Research

Dissertation Project

Dovish Reputation Theory
When Fighting to Demonstrate Resolve Backfires

Leaders and scholars alike often argue that it is worth fighting a war in order to enhance your reputation for resolve in international politics. President Harry Truman warned that failure to fight in Korea “would be an open invitation to new acts of aggression elsewhere.” Famed game-theorist Thomas Schelling went even further and claimed that reputation for resolve is, in fact, “one of the few things worth fighting over.” While this argument is intuitive, is it always true that states maximize their reputation for resolve by fighting? Can states ever maximize their reputation for resolve by backing down, and if so, when? The literature on this subject has carefully examined the benefits states may receive from fighting in order to acquire a reputation for resolve and questioned whether past instances of resolve (or the lack thereof) actually influence future conflicts. However, there has been much less work done on the potential negative consequences of attempting to boost your reputation for resolve by fighting. Therefore, this project seeks to outline the conditions under which states maximize their reputation for resolve by backing down from a conflict rather than fighting. By doing so, I hope to help policymakers avoid fighting or staying in wars for the wrong reasons.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Do Women Make More Credible Threats?
Gender Stereotypes, Audience Costs, and Crisis Bargaining
with Christopher W. Blair
International Organization

As more women attain executive office, it is important to understand how gender dynamics affect international politics. Toward this end, we present the first evidence that gender stereotypes affect leaders’ abilities to generate audience costs. Using survey experiments, we show that female leaders have political incentives to combat gender stereotypes that women are weak by acting “tough” during international military crises. Most prominently, we find evidence that female leaders, and male leaders facing female opponents, pay greater inconsistency costs for backing down from threats than male leaders do against fellow men. These findings point to particular advantages and disadvantages women have in international crises. Namely, female leaders are better able to tie hands—an efficient mechanism for establishing credibility in crises. However, this bargaining advantage means female leaders will also have a harder time backing down from threats. Our findings have critical implications for debates over the effects of greater gender equality in executive offices worldwide.

Who’s Prone to Drone? A Global Time-Series Analysis of
Armed Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Proliferation
with Michael C. Horowitz & Matthew Fuhrmann
Conflict Management and Peace Science

What determines whether countries pursue and obtain armed drones? Using an original time-series dataset, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of armed drone proliferation from 1994 to 2019. We theorize and find evidence that security threats—like terrorism—are not the only factors driving proliferation. Regime type also has a significant effect, but it varies over time. From 1994 to 2010 regime type had no significant effect. However, non-democracies became significantly more likely to pursue and obtain armed drones from 2011 to 2019 owing to China’s entrance into the drone export market, which asymmetrically eased supply-side constraints for non-democracies. We also find that status-seeking states are more likely to pursue armed drones. Our results contribute to the broader academic literature on proliferation by demonstrating how supply shocks can lead to changes in proliferation trends over time and lending further credence to the importance of prestige in international politics.

Working Papers

Madman or Mad Genius? The International Benefits and Domestic Costs of the Madman Strategy

According to the “Madman Theory” outlined by Richard Nixon and embraced by Donald Trump, being perceived as mad can help make seemingly incredible threats—like starting a nuclear war—more credible. This study offers the first experimental test of this theory. In a series of four novel survey experiments, I find evidence that perceived madness does provide advantages in coercive bargaining vis-à-vis foreign adversaries. However, the advantages of perceived madness do not come without costs. Domestic audiences strongly disapprove of a leader perceived as insane, as the public does not want a madman for a president. Although this makes perceived madness a more costly signal that should theoretically enhance a leader’s credibility at the bargaining table, it also makes pursuing this strategy less tenable from a domestic politics perspective. Overall, this study provides clearer support for the Madman Theory than some previous literature has found, but also breaks new ground in highlighting the domestic costs of perceived madness.

The Two Faces of Opposition to Chemical Weapons
Sincere versus Insincere Norm-Holders
with Christopher W. Blair & Jonathan A. Chu

Prominent research holds that the use of weapons of mass destruction is taboo. But how strong are these norms? We argue that some citizens may actually support taboo policies in private but are unwilling to express counter-normative opinions openly due to fear of social sanction. These shallow norm-holders are difficult to identify empirically because they are observationally equivalent to sincere norm-holders in direct-question surveys. To overcome this challenge, we use a list design, which allows survey respondents to indirectly express sensitive opinions. Results from two list experiments fielded in 2016 and 2019 reveal that between 10% and 17% of Americans falsify their preferences over chemical weapons use when asked directly. Taking shallow norm-holders into account reveals that more than a quarter of the U.S. population may actually support using chemical weapons in war. These results comport with recent studies that question the strength of alleged taboos in international politics.

Do Armed Drones Reduce Terrorism?
Evidence from 18 Countries
with Matthew Fuhrmann & Michael C. Horowitz

Do armed drones influence terrorism, and if so, how? Existing analyses focus almost exclusively on the US drone campaigns in Pakistan and/or Afghanistan, yet armed drone proliferation has occurred at a rapid clip over the last five years. Using new data on drone proliferation, we assess whether getting armed drones changes the degree to which all 18 countries that obtained this technology from 2001 to 2017 experienced terrorism. Identifying a causal relationship is difficult because countries are likely to seek armed drones when they already face threats from terrorism. This means that drone adopters may be fundamentally different than non-adopters when it comes to their vulnerability to terrorism. Moreover, countries that obtain armed drones probably pursue counter-terrorism strategies besides getting drones simultaneously. To address these issues, we control for observable factors that cause both terrorism and drone adoption, and employ country and year fixed effects to capture unobservable or difficult-to-measure confounders. Our design allows us to determine how switching from not having armed drones to fielding this technology changes the level of terrorism that a country experiences. Results from negative binomial regressions show that obtaining armed drones significantly lowers the number of terrorist attacks and the number of people killed in terrorist attacks that states experience in a given year. Our findings provide additional evidence that drones are effective as a counter-terrorism tool.

To Compete or Retreat?
The Diffusion of Precision Strike 
with Michael C. Horowitz

The modern precision strike complex is a critical comparative advantage that explains why the American military remains stronger than any potential opponents. After the publicized use of precision strike weapons and stealth technology by the United States in the First Gulf War, analysts predicted that precision strike weapons like cruise missiles, enablers like satellites, and platforms like submarines would spread rapidly around the world. In fact, the diffusion of these capabilities has happened much slower than analysts initially predicted. To explain the variation in proliferation, this paper draws on a novel dataset tracking country-level acquisition of eight aspects of the precision strike complex from 1990 to 2017. Results indicate that supply-side factors—like a state’s technological capacity and defense relationships with key exporters—significantly affect the likelihood of states developing advanced precision strike capabilities. Demand-side factors like interstate security threats also play an important role, but not in the way traditionally theorized. We find an inverted-U relationship between security threats and proliferation. When states have rivals or neighbors with moderate precision strike capabilities, they have security incentives to compete with them. However, when states face highly advanced adversaries, they have a tougher time competing, and thus have incentives to shift resources to other defense strategies.