Margaret F Joseph
Biographic Data
| ID | 711669 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Margaret F Joseph |
| GIVEN NAMES | Margaret F |
| FAMILY NAME | Joseph |
| SIGNATURE | JOSEPH M F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8248-4536 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 82 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Domestic Sources of International Trust
How do states overcome mistrust? Scholars argue that costly foreign policy signals build trust. But when trust is low, such as during rivalries, states are unwilling to use these signals for fear of being cheated. We argue that domestic policies can also build trust by revealing information about a state’s likelihood of cooperating internationally when there is a correlation between domestic and international preferences. We further argue that do…
Elite Partisan Disagreement and Military Victory: Evidence from South Korean Battle Experiments
Does partisan disagreement impact expectations of victory in war? We conjectured it could by degrading military cohesion. We registered two main predictions: (a) soldiers fight less effectively if they observe political parties disagree during a crisis about whether to initiate war and (b) the effects of (a) are amplified when soldiers are affiliated with a dissenting opposition party. With some nuance, we found broad support for these prediction…
Explaining peace during long and rapid power shifts: A theory of grand bargains
Bargaining scholars predict rapid power shifts cause preventive war. But cases with rapidly shifting power often remain peaceful. To explain the dogs that don’t bark, we introduce instant, repeated, costly militarization into Powell’s (1999) conventional-weapons power transition model. First, we rationalize preventive war during long, slow, complete-information power shifts. Second, we find that where past research into conventional shifts predic…
Secret Innovation
Conventional wisdom holds that open, collaborative, and transparent organizations are innovative. But some of the most radical innovations—satellites, lithium-iodine batteries, the internet—were conceived by small, secretive teams in national security agencies. Are these organizations more innovative because of their secrecy, or in spite of it? We study a principal–agent model of public-sector innovation. We give research teams a secret option an…
When do leader backgrounds matter? Evidence from the President’s Daily Brief
A wave of recent scholarship shows that the backgrounds of political leaders shape their behavior once in office. This paper shifts the literature in a new direction by investigating the conditions under which foreign observers think a leader's background is relevant. We argue that pre-tenure biographical attributes are most informative to outsiders during leadership transitions—unique periods where the new ruler does not yet have a track record—…
Do Different Coercive Strategies Help or Hurt Deterrence
Powerful states build different coercive tools to manage their broad foreign policy agenda. Do different coercive strategies help or hurt deterrence success? I analyze a simple crisis model where the Defender seeks to deter a Challenger from investing in a novel coercive technology through hassling and preventive threats. Subtle differences between my model and those of Schram, Bas and Coe, and others generate different logics that clarify the De…
Perceptions of Leadership Importance: Evidence from the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief
Are leaders perceived as important actors during conflict, or are they discounted because of domestic institutions and international structure? We exploit recently declassified CIA President’s Daily Briefs to construct a cross-national, weekly measure of how intelligence analysts perceive foreign leader importance in conflict and diplomacy. We estimate perceptions of leader importance at crisis onset, crisis escalation, war, and war termination i…
The Domestic Sources of International Reputation
Existing research finds that leaders develop international reputations based on their past behavior on the international stage. We argue that leaders' domestic choices can also influence their international reputations, perhaps as much as their past foreign policy decisions do. Using formal theory and intuitive argumentation, we develop an overarching framework to predict how much any domestic choice will affect a leader's international reputatio…
Shooting the Messenger: The Challenge of National Security Whistleblowing
Whistleblowers play an integral role in oversight. In almost every employment sector, organizational insiders who come forward to expose alleged wrongdoing are protected from retaliation. In contrast, national security whistleblowers face steep fines and jail sentences for coming forward. Why? We argue that the difficulty of verifying allegations of wrongdoing in the national security arena make it hard to condition rewards and punishments on the…
A Little Bit of Cheap Talk Is a Dangerous Thing: States Can Communicate Intentions Persuasively and Raise the Risk of War
I study a bargaining model of war in which states contest two issues and the state receiving offers has private information about her value for each issue. When the offerer starts sufficiently uncertain about the receiver's favorite issue, he makes a balanced offer (evenly distributed across both issues) that is less efficient than an offer concentrated on the receiver's most valuable issue would have been but avoids guessing the receiver's favor…
Democracy's Disparity? Gender, Equality, and the 2020 Iowa Caucuses
Media technology, covert action, and the politics of exposure
States wishing to use force in the modern era frequently face strong incentives to exploit secrecy. Successful covert operations can reduce the likelihood of unwanted escalation with powerful rivals and help leaders conceal unpopular actions from domestic and foreign audiences alike. The many benefits of secrecy, however, can only be realized if covert operations remain covert. We argue that access to information and communications technologies (…
