Abstract: This article theoretically clarifies and presents the first large-N empirical support for a centuries-old intuition: that democracies are slow to use violent military force.  It argues that democratic and nondemocratic state leaders managing interstate crises experience tradeoffs over when to respond, and that democratic institutions incentivize democrats that consider violent military force to delay.  The article presents a simplified account of leader choice during crisis and highlights two mechanisms rooted in external and internal politics that may drive delay.  Analyses of nearly 950 states experiencing crisis provide support for expectations.  Democracy is associated with a roughly 40% lower likelihood of responding to a crisis at any given point in time, conditional on responding with violence.  Two illustrative case studies probe the plausibility of the proposed mechanisms.  The article illuminates the processes leaders engage as they consider abandoning negotiating tables at home and abroad for the battlefield.    

Status: Published at Journal of Peace Research.  Paper available here.  PDF available here.

Abstract: How did domestic politics shape President Barack Obama's use of military force during his first term? This article expands and improves upon existing assessments by coupling insights from political science theory with novel evidence from original interviews with administration officials. It systematically analyzes Obama and his administration across three theoretically important dimensions: belief structure, the White House national security advisory apparatus, and decision making in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. It finds that, along each dimension, President Obama appears to display high political sensitivity and democratic responsiveness. Findings shed new light on how the administration understood and weighed domestic political considerations and translated these into security policy outcomes.

Status: Published at Presidential Studies Quarterly.  Paper available here.  PDF available here.  

Abstract: What were the contours of U.S. diplomacy to Czechoslovakia in the lead-up to and during its Velvet Revolution of 1989?  How did the U.S. Embassy in Prague, in collaboration with the George H.W. Bush White House and the State Department, calibrate diplomatic strategy and tactics?  Drawing principally upon newly available primary materials (including recently declassified telegrams, Czechoslovak archival documents, unpublished memoirs, and original interviews), this article explains and evaluates Embassy conduct during the period from August to November 1989.  While unpacking intra-and inter-agency disagreements, it shows how individual Embassy officers—including the former child star turned ambassador, Shirley Temple Black—analyzed political developments, assisted Czechoslovak dissidents, and pursued extensive engagement with the Communist Czechoslovak government.  The article provides the first scholarly, granular account of U.S. diplomacy in Czechoslovakia on the eve of democratization, and contributes to the historiography of U.S. foreign policy at the end of the Cold War. 

Status: Published at Journal of Cold War Studies.  (Accepted 2019.)  Paper available here.  PDF available here.  

Abstract: In crisis bargaining scenarios, resolved states send costly signals to demonstrate a willingness to fight.  Yet public signals of resolve are issued by specific leaders, who operate with cognitive limitations in challenging decision environments.  Drawing upon theories of behavioral economics, we develop a series of observable indicators plausibly connected to leader ability and difficulty of decision environment that we expect interactively shape perceived signaler credibility: capable leaders should be better able to overcome difficult decision environments.  Effects, we argue, are due to perceived variation in the signaler’s uncertainty over the future costs at stake.  Preliminary analysis of a pilot conjoint experiment suggestively supports expectations.  By bridging behavioral economics and foundational scholarship on costly signaling in IR in novel ways, our account represents the first effort to systematically show how individual and environmental decision restrictions jointly set the bounds of observable leader rationality, and in turn shape credibility in IR.

Status: In Principle Acceptance at Journal of Politics.

Abstract: Congressional opinion on foreign relations is central to political science theory, democratic representation, and historical description.  Where does it come from?  This article presents a theory built upon original interviews with legislators and their staff that explains how members of Congress balance tradeoffs between ideological preferences and partisan incentives in their public messaging about presidential foreign policy.  Following from the observation that legislators’ party and foreign policy preferences are associated in a polarized Congress, the paper argues that these dual incentives predictably determine collective expressed congressional opinion on foreign policy.  Drawing upon a corpus of thousands of newly collected and manually classified legislator press releases responding to major uses of military force and major diplomatic maneuvers from 2006-2022, the article presents two sets of findings.  First, the configuration of ideology and party ties shapes when individual legislators speak up about foreign policy, and what they say when they do.  Second, the connection between a president’s party and the substance of the policy pushes Congress towards one of two idealized collective messaging environments—dubbed Vocal and Equivocal—that starkly vary in: 1) messaging volume; 2) intra-party homogeneity; and 3) inter-party polarization.  Taken together, findings shed new light on Congress’s institutional behavior in foreign relations and have implications for existing scholarship, democratic accountability, and American foreign policymaking. 

Status: Working Paper

Status: Working Paper.