Reputational incentives are ubiquitous explanations for war, yet consistent evidence of their effects is elusive for two reasons. First, most work searches for the payment of reputational costs, ye...

Leaders, States, and Reputations:

A wave of recent research challenges the role of regime type in international relations. One striking takeaway is that democratic and autocratic leaders can often achieve similar levels of domestic constraint, which in many issue areas results in similar international outcomes—leading many to question traditional views of democracies as distinctive in their international relations. In this review essay, we use recent contributions in the field to build what we call a “malleable constraints” framework, in which all governments have an institutionally defined default level of domestic audience constraint that is generally higher in democracies, but leaders maintain some agency within these institutions and can strategically increase their exposure to or insulation from this constraint. Using this framework, we argue that regime type is still a crucial differentiator in international affairs even if, as recent studies suggest, democratic and autocratic leaders can sometimes be similarly constrained by domestic audiences and thus achieve similar international outcomes. This framework helps reconcile many competing claims in recent scholarship, including the puzzle of why autocracies do not strategically increase domestic audience constraint more often. Just because autocracies can engage audience constraints and democracies can escape them does not mean that they can do so with equal ease, frequency, or risk.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E1CD35C02F0A247A67D9E7BE361A5FC7/S0020818319000365a.pdf/div-class-title-recapturing-regime-type-in-international-relations-leaders-institutions-and-agency-space-div.pdf

Recapturing Regime Type in International Relations: Leaders, Institutions, and Agency Space

This article introduces the special feature “Leaders, Crisis Behavior, and International Conflict.” Individual leaders play a central role in world politics. Yet, for the last several decades, inte...

Studying Leaders and Military Conflict: Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

Are leaders from certain parties particularly likely to engage in military conflict? This question is difficult to answer because of selection bias. For example, countries may be more likely to ele...

Is There a War Party? Party Change, the Left–Right Divide, and International Conflict:

Vote-Buying by the United States in the United Nations

This article introduces the CHISOLS (Change in Source of Leader Support) dataset, which identifies which leadership changes within countries bring to power a new leader whose primary support is dra...

Measuring change in source of leader support: The CHISOLS dataset

Abstract The Japanese public has been assumed to possess a deeply ingrained aversion toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons. We employ a survey experiment to ascertain whether this aversion is unconditional or may erode in the face of hypothetical deterioration in Japan's security situation, and in particular a hypothetical withdrawal of the US security-nuclear umbrella, increased North Korean nuclear weapons testing activities, and movement by South Korea toward the attainment of a nuclear arsenal. We find that the Japanese nuclear aversion may come under stress in the face of such developments. Additionally, we find that the elasticity of Japanese attitudes with respect to the nuclear option in the face of external security deterioration may be associated with an important individual-level demographic characteristic, namely, gender.

External Threats and Public Opinion: The East Asian Security Environment and Japanese Views on the Nuclear Option

Social media communication makes visible the linkages between governments’ actions to diplomatic events and domestic audiences’ reactions. This study analyses tweets that discuss the recent diplomatic crisis between Japan and Korea. Through the detection of clusters of Twitter users and the content analysis of the tweets in the two countries, this study shows the public’s interpretation of a crisis widely differs by their stances towards their country’s government. The analysis finds that the clusters are aligned with their pro- and anti-stances towards the current government and that pro-government clusters tend to interpret the diplomatic crisis through a historical perspective, while anti-government clusters interpret it as a matter of present-day politics. Furthermore, we find strong negativity in the tweets discussing the opponent online groups, especially by the anti-government cluster against the pro-government online camp. These findings suggest that a diplomatic crisis may create or deepen domestic polarisation.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/13691481231172346

Naoko Matsumura

Papers

Measuring change in source of leader support: The CHISOLS dataset

External Threats and Public Opinion: The East Asian Security Environment and Japanese Views on the Nuclear Option

The social media audience of diplomatic crisis