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Most of the burgeoning theoretical and empirical literature on the role of leaders in comparative politics and international relations is built on the assumption that leaders choose policies to stay in office. However, leaders can lose office in a variety of ways. Leaders can lose office as a result of ill health; they can lose office in a regular manner; or they can be removed in an irregular manner such as by a coup. How a leader loses office, moreover, significantly affects the leader's subsequent fate. A broader perspective on not just the probability, but also the manner of losing office—and its associated consequences—thus suggests an additional mechanism to explain the behavior of leaders. If policy significantly affects not just whether, but also how, leaders lose office, leaders might design policy to minimize the anticipated negative consequences of losing office. Once we unpack the manner in which leaders lose office, for example, we see that the postulated logic of diversionary war only holds for a subgroup of leaders: those who fear an irregular removal from office.

The new collection of essays edited by John A. Vasquez in What Do We Know About War? provides a useful overview of the quantitative literature on war. This book makes no claims to move the field forward significantly but, instead, offers seniors and first-year graduate students a good basic understanding of how statistical analyses have been used to explain the variation between war and peace. The book has significant strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths are the wide array of questions addressed and the attempt to provide a systematic discussion of the current state of the quantitative knowledge on war; its weaknesses are the paucity of attention paid to new insights from the rational choice literature and their implications for the quantitative study of conflict.

This article examines how the postdefeat fate of leaders of different regimes affects their incentives to end or continue a losing war and how the outcome of war interacts with regime type to affect the leaders' postwar fate. Three regime types—democracies, dictatorships, and mixed regimes—and three fates—staying in power, losing power, and losing power with additional punishment in the form of exile, imprisonment, or death—are distinguished. Only leaders of mixed regimes are likely to lose power and suffer additional punishment whether they lose a war moderately or disastrously. Therefore, leaders of such losing mixed regimes have a disincentive to settle on moderately losing terms; they prefer to continue war in a gamble for resurrection. As a result, wars with losing mixed regimes last longer and produce higher numbers of battle deaths for both sides than other wars.

This article examines how the postdefeat fate of leaders of different regimes affects their incentives to end or continue a losing war & how the outcome of war interacts with regime type to affect the leaders' postwar fate. Three regime types -- democracies, dictatorships, & mixed regimes -- & three fates -- staying in power; losing power; & losing power with additional punishment in the form of exile, imprisonment, or death -- are distinguished. Only leaders of mixed regimes are likely to lose power & suffer additional punishment whether they lose a war moderately or disastrously. Therefore, leaders of such losing mixed regimes have a disincentive to settle on moderately losing terms; they prefer to continue war in a gamble for resurrection. As a result, wars with losing mixed regimes last longer & produce higher numbers of battle deaths for both sides than other wars. 9 Tables, 51 References. Adapted from the source document.

Although in principle states can bargain over the entire extent of their combined territory, we observe historically that states bargain within far more limited confines defined by well-bounded claims. We argue that this observation stems from the fact that states generally have limited territorial aims due either to limited benefits of obtaining additional territory and/or the costs of absorbing and controlling new territories and their inhabitants. Using a formal model, we show that introducing states with limited aims over territory has strategic implications for bargaining that have not been appreciated in canonical models that do not consider heterogeneity in state preferences. Whereas traditional models generally imply that small demands undermine the credibility of a challenger's threat, the existence of states with limited territorial aims makes limited demands credible, effective, and stable in the face of shocks to relative power. We then employ geospatial data on the geographic extent of territorial disputes in the period 1947–2000 to establish two results: the size of claims is weakly related to the relative power of disputants and unaffected by dramatic changes in power, and smaller claims are associated with a higher probability that the challenger will receive any concession.

The literature on diversionary war has long argued that a leader's tenure considerations play an important role in international conflict behavior. However, for the diversionary use of force to be rational, international conflict must in turn affect the leader's tenure. A two-stage probit model on a new data set of all leaders between 1919 and 1992 is used to examine this reciprocal relationship between the probability of losing office and the probability of crisis initiation. Contrary to theories of the diversionary use of force, results show that an increase in the risk of losing office makes leaders less likely to initiate a crisis, and an increase in the risk of an international crisis makes leaders more likely to lose office. Results also suggest that democracies are overall less likely to initiate a crisis because of the domestic political insecurity of democratic leaders.