Leadership style, domestic political constraints, and foreign policy crisis decision-making

This project develops and tests, in the domain of foreign policy crisis decision-making, a theoretical framework that challenges the conventional assumption that all leaders will respond similarly to “pacifying” domestic constraints (e.g., checks and balances, executive accountability to the public). This framework incorporates research suggesting that leaders vary systematically in how they perceive and respond to domestic constraints: “constraint respecters” internalize constraints in their environments, while “constraint challengers” view constraints as obstacles to be overcome.; Output-related hypotheses derived from this framework are tested through a statistical analysis of 171 foreign policy crises. These findings suggest a contingent “monadic democratic peace”: democracies behave quite pacifically toward all states when leaders who are most sensitive to pacifying domestic constraints are in power. As hypothesized, “dispositionally aggressive constraint challengers” holding power in both democracies and autocracies are most prone to use violence in responding to international crises, while “dispositionally pacific constraint respecters” in autocracies are somewhat less violence-prone, and “dispositionally pacific constraint respecters” in democracies are the most pacifically inclined of all combinations of leadership style and regime type.; Process-related hypotheses are tested through case studies that explore the decision-making processes employed by President Kennedy (a dispositionally pacific constraint respecter) and President Reagan (a dispositionally aggressive constraint challenger) during four foreign policy crises. The results indicate that these different types of leaders do indeed perceive and respond to pacifying domestic constraints in systematically different ways. Specifically, dispositionally pacific constraint respecters perceive their policy options to be constrained by the preferences of key domestic actors, which they seek to accommodate. Dispositionally aggressive constraint challengers view such opposition as illegitimate, misguided, and harmful to state interests, and they actively seek to circumvent such constraints.