Suchergebnisse

Where were coups more likely to occur in the US world order? The US has occasionally resorted to coups to realign the foreign policy preferences in allied nations with its own preferences. This article explains why coups were more likely in countries where the leaders enjoyed an incumbency advantage that thwarted the ability of potential successors to gain power through regular channels of leadership turnover. That was more likely to be the case in presidential than in parliamentary democracies, and more likely in personalistic, military, or single-party regimes than in autocracies with multiparty legislatures.

"State Leaders and Foreign Policy" published on by Oxford University Press.

This study provides micro-level evidence for the new theories of accountability under globalization. We analyze the micro-level logic that underpins political accountability in democratic countries with highly globalized economies. We contend that voters discount current economic conditions in evaluating incumbent leaders if they perceive the incumbent leader moving the country in the right direction. We test this argument with survey data from eight European countries in 2012, while controlling for potential alternative explanations associated with pocketbook, sociotropic, and clarity-of-responsibility factors. We find that valence considerations related to future directions in the country sustain positive evaluations of leaders' performance even in the face of negative evaluations of the economy.

Despite many predictions to the contrary, the Republic of Korea (ROK) is currently one of the countries with most pro-American attitudes. We investigate what is behind the extraordinary resilience in US popular standing in an allegedly least likely setting. Using survey data from 2002 and 2007 and a novel methodology, Classification and Regression Tree models, we test whether US standing is: (1) a matter of interests, i.e. a reward that the USA receives because it either provides security or international public goods; or (2) whether it is a matter of image, i.e. the recognition that the USA is a role model to emulate. We find that across a large number of predictors, the Korean public mostly liked the USA because they liked American ways of doing business, which gives support to the image hypothesis. Security interests played a secondary role in shaping US standing, while the provision of international public goods had no impact in the popular assessment of the USA in the ROK. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

The impact of the political characteristics of national leaders on the management of territorial disputes is investigated to learn what kinds of leaders are more likely to resort to strategies of peaceful resolution. The choice to pursue strategies of accommodation and compromise is in part a function of leaders' time in office and the reputation they have established through their international conflict behavior and their military expertise. This is because leaders face different incentives as their tenure in office grows longer and because their reputation can be a form of expendable political capital that enables leaders to initiate a significant foreign policy change. A territorial dispute data set and a leader data set for the period from 1950 to 1990 are used to test this argument. An analysis using ordered probit models gives credence to the conjecture that leaders' characteristics are systematically associated with the choice of pursuing a peaceful resolution of a territorial dispute.