Territorial Dispute Settlement and the Fates of Leaders

• In Event: Leaders, International Conflict, and Peaceful Possibilities

Abstract

Scholars widely attribute the intractability of territorial disputes to domestic political constraints: leaders fear that compromising on disputed territory may provoke domestic backlash and jeopardize their hold on political office. While widely assumed in many explanations of territorial conflict, the extent to which efforts to resolve territorial disputes actually trigger domestic political punishment has seldom been tested empirically. Linking cross-national time-series data on leader tenure (Goemans et al. 2009) and election outcomes (Hyde and Marinov 2019) to territorial settlement proposals (Wiegand et al. 2020) and territorial negotiations (Huth and Allee 2002), I examine how territorial dispute settlement efforts have impacted leaders’ survival in office since 1945. Preliminary analysis suggests that, despite leaders’ strategic incentives to pursue territorial settlements only when it is politically safe to do so, the pursuit of territorial settlements nevertheless contribute to a higher risk of leader exit in democratic contexts, though largely through non-electoral channels such as resignation. In authoritarian contexts, on the other hand, territorial settlement attempts tend to be associated with a lower risk of leader exit. While these results appeal to the intuition that democratic leaders face greater accountability than autocratic leaders do, they also call for deeper investigation of the channels by which this accountability is actually imposed.

Author

• Andi Cam Zhou, U.S. Naval Academy