The Monkey Cage

I’m in Ireland at the moment, unwinding for a few days after sending in my book manuscript. But I’m not unwinding completely, As I note over at Crooked Timber, there is a quite important referendum taking place on Thursday. After the failure to ratify the so-called European Constitution (it was voted down in referendums in France and Holland), the EU member states are trying for a second bite of the cherry, with a somewhat modified document, the so-called Lisbon Treaty. In the wake of their problems the last time, they’ve decided not to give European voters the chance to turn it down, except in Ireland, where they have to for domestic constitutional reasons. This is an interesting test of arguments about European legitimacy, and in particular Andrew Moravcsik’s claim (see here for a relatively recent statement) that EU institutional changes neither need nor should have direct political legitimation.

Continue reading "Legitimating the EU" »

Posted by Henry at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

This is an amazing representation of world politics from the late 1930s through the present day as an interconnected series of food fights. I’m a little slow: For one thing, this has been around for a while but I hadn’t seen it ‘til now. For another, it took me several run-throughs to pick up on some of the references. A hint to get you started: The various countries are represented by a stereotypical food item — hamburgers, sausage, French fries, sushi, beef Stroganoff, and so on.

[Hat tip to Jacob Sohlberg]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is a clever piece by John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell analyzing some major schools of thought about American foreign policy — liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism, and realism — through the lens of “The Godfather.” I wonder what my IR colleagues make of this.

[Hat tip to PolySigh]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Statistical evidence from Sierra Leone’s civil war offers support to three major literatures that seek to account for revolutionary mobilization…[P]articipation in a military faction does depend on an individual’s relative social and economic position, the costs and benefits of joining, and the social pressures that emanate from friends and community members. While these arguments are often presented as rival, multiple logics of participation do coexist within the same conflict.

That is from a recently published paper by Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy Weinstein (gated, ungated).

The data come from a survey of demobilized combatants and non-combatants in Sierra Leone. This work, along with recent work by Stathis Kalyvas and Ana Arjona, is pushing the frontiers of both international relations research, in which civil wars figure prominently but individual-level actions are rarely investigated, and political behavior research, in which individual-level actions are the focus but civil war is rarely investigated.

Some other noteworthy findings concern the meaning of grievances:

At the same time, our empirical results challenge conventional accounts of participation that emphasize grievances. While proxies for standard grievance explanations receive support in our study of those who rebel, we find that the same indicators—poverty, a lack of access to education, and political alienation—also predict the decision to defend the status quo.Moreover, these factors also distinguish those who are abducted into a fighting force from those who remain on the sidelines. Conventional interpretations of welfare measures which emphasize the individual and group frustrations that drive participation in violence are thus called into question. Individual characteristics that observers may readily take to be indicators of frustration with the state may instead proxy for features such as a greater vulnerability to political manipulation by political and military elites, a greater frustration with more peaceful forms of protest, or most simply, a lack of other options.

As well as the importance of social pressure:

Our work suggests as well that involuntary participation is a fundamental part of revolutionary mobilization and political violence. Although this fact is already well appreciated by scholars of the Sierra Leone conflict, traditional theories of mobilization within political science make little mention of coerced participation.

I would add that studies of participation in genocide also emphasize the importance of coercion. See in particular Scott Straus’ work on the Rwandan genocide.

For a sort of postlude to this work, see Humphreys and Weinstein’s investigation of how to demobilize and reintegrate civil war participants (e.g., here and here).

Posted by John Sides at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I blogged Jason Lyall’s paper on the political consequences of artillery shelling back when I was doing my political science papers weblog. But I never said anything about his intriguing partial justification for thinking that Russian artillery shelling might be natural quasi-experiment:

At Khankala, Russia’s main base in Chechnya, the remaining shelling (29%) was due to soldier inebriation. Russia’s military forces in Chechnya are notorious for indiscipline, with drunk (or high) soldiers often participating in combat operations. Khankala itself is distinguished by its possession of Chechnya’s worst traffic safety record due to soldiers driving their armored vehicles while inebriated (e.g., “Bronirovannye ubiitsy,” Chechenskoe Obshchestvo, 22 February 2006).

We can deduce that Khankala’s artillery fire is due to random indiscipline in part because of legal prosecution of drunk soldiers under Chapter 33, Section 349 (Part 1) of the Russian Criminal Code (“Violation of the Rules for Handling Arms and Hazardous Materials”). This chapter punishes soldiers for “weapons abuse followed by infliction of grave bodily harm.” Though enforcement is weak, we have recorded prosecutions of soldiers for the “mistaken” discharge of artillery while inebriated (e.g., “Six Civilians Die,” Reliefweb.org, 17 July 2000; “Chechen prosecutor’s office opens criminal case,” RFE/RL, 16 August 2002; “Aiming Error May Cost Officer,” ITAR-TASS Weekly, 11 November 2005). Soldiers have even shelled themselves accidentally (“Zdes’ zhivut liudi,” Memorial, July 2000).

