BOOK PROJECT
DECISION BY DESIGN: NATIONAL SECURITY INSTITUTIONS & INTERSTATE CRISIS
Do domestic bureaucracies affect interstate conflict behavior? One school of thought argues that military, diplomatic, and intelligence actors possess unique preferences, leading to inefficient group decision-making that increases the propensity for miscalculation, risk acceptant bargaining, and interstate violence. Another school of thought argues that chief executives possess a set of management tools that attenuate bureaucratic preference divergence and ensure efficient group decision-making. Despite the availability of these tools, however, political science observes wide variation in the performance of national security decision-making groups. This yields a puzzle: why do chief executives sometimes choose management strategies that lead to inefficient group decision-making?
This book project makes three contributions to address this puzzle. First, applying concepts from economics, social psychology, and comparative politics, this project introduces a new framework for thinking about the relationship between bureaucracy and international relations: national security institutions, which are defined as the rules and procedures that regulate relationships between chief executives and their military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers. The first half of the book project argues that states can design national security institutions featuring strong decision-making and coordination bodies, such as the U.S. National Security Council, that improve vertical and horizontal information flow between actors. The central argument is that these informational efficiency gains within states improve signaling between states, thereby decreasing the propensity for interstate crisis. Second, I test the argument through statistical analyses that introduce and employ an original cross-national time series dataset on national security institutions across the world from 1946 to 2015. These data include 857 unique decision-making and coordination bodies, as well as 5,339 chief executives, defense ministers, foreign ministers, and senior intelligence advisers. Critically, they describe all known instances of national security councils across the world since World War II. The findings demonstrate a strong, negative relationship between the strength of national security institutions and propensity for interstate crisis. Subsequent qualitative analysis illustrates the proposed mechanisms of the theory, leveraging a wealth of new archival and interview evidence from China, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States. Third, the second half of the book project explores the incentives that encourage and constrain state leaders from reforming their national security institutions. Heterogeneity in the political environment helps to explain why some state leaders rationally resist efficiency-improving reforms.
The book project has theoretical implications for the domestic origins of international conflict, as well as how institutions aggregate actor preferences and enhance group performance. Finally, through its case selection, the project makes a contribution to the study of Chinese foreign policy, offering the first look inside critical government bodies that currently remain a black box to academic and non-academic worlds alike. In so doing, the analysis connects the presently disparate sub-fields on China's foreign policy bureaucracy and its international behavior.
This book project makes three contributions to address this puzzle. First, applying concepts from economics, social psychology, and comparative politics, this project introduces a new framework for thinking about the relationship between bureaucracy and international relations: national security institutions, which are defined as the rules and procedures that regulate relationships between chief executives and their military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers. The first half of the book project argues that states can design national security institutions featuring strong decision-making and coordination bodies, such as the U.S. National Security Council, that improve vertical and horizontal information flow between actors. The central argument is that these informational efficiency gains within states improve signaling between states, thereby decreasing the propensity for interstate crisis. Second, I test the argument through statistical analyses that introduce and employ an original cross-national time series dataset on national security institutions across the world from 1946 to 2015. These data include 857 unique decision-making and coordination bodies, as well as 5,339 chief executives, defense ministers, foreign ministers, and senior intelligence advisers. Critically, they describe all known instances of national security councils across the world since World War II. The findings demonstrate a strong, negative relationship between the strength of national security institutions and propensity for interstate crisis. Subsequent qualitative analysis illustrates the proposed mechanisms of the theory, leveraging a wealth of new archival and interview evidence from China, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States. Third, the second half of the book project explores the incentives that encourage and constrain state leaders from reforming their national security institutions. Heterogeneity in the political environment helps to explain why some state leaders rationally resist efficiency-improving reforms.
The book project has theoretical implications for the domestic origins of international conflict, as well as how institutions aggregate actor preferences and enhance group performance. Finally, through its case selection, the project makes a contribution to the study of Chinese foreign policy, offering the first look inside critical government bodies that currently remain a black box to academic and non-academic worlds alike. In so doing, the analysis connects the presently disparate sub-fields on China's foreign policy bureaucracy and its international behavior.
