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Why do some leaders stay in wars they are unlikely to win? Why do other leaders give in to their adversaries' demands when continued fighting is still possible? Peace at What Price? strives to answer these questions by offering a new theoretical concept: leader culpability. Culpable leaders - those who can be credibly linked to the decision to involve the state in the war - face a significantly higher likelihood of domestic punishment if they fail to win a war than non-culpable leaders who do the same. Consequently, culpable leaders will prosecute wars very differently from their non-culpable counterparts. Utilizing a large-N analysis and case illustrations, the book's findings challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the relationship between war outcomes and leader removal and demonstrate the necessity of looking at individual leader attributes, instead of collapsing leaders by regime type. The book also offers new insights on democracies at war and speaks to the American experience in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

A leader's culpability for involving his state in a conflict affects both his war termination calculus and his domestic audience's willingness to punish him if he loses. I define a culpable leader as any leader who either presides over the beginning of a war, or comes to power midwar and shares a political connection with a culpable predecessor. Using a data set created specifically for this study, I find that culpable leaders are more likely than nonculpable ones to achieve favorable war outcomes. I also find that domestic audiences will be willing to punish culpable leaders who lose, yet spare nonculpable leaders who do the same. Taken together, my findings underscore the need to appreciate more fully the role individual leaders play in bringing their states to war.

A growing body of literature argues that war outcomes affect leaders' tenure in office. But disagreement persists over how domestic political institutions translate performance in war into leader accountability. Some scholars argue that the tenure of democratic leaders is most sensitive to war outcomes, while others posit that autocratic leaders are more likely to be punished or rewarded for the outcomes of conflicts. The authors argue that existing research fails to take into account two important factors: whether the leader is viewed as culpable for the country's entry into the conflict, and whether the country features domestic institutions that make the leader vulnerable to removal from office, which varies greatly across nondemocracies. After taking leaders' culpability and vulnerability into account, the authors show that the tenures of culpable, democratic leaders and culpable, vulnerable, nondemocratic leaders are sensitive to war outcomes. By contrast, the tenures of nondemocratic leaders who are less vulnerable to removal are not sensitive to war outcomes, regardless of their culpability. (World Politics / SWP)

The "dyad" has become the analytical cornerstone of quantitative interstate conflict studies. Stuart Bremer, in no small part due to his "Dangerous Dyads" article, has been identified with the dyadic/dyad-year approach. We think this has come at the expense of his interest in "process models" of interstate conflict. Our examination of his writings on The Process of War indicate that multilateral conflict processes are most probably misspecified by a dyadic approach. We draw on examples such as alliance coalition formation, extended deterrence, economic sanctions, and especially war expansion, to elaborate upon and support our claim. We conclude our assessment of the dyadic/dyad-year approach by suggesting some areas for our colleagues to consider before adopting a dyadic approach in their own research.

AbstractThough avoiding blame is often a goal of elected officials, there are relatively few empirical examinations of how citizens assign blame during controversies. We are particularly interested in how this process works when an executive has been caught in a lie. Using two survey experiments, we examine whether subordinates can shield executives when they act as the face of a crisis. We first leverage a real-life situation involving the family separation crisis at the US–Mexico border in 2018. Respondents who read that Donald Trump falsely claimed he could not end the practice of family separation disapprove of his dishonesty. Yet this cost disappears when Trump's then-Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, is the primary official discussed in news stories. We then replicate these findings in a fictional scenario involving a city mayor, showing that the mayor is partially shielded from negative appraisals when the city manager lies on his behalf.