Information Market Failure: Lapses in Public Consent and Their Consequences for Democratic Crisis Diplomacy.

International Relations;American Foreign Policy;International Security;Defense Economics;Political Science;Social Sciences;Political Science

Mohammad, Neill AStam, Allan C. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: International Relations;    American Foreign Policy;    International Security;    Defense Economics;    Political Science;    Social Sciences;    Political Science;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/96002/neilla_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Current understandings of the effects of domestic regimes on international security behavior rely on voting behavior in at least two ways.First, the need for democratic executives to provide public goods to large groups of supporters in order to retain office produces clear monadic behavioral patterns.These include a preference for military quality over quantity, and in most cases incentives against rash or speculative foreign adventures.Second, because democratic leaders are accountable to the popular will---and, most importantly, recognize that their counterparts in other democratic states face the same incentives they do--- we can also observe certain dyadic behaviors between democratic states.The most well-known of these, of course, is the ;;democratic peace.”However, these arguments implicitly rely on voting publics that can punish and reward their leaders appropriately.In this dissertation, I argue that the assumptions that world politics scholars make about voting behavior are at odds with what we know about voters;; conduct from the study of American politics.The clear partisan divides that are necessary to generate meaningful public opposition to government policy are rare at the outset of a conflict or dispute.When we combine this observation with the theoretical insight that public support for a government;;s security policy is most useful at the outset of a crisis, then we are left with a puzzle: democratic executives have the most latitude in shaping public sentiment toward a potential conflict at the exact moment in time when that latitude is the most strategically useful.I refer to this influence as ``information market intervention;;;; and develop this argument in three distinct applications.First, I amend a common crisis-bargaining model to account for the possibility of endogenous public support.Second, I present results from a survey experiment that demonstrate how the sources of voters;; evaluations of prospective foreign policy are distinctly different from evaluations of prior events. Finally, I examine the behavior of common equity in prominent American defense firms to isolate those historical episodes in which elite manipulation of public opinion was more likely to have occurred.