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A Framework for Measuring Leaders’ Willingness to Use Force

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2020

JEFF CARTER Open the ORCID record for JEFF CARTER [Opens in a new window]  and
CHARLES E. SMITH JR. Open the ORCID record for CHARLES E. SMITH JR. [Opens in a new window]
JEFF CARTER*
Affiliation:
Appalachian State University
CHARLES E. SMITH JR.*
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
*
Jeff Carter Assistant Professor, Department of Government and Justice Studies, Appalachian State University, [email protected].
Charles E. Smith Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Mississippi, [email protected].
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Abstract

Political leaders’ willingness to use force is central to many explanations of foreign policy and interstate conflict. Unfortunately, existing indicators typically measure one aspect of this general concept, have limited coverage, and/or are not derived independently of leaders’ participation in interstate conflicts. We develop a strategy for constructing measures of leaders’ underlying willingness to use force with data on their background experiences, political orientations, and psychological traits in a Bayesian latent variable framework. Our approach produces measures of latent hawkishness for all national leaders between 1875 and 2004 that offer advantages over existing proxies along multiple dimensions, including construct validity, predictive validity, and measurement uncertainty. Importantly, our statistical framework allows scholars to build upon our measures by incorporating additional data and altering the assumptions underlying our models.

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 1352 - 1358
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Giacomo Chiozza, Michael Horowitz, Heather Ondercin, Scott Wolford, and the editors and reviewers at the APSR for helpful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. We also thank Michael Horowitz, Allan Stam, Kali Ellis, Katsunori Seki, Laron Williams, Thomas Brambor, Johannes Lindvall, and Jonathan Keller for making their data publicly available. We could not have written this article without their work. A supplementary appendix contains additional technical details, diagnostic analyses, and results tables. Replication materials are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/7WFX1K.

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Supplementary material: Link

Carter and Smith Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/7WFX1K
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Supplementary material: PDF

Carter and Smith supplementary material

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