Leaders, International Conflict, and Peaceful Possibilities

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How do leaders make effective threats? Which leaders pursue international cooperation, and can they do so safely? This panel brings together five papers investigating the role of leaders on international conflict and international cooperation. These papers, while united in their focus on leaders, are diverse in their methodologies and approaches. Andi Zhou analyzes data from 1945 forward to investigate whether leaders are punished, either electorally or through other means, for pursuing settlements to territorial disputes. X Zhang and Qi Jing use new data on leaders’ pre-tenure overseas experiences to test the applicability of the ‘cosmopolitan peace hypothesis’ to leader foreign policy behavior. John P. Harden leverages new data on US presidents’ high-profile diplomatic initiatives from the founding of the US to 2009 to explain how leader narcissism causes more frequent showboating and success in the cooperative arena. Joshua Schwartz uses survey experiments with both elite and non-elite populations in the UK to investigate whether threats of nuclear brinksmanship are credible, and whether automating nuclear weapons out of the hand of leaders impacts the credibility of threats. Don Casler and Robert Ralston use a combination historical analysis of dispute reciprocation and surveys to examine whether leaders of declining powers can make credible international threats.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Individual Presentations

• Lucid Leaders: Declining Powers and Threat Credibility - Donald Casler, University of Illinois; Robert Ralston, University of Birmingham

• Global Heros? Leader Narcissism and the Pursuit of Diplomatic Success - John Patrick Harden, Dartmouth College

• Can Automating Nuclear Deterrence Avoid Conflict? Evidence from UK MPs - Joshua Schwartz, Carnegie Mellon University

• Belligerent Cosmopolitans: Pre-office Foreign Experience and Conflict Behavior - Xunchao Zhang, Stanford University; Qi Jing, University of California, Los Angeles

• Territorial Dispute Settlement and the Fates of Leaders - Andi Cam Zhou, U.S. Naval Academy

Discussants

• Matthew Fuhrmann Texas A&M University

• Stacie E. Goddard Wellesley College