Are Coups Really Contagious? An Extreme Bounds Analysis of Political Diffusion
Protests and democratic transitions tend to spread cross-nationally. Is this true of all political events? We argue that the mechanisms underlying the diffusion of mass-participation events are unlikely to support the spread of elite-led violence, particularly coups. Further, past findings of coup contagion employed empirical techniques unable to distinguish clustering, common shocks, and actual diffusion. To investigate which events diffuse and …
A Little Bit of Cheap Talk Is a Dangerous Thing: States Can Communicate Intentions Persuasively and Raise the Risk of War
I study a bargaining model of war in which states contest two issues and the state receiving offers has private information about her value for each issue. When the offerer starts sufficiently uncertain about the receiver's favorite issue, he makes a balanced offer (evenly distributed across both issues) that is less efficient than an offer concentrated on the receiver's most valuable issue would have been but avoids guessing the receiver's favor…
Are Coups Really Contagious? An Extreme Bounds Analysis of Political Diffusion
Protests and democratic transitions tend to spread cross-nationally. Is this true of all political events? We argue that the mechanisms underlying the diffusion of mass-participation events are unlikely to support the spread of elite-led violence, particularly coups. Further, past findings of coup contagion employed empirical techniques unable to distinguish clustering, common shocks, and actual diffusion. To investigate which events diffuse and …
Media technology, covert action, and the politics of exposure
States wishing to use force in the modern era frequently face strong incentives to exploit secrecy. Successful covert operations can reduce the likelihood of unwanted escalation with powerful rivals and help leaders conceal unpopular actions from domestic and foreign audiences alike. The many benefits of secrecy, however, can only be realized if covert operations remain covert. We argue that access to information and communications technologies (…
The Domestic Sources of International Reputation
Existing research finds that leaders develop international reputations based on their past behavior on the international stage. We argue that leaders' domestic choices can also influence their international reputations, perhaps as much as their past foreign policy decisions do. Using formal theory and intuitive argumentation, we develop an overarching framework to predict how much any domestic choice will affect a leader's international reputatio…
Shooting the Messenger: The Challenge of National Security Whistleblowing
Whistleblowers play an integral role in oversight. In almost every employment sector, organizational insiders who come forward to expose alleged wrongdoing are protected from retaliation. In contrast, national security whistleblowers face steep fines and jail sentences for coming forward. Why? We argue that the difficulty of verifying allegations of wrongdoing in the national security arena make it hard to condition rewards and punishments on the…
Do Different Coercive Strategies Help or Hurt Deterrence
Powerful states build different coercive tools to manage their broad foreign policy agenda. Do different coercive strategies help or hurt deterrence success? I analyze a simple crisis model where the Defender seeks to deter a Challenger from investing in a novel coercive technology through hassling and preventive threats. Subtle differences between my model and those of Schram, Bas and Coe, and others generate different logics that clarify the De…
Perceptions of Leadership Importance: Evidence from the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief
Are leaders perceived as important actors during conflict, or are they discounted because of domestic institutions and international structure? We exploit recently declassified CIA President’s Daily Briefs to construct a cross-national, weekly measure of how intelligence analysts perceive foreign leader importance in conflict and diplomacy. We estimate perceptions of leader importance at crisis onset, crisis escalation, war, and war termination i…
Secret Innovation
Conventional wisdom holds that open, collaborative, and transparent organizations are innovative. But some of the most radical innovations—satellites, lithium-iodine batteries, the internet—were conceived by small, secretive teams in national security agencies. Are these organizations more innovative because of their secrecy, or in spite of it? We study a principal–agent model of public-sector innovation. We give research teams a secret option an…
When do leader backgrounds matter? Evidence from the President’s Daily Brief
A wave of recent scholarship shows that the backgrounds of political leaders shape their behavior once in office. This paper shifts the literature in a new direction by investigating the conditions under which foreign observers think a leader's background is relevant. We argue that pre-tenure biographical attributes are most informative to outsiders during leadership transitions—unique periods where the new ruler does not yet have a track record—…
Explaining peace during long and rapid power shifts: A theory of grand bargains
Bargaining scholars predict rapid power shifts cause preventive war. But cases with rapidly shifting power often remain peaceful. To explain the dogs that don’t bark, we introduce instant, repeated, costly militarization into Powell’s (1999) conventional-weapons power transition model. First, we rationalize preventive war during long, slow, complete-information power shifts. Second, we find that where past research into conventional shifts predic…
Media technology, covert action, and the politics of exposure
States wishing to use force in the modern era frequently face strong incentives to exploit secrecy. Successful covert operations can reduce the likelihood of unwanted escalation with powerful rivals and help leaders conceal unpopular actions from domestic and foreign audiences alike. The many benefits of secrecy, however, can only be realized if covert operations remain covert. We argue that access to information and communications technologies (…
