distinction, however, is crucial for discriminatin…
The Pendulum of Congressional Power: Agenda Change, Partisanship and the Demise of the Post-World War II Foreign Policy Consensus
Many scholars contend that Congress rarely matters in the realm of foreign policy. The source of this collective impotence is often explained by the weaknesses in congressional institutions vis-a-vis the president, as well as a general inability to respond effectively to a dynamic international political environment. We contend that the debate over congressional activism has not adequately addressed the role of agenda change. We analyze all roll …
Institutional Instability and the Credibility of Audience Costs: Political Participation and Interstate Crisis Bargaining, 1816-1992
While considerable empirical evidence shows democratic dyads to be less prone to violence than other types of regime pairs, disagreement still exists on the causal factors inhibiting conflict among democratic states. Some scholars have concluded that increased attention needs to be given to identifying specific characteristics of democratic states that might mitigate or incite coercive foreign policy actions. This article begins to pull apart the…
Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force
Scholars have argued for some time that the rally ’round the flag phenomenon creates incentives for political leaders to use military force to divert attention away from domestic turmoil. It is hypothesized that a state’s strategic or historical context conditions its use of military force abroad, and that the probability of diversionary uses of force is higher in opportunity-rich environments of enduring rivalry. Empirical analyses lend support …
Interstate Rivalry and the Recurrence of Crises: A Comparison of Rival and Nonrival Crisis Behavior,1918-1994
Research on enduring rivalry has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the last few years. As scholars begin to relax assumptions regarding event independence and historical memory, rivalry has emerged to explain dependencies across countries and over time. Despite the evidence to date, some scholars challenge the rivalry distinction and suggest that a stochastic model may explain the distribution of militarized disputes eq…
Enduring Rivals: Presidential Success and Support in the House of Representatives
We compare presidents' legislative support and success at the vote level of analysis. In so doing, we remind readers that these two outcomes measures, collected by Congressional Quarterly, Inc., may or may not reflect presidential agenda preferences. Success refers to a victory for the president on his vote positions, while support refers to margin of legislators taking the same position on the vote as the president. The vote level provides numer…
Strategic Position Taking and Presidential Influence in Congress
The rise and fall of presidential success in Congress remains a central puzzle in the literature. We model success as two interrelated processes: presidential position taking and Congress's decision to support or oppose the president. The analysis emphasizes the importance of strategic position taking in determining presidential success. We show that presidential approval significantly influences success, not only because it affects congressional…
Committed To Peace: Liberal Institutions and the Termination of Rivalry
Rivalry is characterized by mutual mistrust, anger and fear, and becomes increasingly intractable as confrontations between rivals militarize. The empirical record confirms that rivalries account for the vast number of militarized interstate disputes and wars in the international system. Although considerable attention has been spent on the initiation, duration or termination of rivalries, to date no comprehensive theoretical framework for their …
Taming the Leviathan: Examining the Impact of External Threat on State Capacity
This article argues that the systemic security environment influences the structure of domestic political and economic institutions. If states have been primarily created to protect one group from predation by another, then the state may visibly change as external threats rise and fall. The authors argue that political elites respond to threatening environments by enhancing the ability of the state to extract resources from society in order to pr…
Senate Influence or Presidential Unilateralism: An Examination of Treaties and Executive Agreements from Theodore Roosevelt and George W. Bush
Treaty-making involves the constitutional struggle for policy control. Both the Executive and Senate are defined as official actors in establishing international commitments and both closely guard their constitutionally defined roles.Yet most research concludes that Congress rarely matters when defining US commitments abroad.We explore the Senate's role in treaty-making during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt (1901—1909) and the first te…
Opportunities and Presidential Uses of Force: A Selection Model of Crisis Decision-Making
Political vulnerability is thought to influence the opportunities available to the US president to engage in uses of force abroad. Conventional theories linking economic misfortune and partisan opposition to presidential uses of force detail the incentives and constraints facing the president in decisions to use force. In contrast, these theories’ strategic counterparts focus on the ability of US adversaries to respond to the president’s vulnerab…
