Suchergebnisse

"This book addresses two central questions in current debates about US foreign policy: how did the US sustain its world order, and can this world order persist in the future? Giacomo Chiozza suggests that the answer depends on the relations the US maintains with incumbents and challengers in partner nations"--

This study investigates an observable implication of audience cost theory. Building upon rational expectations theories of voters' choice and foreign policy substitutability theory, it posits that audience costs vary over the electoral calendar. It then assesses whether US presidents' major responses in international crises reflect the variability in audience costs in an analysis of 66 international crises between 1937 and 2006. Using out-of-sample tests, this study finds that tying-hand commitment strategies were more frequent closer to presidential elections, as expected from audience cost theory. It also finds that the fluctuation of audience costs over the electoral calendar is non-linear.

This article tests a series of hypotheses that probe whether the crisis over Iraq has profoundly altered the popular perceptions of the United States abroad. Using survey data from Britain, France, Germany and Russia, this article shows that attitudes towards the United States were primarily shaped by the approval of President George W. Bush and of the American people themselves. More specific misgivings about the use of US power in the world entered into the cognitive calculus only as secondary factors. For substantial portions of the mass publics a dim view of the American people overshadowed all other considerations in the formation of a negative view of the United States. This finding suggests that a change of US administration would not be sufficient per se to alter popular attitudes towards the United States. For that to occur, views of the American people would have to improve as well.

This article offers an empirical test of Huntington's thesis in The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington argues that states belonging to different civilizations will have a higher propensity to be involved in international conflict. This effect should be more prominent in the post-Cold War period. The civilization factor should also interact with membership in different Cold War blocs, border contiguity, regime type, and levels of modernization, magnifying or depressing the basic effects of these variables. To test these hypotheses, a logit specification with King & Zeng's solution for rareness of events is used on the Kosimo data. The Kosimo data allow for an extension of the empirical analysis from both a temporal and a substantive point of view. This study shows that state interactions across the civilizational divide are not more conflict prone. The first eight years of the post-Cold War era also fail to give support to Huntington's thesis. Moreover, while the civilization factor modifies the effects of border contiguity and regime type, this is not sufficient to generate conditions under which differences in civilizational heritage are associated with greater risks of conflict.