In multiethnic societies, domestic minority groups are frequently associated with external adversaries. In such situations, external confrontations may potentially exacerbate internal ethnic conflict by increasing intolerance toward the domestic minority. Alternatively, they may result in rallying the public around a common superordinate national identity. We examine the case of India, which has a long-running rivalry with Muslim-majority Pakistan. Through a large (n = 7052) survey experiment, we find little evidence that a hypothetical crisis with Pakistan worsens attitudes toward India's large Muslim minority. Instead, we find that such a crisis may improve intergroup cohesion within India, improving tolerance towards Muslim minorities.

We explore whether international disputes harm commerce by galvanizing consumer boycotts of foreign products. Boycotts increase the social penalty of owning goods associated with a foreign adversary, offsetting individual incentives to free ride or discount the utility of participation. By harming international commerce, boycotts can help reveal information about resolve and avoid more costly forms of conflict. Using administrative data on the universe of new passenger vehicle registration records in China from 2009 to 2015, we demonstrate that consumer boycotts that arose amid tensions between China and Japan over a territorial dispute in 2012 had significant and persistent effects on vehicle sales, especially in cities that witnessed anti-Japanese street demonstrations. The market share of Japanese brands dropped substantially during and after the boycott with long lasting effects. Our analysis provides concrete evidence of the short- and long-term impacts of international tensions on economic activities.

How does public diplomacy shape global public opinion? In this note, we theorize that positive public diplomacy that emphasizes aid and friendship works, while negative messages that criticize international rivals are ineffective. We conduct an experiment, to our knowledge the first of its kind, that randomly exposes Indian citizens to real Twitter messages from Chinese diplomats. We find that positive messages emphasizing aid and friendship improve perceptions of China, even in times of escalating violent conflict. However, messages from so-called “Wolf Warrior” diplomats that harshly criticize the United States are ineffective and can backfire in times of crisis. We argue public diplomacy can be a useful tool for global powers, but that domestic political pressures have pushed some diplomats, like China's Wolf Warriors, toward nationalist messages that do not appeal to foreign audiences.

This study investigates how individuals may develop more or less strong beliefs in the indivisibility of a disputed territory and how such beliefs may influence their policy preferences toward resolving the dispute. Using a survey experiment in Japan, we find that historical ownership strengthens respondents’ beliefs in territorial indivisibility. Furthermore, those who hold the strongest belief in territorial indivisibility are much less likely to support bilateral negotiation and more likely to support contentious policies, including but not limited to military actions. Finally, we explore external validity of the findings by analyzing respondents who had a real dispute in mind during the survey with China, South Korea, and Russia, respectively.

How does the design of military institutions affect who bears the costs of war? We answer this question by studying the transformative shift from segregated to integrated US military units during the Korean War. Combining new micro-level data on combat fatalities with archival data on the deployment and racial composition of military battalions, we show that Black and white soldiers died at similar rates under segregation. Qualitative and quantitative evidence provides one potential explanation for this counterintuitive null finding: acute battlefield concerns necessitated deploying military units wherever soldiers were needed, regardless of their race. We next argue that the mid-war racial integration of units, which tied the fates of soldiers more closely together, should not alter the relative fatality rates. The evidence is consistent with this expectation. Finally, while aggregate fatality rates were equal across races, segregation enabled short-term casualty discrepancies. Under segregation there were high casualty periods for white units followed by high casualty periods for Black units. Integration eliminated this variability. This research note highlights how enshrining segregationist policies within militaries creates permissive conditions for either commanders' choices, or the dictates and variability of conflict, to shape who bears war's costs.

How do the costs of conflict influence public support for the use of force? Existing research finds that weapons that eliminate the possibility of military casualties, such as drones, increase popular support for engaging in conflict. We argue that this effect may be overstated because the choice of weapons technology is endogenous to conflict. Leaders may select to use drones in conflicts where the risk of harm to ground forces is especially high. To address this, we replicate and extend the research design of Walsh and Schulzke across three survey experiments. The key innovation in our experiments is that subjects are led to believe that the choice of attack type – drones or ground troops – is determined by weather conditions rather than strategic considerations. We find that support for military action does not differ across treatments in which subjects are told that the attack involves drone strikes or ground troops.

Interactions between units in political systems often occur across multiple relational contexts. These relational systems feature interdependencies that result in inferential shortcomings and poorly-fitting models when ignored. General advancements in inferential network analysis have improved our ability to understand relational systems featuring interdependence, but developments specific to working with interdependence that cross relational contexts remain sparse. In this paper, I introduce a multilayer network approach to modeling systems comprising multiple relations using the exponential random graph model. In two substantive applications, the first a policy communication network and the second a global conflict network, I demonstrate that the multilayer approach affords inferential leverage and produces models that better fit observed data.

In “Diversionary Dragons, or ‘Talking Tough in Taipei’” (Journal of East Asian Studies 9, 3: 369–398), Yitan Li, Patrick James, and A. Cooper Drury presented a newly created data set to show that Chen Shui-bian used independence rhetoric and confrontation with the mainland as a diversionary tactic in the face of domestic political difficulties. In the present exchange, Jonathan Sullivan challenges the authors' understanding of how the Democratic Progressive Party used the Taiwan independence issue—and the authors' interpretation of independence—and raises questions about the coding of press coverage as a means of identifying underlying preferences. The authors respond, concluding that the future use of such diversionary tactics is by no means foreclosed.

Much has been written on the triangular, and increasingly high-profile, China-Taiwan-US relations. However, scholars have yet to apply Diversionary Theory to the China-Taiwan dyad. DT argues that leaders may resort to international conflict when domestic political and economic situations become troublesome, aiming at directing public attention away from problems at home. While creation of explicit military conflict in the Taiwan Strait by Taipei is deemed quite unlikely, more subtle processes of diversion might be expected instead. This article applies a variant on DT to assess whether leaders in Taipei have used rhetoric about Taiwan independence or unification as a distraction from domestic problems during the years leading up to Taiwan's 2004 presidential election. We find that, as the president's approval sinks, pro-independence rhetoric becomes more likely. Overall, the results of this study confirm extension of DT to the case of Taiwan and encourage further research applied to middle powers.