We also have eyewitness testimony from both Russian officers and residents of the shelled villages. As Aslan, a company commander, put it, soldiers “get drunk as pigs, lob out a few shells, claim combat pay and get drunk again” (Time, 24 October 2000). One village leader noted after a strike that “I’m sure there was no necessity in this shelling. As a rule, they fire every time they get drunk” (“Settlement was shelled,” Memorial, November 2005). Villagers often petition Russian authorities to cease fire, citing drunkenness as the motive behind the wanton violence (e.g., “Otkrytoe Pis’mo,” Groznenskii Rabochii, 19 July 2001).

Posted by Henry at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Pape’s work on suicide terrorism — notably, this book — has attracted a lot of attention (e.g., here). He was also — and here is a fact I did not know until today — an advisor on Ron Paul’s campaign team.

Pape analyzes data on all 188 suicide terror attacks between 1980 and 2001. He concludes that almost all of these attacks shared one common feature: they targeted a country believed to be a foreign occupier. This, not religious extremism, was the motivation of those who committed these suicide attacks.

Now a soon-to-be-published paper argues that Pape’s data cannot support that conclusion. The paper is here, authored by Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay. In short, they argue, the problem is this. To know whether X causes suicide terrorism, we need to know how the propensity to use suicide terrorism varies with X. That is, we not only need data on when suicide terrorism occurs, we need data on when suicide terrorism does not occur — i.e., when groups choose other tactics besides suicide terrorism. Analyzing only instances when suicide terrorism occurred is not sufficient.

Ashworth et al. conclude:

The data Pape collects do not speak to the correlates of suicide terror, and the policy conclusions he advocates cannot be justified by appealing to the data he collects.

Posted by John Sides at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Dan Drezner and Steve Clemons argue it out over whether or not the US should boycott the Beijing Olympics (Steve says no, Dan says that it would be no harm if the West uses the threat of non-attendance to squeeze some concessions from the Chinese). For me, the interesting question is why the Olympics are so politically important, and how their importance seems to be changing. International relations scholars don’t have much to say about the politics of the modern Olympics (there’s a book by Christopher Hill, but that’s about it), but it’s surely an important international institution; as we can see from recent events, states pay a lot of attention to it. This was true of the original Olympic festival in Greece too; Martin Wight identifies the festival as one of the key institutions binding together the Greek city-state system (although the original Olympics had a military truce attached to it, so it was obviously more important in the ways that IR scholars usually measure importance.

The current debacle though seems to mark an important change in the politics of the Olympics. As best I understand it (I am open to corrections if wrong), in the past, Olympics politics have concerned inter-state rivalry, and have been driven by decisions on the part of traditional political elites. The US boycott of the Soviet games in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 resulted from a decision by Jimmy Carter, and the tit-for-tat boycott by the Soviets and their allies of the LA games in 1984 resulted from a top level decision too. The dynamic driving the Beijing Olympics seems to me to be rather different; what we are seeing is that the politics of boycott is being driven by mass-publics, and most recently by protestors, rather than by political leaders. In the absence of the public unrest that has culminated in the recent protests in Paris, I doubt very much that Western political leaders would be muttering about not showing at the opening ceremonies - the geopolitical stakes of market access etc are likely more important to them than the fate of Tibetans. But given the widespread public reaction in the West, even leaders like Gordon Brown, who obviously want very much to attend, are having to insulate themselves from public pressures by taking other actions liable to annoy China (such as meeting with the Dalai Lama). In short, I think we are seeing how public opinion and organized cross-national opposition can create significant constraints on the ability of leaders to respond to what they see as the geostrategic necessity of keeping China happy. This is, as best as I am aware, a new phase in the development of the Olympics.

Posted by Henry at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Mark Penn’s departure from the Clinton campaign — after a friendly meeting with Colombian representatives to discuss promoting a trade agreement that Clinton opposes — provides a motivation to examine American opinion about trade. Doing so reveals the barriers that trade agreements face.

Public skepticism about free trade is rampant and hardly new. In his book on American attitudes toward foreign policy, Ole Holsti notes that in a series of Gallup polls in 1993, an average of only 38% of respondents favored NAFTA. More recently, Bryan Caplan finds that the public is, on average, likely to believe that trade agreements cost jobs or, at best, make no difference in job creation or loss. Many similar findings are here. The public’s attitude contrasts sharply with those of economists and other elites, who tend to support trade agreements (see again Holsti and Caplan, as well as the piece by Daniel Drezner that I discussed last week).