NATIONAL SECURITY INSTITUTIONS DATASET, 1946-2015
ARCHIVAL & INTERVIEW RESEARCH
- Center for International Security Studies, Islamabad | Fall 2017
- Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto | Fall 2017
- Academia Historica - 國史館, Taipei | Summer 2017
- Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica - 中研院近史所, Taipei | Summer 2017
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives - 外交部档案馆, Beijing | Spring 2017
- Peking University Library - 北京大学图书馆, Beijing | Spring 2017
- Nehru Memorial Library and Museum, Delhi | Winter 2017
- National Archives of India, Delhi | Winter 2017
- National Archives and Records Administration, College Park | Fall 2016
- National Security Archive, Washington DC | Fall 2016
- Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence | Fall 2016
- Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene | Fall 2016
- William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock | Fall 2016
- National Archives Administration - 國家發展委員會檔案管理局, Taipei | Summer 2016
CHINESE FOREIGN POLICY
DELEGATED DIPLOMACY: WHY CHINA USES THE MILITARY FOR FACE-TO-FACE EXCHANGES (Under Review)
with Austin Strange
APSA & ISA Annual Conferences | 2016 & 2017
Why do states engage in face-to-face diplomacy? Existing research finds that diplomatic meetings allow statesmen to assess intentions and maintain interstate relationships. We instead argue and empirically demonstrate that states can use face-to-face diplomacy to improve material capabilities. Specifically, heads of state can acquire and distribute defense information and technology by delegating face-to-face diplomacy to military actors, leveraging the latter's expertise during the meeting. Introducing original, individual-level data on China's diplomatic exchanges, we provide the first systematic evidence on why states opt into military diplomacy. Our data further show that China's military was responsible for nearly half of all its high-level public diplomacy in recent years, illustrating the importance of examining the Chinese case. We extend our statistical analysis by examining recently declassified government materials and meeting transcripts from the United States and China.
HOW NATIONAL SECURITY INSTITUTIONS CHANGE INTERSTATE SIGNALING (Working Paper)
APSA Annual Conferences | 2018
CHINA'S CRISIS BARGAINING: THEORY AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE (In Progress)
CHINA DIPLOMATIC EXCHANGE DATASET, 1949-2015 (In Progress)
Data Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China
ADVISERS, INSTITUTIONS & ELITE DECISION-MAKING
SOCIALIZED HAWKS? HOW SELECTION EXPLAINS MILITARY ATTITUDES ON THE USE OF FORCE (Under Review)
with Kaine Meshkin and Robert Schub
APSA & ISA Annual Conferences | 2017 & 20178
Research Grant, Institute for Quantitive Social Science (IQSS)
Do military and civilian attitudes on the use of force differ and, if so, why? Past scholarship is divided on whether military officials are more hawkish but is relatively unified in attributing differences to military socialization. This study offers new evidence on the direction of the civil-military attitudinal gap and challenges the consensus on its source, theorizing that differences stem from career selection, not socialization. To adjudicate between contentions, we survey incoming officer candidates at the US Military Academy before and after basic training and pair the results with synchronous surveys of a nationally representative sample. We find that military individuals are consistently more hawkish than civilians, the gap is evident upon arrival, and socialization during basic training has minimal effect on the gap. An embedded experiment further reveals that while military individuals display elevated sensitivity to war's cost, this is more than offset by preexisting hawkish dispositions. The results challenge and solidify assumptions underpinning canonical theories of civil-military relations and clarify the behavioral origins of attitudes on the use of force.
ARMIES AND INFLUENCE: WHEN MILITARY ELITES CHANGE NATIONAL SECURITY DECISION-MAKING (In Progress)
with Josh Kertzer
TECHNOLOGY & INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
EXPLAINING CYBERSPACE SECURITY STRATEGY: CHINA AND THE WORLD (In Progress)
Image: Photo of Watercolor by Tanconville, 1911