Territory, River, and Maritime Claims in the Western Hemisphere: Regime Type, Rivalry, and MIDs from 1901 to 2000
Issues remain at the core of armed conflict. Territory, in particular, appears to increase substantially the probability of inter-state violence and is concluded by many to be one of the most critical correlates of war onset. While scholars have called for an issue-based approach to the study of international relations for some time, recent data collection efforts allow the emergence and management of contentious issues over time to be studied mo…
Power or Posturing? Policy Availability and Congressional Influence on U.S. Presidential Decisions to Use Force
We examine two competing arguments relating to the role of Congress in explaining presidential decisions to use force from 1953 to 2000. We offer a policy availability rationale that suggests Congress matters in the decision to use force because presidents are motivated by their ability to influence legislative policy making. The models demonstrate that presidential success in Congress is the significant factor determining military action, not pa…
Enforcing order: Territorial reach and maritime piracy
Existing studies of piracy focus attention on the institutional determinants of maritime piracy, but neglect variation in governments’ reach over territory. We argue that the effect of state capacity on piracy is a function of states’ ability to extend authority over the country’s entire territory. We expect that government reach—a function of geographic factors such as the distance between a country’s capital and its coastline—mediates the effec…
Searching for Sanctuary: Government Power and the Location of Maritime Piracy
Recent systematic work on the incidence of maritime piracy shows the importance of various political, economic, and geographic correlates at the country level. Yet these correlates tell us little about the determinants of piracy location off states’ coasts, despite the fact that piracy is well known to cluster locally. Conceptualizing pirates as strategic actors who consider the risk of detection and capture, this article argues that states’ abil…
External threat and the limits of democratic pacifism
Scholars widely recognize that democratic dyads are associated with lower hazards of armed conflict and more efficient conflict resolution. Many attempts have been made to challenge the notion of democratic pacifism, but perhaps the most significant is the argument that the Democratic Peace is epiphenomenal to territorial issues, specifically the external threats that they pose. The presence of an external threat might be the mechanism by which d…
Managing territorial conflict: An introduction to this special issue
When Political Gridlock Reigns in Presidential Foreign Policy: Policy Availability and the Role of Congress
There is an inherent connection between the party cover and policy availability theories that has been largely overlooked by the presidential use of force literature. Party cover views the president's party strength in Congress as the prominent structural source shaping presidential incentives by diffusing responsibility in foreign policy. But policy availability adds to this view by explaining how such domestic conditions shape the variety of ch…
The Homegrown Threat: State Strength, Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism
Scholars maintain that, similar to insurgency, terrorist violence is precipitated by both relative deprivation and state weakness. Yet aggrieved minority groups within a country should turn to terrorism when they are weak relative to the state rather than strong. Empirical evidence shows minority group discrimination and fragile political institutions to independently increase domestic terror attacks. But it remains unclear whether grievances dri…
The politicization of crime: Electoral competition and the supply of maritime piracy in Indonesia
Electoral competition in weak institutional settings has been shown to increase criminal violence, in particular homicides. Electoral competitiveness, by virtue of threatening the ability of incumbents to maintain informal corruption agreements with criminal networks, is argued to increase crime because of violent competition among criminal groups over future influence. We link elections to maritime piracy, a form of criminal behavior that has in…
Financing rebellion: Using piracy to explain and predict conflict intensity in Africa and Southeast Asia
A prominent explanation of the resource-conflict relationship suggests that natural resources finance rebellion by permitting rebel leaders the opportunity to purchase weapons, fighters, and local support. The bunkering of oil in the Niger Delta by quasi-criminal syndicates is an example of how the black-market selling of stolen oil may help finance anti-state groups. More systematic assessments have also shown that the risk and duration of confl…
Political science (27 works) · Law (24 works) · Economics (22 works) · Politics (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (17 works) · Political economy (17 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (14 works) · Democracy (11 works) · Sociology (8 works)