The contours of mass attitudes are even more interesting. In the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, respondents were asked this question:

This year Congress also debated a new free trade agreement that reduces barriers to trade between the U.S. and countries in Central America. Some politicians argue that the agreement allows America to better compete in the global economy and would create more stable democracies in Central America. Other politicians argue that it helps businesses to move jobs abroad where labor is cheaper and does not protect American producers. What do you think? If you were faced with this decision, would you vote for or against the trade agreement?

Only 27% supported the agreement, 46% were opposed, and 27% did not know.

Notably, this is one of the few issues in American politics where you will not find a significant partisan cleavage. 51% of Democrats opposed CAFTA (vs. 22% support), as did 41% of Republicans (vs. 36% support). Independents mirrored Democrats.

Better predictors of attitudes are education and income. Those with less than a 4-year degree tended to oppose CAFTA (50% vs. 24%), but those with at least a 4-year degree were evenly split (39% vs. 39%). Support also increases with income, although only among the wealthiest respondents (those making $150K or more) was there even bare majority support for CAFTA.

In his new book A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, William Bernstein writes:

The world’s increasing dependency on the continuous flow of trade has made us both prosperous and vulnerable.

It’s clear that the public agrees with the latter but not the former.

Posted by John Sides at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

For more than half a century, realist scholars of international relations have maintained that their worldview is inimical to the American public. For a variety of reasons – inchoate attitudes, national history, American exceptionalism – realists assert that the U.S. government pursues realist policies in spite and not because of public opinion. This paper takes a closer look at the anti-realist assumption by examining survey data and the empirical literature on the mass public’s attitudes towards foreign policy priorities and worldviews, the use of force, and foreign economic policy over the past three decades. The results suggest that, far from disliking realism, Americans are at least as comfortable with the logic of realpolitik as they are with liberal internationalism. The persistence of the anti-realist assumption might be due to an ironic fact: American elites are more predisposed towards liberal internationalism than the rest of the American public.

That is from a recent paper by Daniel Drezner (ungated version here). Drezner surveys a vast amount of polling data and argues that there is an “intuitive realism” or “folk realism” in American public opinion:

• Americans prioritize realist goals — e.g., protecting the U.S. against terrorist attacks — more than internationalist goals — e.g., promoting democracy and human rights.

• Americans favor the use of force much more when the mission is based on realpolitik (e.g., missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998) than when it is based on humanitarian concerns (e.g., Haiti in 1992-95).

• Americans are “mercantilist” with regard to trade, expressing concerns about the loss of American jobs and favoring a relative gains approach.

Drezner argues, convincingly, that the null hypothesis among some IR scholars is “the American public is hostile to realism.” If that’s the null, then Drezner has amassed impressive evidence to reject the null.

At the same time, I wondered if this folk realism was, well, entirely real.

Continue reading "Is the American Public Realist?" »

Posted by John Sides at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Andrew Kydd has a short paper that uses game theory to analyze the benefits and disadvantages of ethnic profiling at airports etc. He starts with analysis of a simple Matching Pennies game (which I’ve always had in the back of my head as the most obvious simple way of modeling this process; I suspect the same is true of many people who have (a) taken a course in basic game theory, and (b) thought about profiling tactics), and moves on to a more complex specification. On the basis of a Colonel Blotto game, Kydd argues that some degree of ‘seemingly unfair profiling’ is likely to result from rational strategies employed by actors on both sides, except under relatively unlikely parameter values. He concludes that:

Profiing in the context of strategic terrorist groups is rational, when considered solely on the basis of what will stop more terrorist attacks. Other factors may constrain the United States from profiling, but the logic of interaction with terrorist groups suggests a powerful dynamic in its favor.

While the paper is still a work in progress, I worry that this is one of those cases where game theorists reach confident conclusions on the basis of ceteris paribus conditions, where the ceteris are anything but paribus if you look at them closely. Entirely apart from the ethical implications (which he seems interested in exploring in future iterations of the piece), the conclusion that profiling will stop terrorism rests on the assumption that increases in profiling of specific ethnic groups won’t have any consequences for future recruitment of terrorists from those groups. There’s an array of circumstantial evidence that the perceived humiliation that targeted searches and other such measures involve have significant implications for relations between the targeted group and other members of the population.