Are Coups Really Contagious? An Extreme Bounds Analysis of Political Diffusion
Protests and democratic transitions tend to spread cross-nationally. Is this true of all political events? We argue that the mechanisms underlying the diffusion of mass-participation events are unlikely to support the spread of elite-led violence, particularly coups. Further, past findings of coup contagion employed empirical techniques unable to distinguish clustering, common shocks, and actual diffusion. To investigate which events diffuse and …
Democracy's Disparity? Gender, Equality, and the 2020 Iowa Caucuses
A Little Bit of Cheap Talk Is a Dangerous Thing: States Can Communicate Intentions Persuasively and Raise the Risk of War
I study a bargaining model of war in which states contest two issues and the state receiving offers has private information about her value for each issue. When the offerer starts sufficiently uncertain about the receiver's favorite issue, he makes a balanced offer (evenly distributed across both issues) that is less efficient than an offer concentrated on the receiver's most valuable issue would have been but avoids guessing the receiver's favor…
Shooting the Messenger: The Challenge of National Security Whistleblowing
Whistleblowers play an integral role in oversight. In almost every employment sector, organizational insiders who come forward to expose alleged wrongdoing are protected from retaliation. In contrast, national security whistleblowers face steep fines and jail sentences for coming forward. Why? We argue that the difficulty of verifying allegations of wrongdoing in the national security arena make it hard to condition rewards and punishments on the…
When do leader backgrounds matter? Evidence from the President’s Daily Brief
A wave of recent scholarship shows that the backgrounds of political leaders shape their behavior once in office. This paper shifts the literature in a new direction by investigating the conditions under which foreign observers think a leader's background is relevant. We argue that pre-tenure biographical attributes are most informative to outsiders during leadership transitions—unique periods where the new ruler does not yet have a track record—…
Do Different Coercive Strategies Help or Hurt Deterrence
Powerful states build different coercive tools to manage their broad foreign policy agenda. Do different coercive strategies help or hurt deterrence success? I analyze a simple crisis model where the Defender seeks to deter a Challenger from investing in a novel coercive technology through hassling and preventive threats. Subtle differences between my model and those of Schram, Bas and Coe, and others generate different logics that clarify the De…
Perceptions of Leadership Importance: Evidence from the CIA’s President’s Daily Brief
Are leaders perceived as important actors during conflict, or are they discounted because of domestic institutions and international structure? We exploit recently declassified CIA President’s Daily Briefs to construct a cross-national, weekly measure of how intelligence analysts perceive foreign leader importance in conflict and diplomacy. We estimate perceptions of leader importance at crisis onset, crisis escalation, war, and war termination i…
The Domestic Sources of International Reputation
Existing research finds that leaders develop international reputations based on their past behavior on the international stage. We argue that leaders' domestic choices can also influence their international reputations, perhaps as much as their past foreign policy decisions do. Using formal theory and intuitive argumentation, we develop an overarching framework to predict how much any domestic choice will affect a leader's international reputatio…
Secret Innovation
Conventional wisdom holds that open, collaborative, and transparent organizations are innovative. But some of the most radical innovations—satellites, lithium-iodine batteries, the internet—were conceived by small, secretive teams in national security agencies. Are these organizations more innovative because of their secrecy, or in spite of it? We study a principal–agent model of public-sector innovation. We give research teams a secret option an…
Explaining peace during long and rapid power shifts: A theory of grand bargains
Bargaining scholars predict rapid power shifts cause preventive war. But cases with rapidly shifting power often remain peaceful. To explain the dogs that don’t bark, we introduce instant, repeated, costly militarization into Powell’s (1999) conventional-weapons power transition model. First, we rationalize preventive war during long, slow, complete-information power shifts. Second, we find that where past research into conventional shifts predic…
The Domestic Sources of International Trust
How do states overcome mistrust? Scholars argue that costly foreign policy signals build trust. But when trust is low, such as during rivalries, states are unwilling to use these signals for fear of being cheated. We argue that domestic policies can also build trust by revealing information about a state’s likelihood of cooperating internationally when there is a correlation between domestic and international preferences. We further argue that do…
Elite Partisan Disagreement and Military Victory: Evidence from South Korean Battle Experiments
Does partisan disagreement impact expectations of victory in war? We conjectured it could by degrading military cohesion. We registered two main predictions: (a) soldiers fight less effectively if they observe political parties disagree during a crisis about whether to initiate war and (b) the effects of (a) are amplified when soldiers are affiliated with a dissenting opposition party. With some nuance, we found broad support for these prediction…
Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (6 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Computer security (4 works)