Jack Knight and I have some unpublished work where we try to tease this out in the context of trust relations - we argue that those who feel targeted by measures of this sort are rationally going to be more distrustful of those who belong to more privileged sections of the population for a variety of reasons. This may obviously have consequences for the ease of recruiting those aggrieved members to terrorist organizations. Obviously, there’s no good way of measuring the extent of this effect, assuming it exists. But equally obviously, this and related interaction effects mean that one should be quite careful before drawing broad conclusions about the merits of policies on the basis of simple game theoretic models - the unmeasured knock-on consequences may very likely swamp the specific effects that your model is designed to single out.

Posted by Henry at 06:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Dan Drezner writes in the Chronicle about political science methodology and Walt/Mearsheimer.

Does the public understand how political science works? Or are political scientists the ones who need re-educating? Those questions have been running through my mind in light of the drubbing that John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt received in the American news media for their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy … From a political-science perspective, what’s interesting about those reviews is that they are largely grounded in methodological critiques — which rarely break into the public sphere. What’s disturbing is that the methodologies used in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy are hardly unique to Mearsheimer and Walt. Are the indictments of their book overblown, or do they expose the methodological flaws of the discipline in general?

The most persistent public criticism of Mearsheimer and Walt has been their failure to empirically buttress their argument with interviews. … To the general reader, such critiques must sound damning. International-relations scholars know full well, however, that innumerable peer-reviewed articles and university-press books utilize the same kind of empirical sources that appear in The Israel Lobby. Most case studies in international relations rely on news-conference transcripts, official documents, newspaper reportage, think-tank analyses, other scholarly works, etc. It is not that political scientists never interview policy makers — they do (and Mearsheimer and Walt aver that they have as well). However, with a few splendid exceptions, interviews are not the bread and butter of most international-relations scholarship. (This kind of fieldwork is much more common in comparative politics.)

… the claim that political scientists can’t write about policy without talking to policy makers borders on the absurd. The first rule about policy makers is that they always have agendas — even in interviews with social scientists. … Further, most empirical work in political science is concerned with actions, not words … Other methodological critiques are more difficult to dismiss. … Mead enumerates several methodological sins, in particular the imprecise manner in which the “Israel Lobby” is defined in the book. … Many of the reviews of the book highlight two flaws that, disturbingly, are more pervasive in academic political science. The first is the failure to compare the case in question to other cases. …

Continue reading "Drezner on political science methodology and Walt/Mearsheimer" »

Posted by Henry at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan Drezner today

Kevin Whitelaw wrote a fascinating piece in U.S. News and World Report suggesting that Al Qaeda is confronting a more powerful foe than the United States government: organizational pathology:

More than 600 captured personnel files of foreigners who joined the terrorist group known as Al Qaeda in Iraq tell the individual stories of Muslim extremists who made the difficult journey to Iraq—and most likely died or were captured there….

But the records, which were analyzed and released by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, also point out a trait that has been unique to al Qaeda and many of its offshoots: They are surprisingly bureaucratic.

This is something that has already received some attention in the literature. Jacob N. Shapiro, and David A. Siegel (who gave an interesting talk at GWU a couple of years ago) have a piece in International Studies Quarterly that looks at principal-agent problems in terrorist organizations, and concludes that one of the big problems that terrorist masterminds face is in ensuring that their underlings behave honestly. This may have unfortunate results for their organization’s effectiveness.

Continue reading "Accounting for terrorism" »

Posted by Henry at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Kissinger, called upon to explain his bizarre emergence as a sex symbol, famously quipped that “Power is the ultimiate aphrodisiac.” That quip came immediately to my mind as I read Daniel Drezner’s article, “Foreign Policy Goes Glam,” in the November/December issue of The National Interest. In the very first sentence of the article, Drezner asks, “Who would you rather sit next to at your next Council on Foreign Relations roundtable: Henry Kissinger or Angelina Jolie?”

Point taken. Celebrities — many of them sex symbols like Jolie, Madonna, or George Clooney — are increasingly emerging as a force to be reckoned with in public and international affairs. Let me suggest that perhaps, given Drezner’s argument, Kissinger’s formulation should be revised: Aphrodisia is the ultimate power.

Drezner’s point is simple:

Increasingly, celebrities are taking an active interest in world politics. … [T]hese efforts … are actually affecting what governments do and say. The power of soft news has given star entertainers additional leverage to advance their causes. Their ability to raise issues to the top of the global agenda is growing.

Even as vice president, Drezner notes, Al Gore “made little headway in addressing the problem of global warming eyond negotiating a treaty that the United States never ratified.” “As a post-White House celebrity,” though, Gore “has been far more successful … than he ever was as vice president. This is the kind of parable that could lead aspiring policy wonks to wonder if the best way to command policy influence is to attend Julliard instead of the Fletcher School.”

Rather than continuing to cherry-pick Drezner’s punch lines, I’ll simply point interested readers to it (abstract here). His interpretation of the causes and consequences of “glam” politics isn’t novel, but it’s an engaging piece that warrants a look.

p.s. Those who aren’t already familiar with Drezner’s international relations-oriented blog should check it out — lots of grist for the mill there.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a war drags on and as American casualties mount with no clear end in sight, war-weariness sets in among members of the mass public, who increasingly come to question whether the perceived benefits of the war outweigh the costs. This idea — that successes and failures on the battlefield determine the public’s willingness to support American military involvement overseas — is a key element of the conventional wisdom concerning public opinion and foreign policy.

In “Assuming the Costs of War: Events, Elites, and American Public Support for Military Conflict” (Journal of Politics, November 2007), Adam Berinsky puts this piece of conventional wisdom to the test. If Berinsky is right, the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Analyzing data from World War II and the Iraq War, Berinsky finds “little evidence that citizens make complex cost/benefit calculations when evaluating military action.” Rather, it is dissensus among members of the political elite that undermines public support for a war.”During times of war,” Berinsky writes, “individual-level knowledge of the most basic facts of war is weak; the power of elite cues is not.” Thus, an interpretation of mass opinion dynamics premised on well informed cost-benefit calculations is bound to fall short.

After Pearl Harbor, members of Congress of both major parties converged in support of the U.S. military effort and the public followed along, notwithstanding the terrible toll that the war was taking on the country. By contrast, the split between Republican and Democratic leaders in endorsement of the Iraq War (strong advocacy by the Republican leadership, headed by President Bush, versus a mixed response from Democratic leaders) has been directly reflected in the dynamics of mass opinion. None of this is to say that what happens on the battlefield has no impact on public opinion; whether it matters, Berinsky concludes, depends on the cost-benefit calculations of the elites from whom the mass public derives its political cues rather than on the direct cost-benefit calculations of ordinary citizens themselves.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Mueller is an unfailingly provocative scholar of international affairs who (ironically from his perch in the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State University) has challenged the core assumptions of the U.S. response to international terrorism. Mueller’s thesis is accurately conveyed by the title of his
book-length treatment of the subject, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.

Mueller’s “hypothesis that dare not speak its name” is the claim — which strikes some as outrageous and others as a much-needed antidote to a fundamentally flawed policy response — that the U.S. has wildly overreacted to the terrorist threat. I claim no expertise whatsoever on matters pertaining to this issue, so rather than trying to assess Mueller’s argument I’ll simply itemize some of his main points and invite interested readers to follow up on their own.

• Terrorism, particularly international terrorism, doesn’t do much damage when considered in almost any reasonable context.

• The likelihood that any individual American will be killed in a terrorist event is microscopic. Outside of 2001, fewer people have been killed in the U.S. by international terrorism than have drowned in toilets or have died from bee stings.

• Just about any damage terrorists are likely to be able to perpetrate can be readily absorbed. To deem the threat an “existential” one is somewhere between extravagant and absurd.

• Chemical and radiological weapons, and most biological ones as well, are incapable of perpetrating mass destruction.

• The likelihood that a terrorist group will be able to master nuclear weapons any time soon is extremely, perhaps vanishingly, small.

• Policies that focus entirely on worst-case scenarios (or worst-case fantasies) are unwise and can be exceedingly wasteful.

• Much, probably most, of the money and effort expended on counterterrorism since 2001 has been wasted.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Civil war settlements create institutional arrangements that in turn shape postsettlement politics among the parties to the previous conflict. Following civil wars that involve competing nation-state projects, partition is more likely than alternative institutional arrangements—specifically, unitarism, de facto separation, and autonomy arrangements—to preserve the peace and facilitate democratization. A theory of domestic political institutions as a constraint on reescalation of conflict explains this unexpected relationship through four intermediate effects—specifically, the likelihood that each institutional arrangement will reinforce incompatible national identities, focus the pursuit of greed and grievance on a single zero-sum conflict over the allocation of decision rights, empower the parties to the previous conflict with multiple escalatory options, and foster incompatible expectations of victory. The theory’s predictions stand up under statistical tests that use four alternative datasets.

That is from a new article by Thomas Chapman and Philip Roeder. (Can anyone find an ungated version?) Various people have advocated partition as the best answer to the ongoing civil strife in Iraq. While Chapman and Roeder are cautious in drawing implications for Iraq, their evidence of partition’s benefits deserves consideration. See, however, the differing perspective of Nicholas Sambanis.

Addendum: see also this paper by James Fearon. [Hat tip to Holger Schmidt]

Posted by John Sides at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)