Leader Age, Regime Type, and Violent International Relations

Abstract

In this article, the authors investigate the relationship between states'political leaders'ages, their regime type, and the likelihood of militarized dispute initiation and escalation. They examine more than 100,000 interstate dyads between 1875 and 2002 to systematically test the relationship between leader age and militarized disputes. The results show that, in general, as the age of leaders increases, they become more likely to both initiate and escalate militarized disputes. In addition, the interaction of age and regime type is significant. In personalist regimes, the general effect reverses; as age increases, the relative risk of conflict declines in comparison to other types of regimes. Increasing leader age in democracies increases the relative risk propensity for conflict initiation at a higher level than for personalist regimes, while the impact of increasing leader age is most substantial in intermediate regimes.

The Behavioral Revolution and International Relations

“…The revolution had important precursors in the work of Herbert Simon 31. For example, Allison 1971;andHorowitz, McDermott, andStam 2005, respectively. 32.…”

“…For behavioral research in the field of international law, see Broude 2015;Galbraith 2013;Jolls, Sunstein, and Thaler 1998;Poulsen 2013;Sitaraman and Zionts 2015;van Aaken 2014. 14. For example, see research on leaders by Horowitz, McDermott, and Stam 2005 and on time horizons by Edelstein 2002 andKrebs andRapport 2012. 15. Some notable exceptions include Ellis 2015 andMcDermott 2007.…”

“…Hafner-Burton et al 2014. For examples beyond the special issue, see Byman and Pollack 2001;Colgan 2013;Croco 2011;Debs and Goemans 2010;Hall and Yarhi-Milo 2012;Horowitz, McDermott, and Stam 2005;Saunders 2009;Weeks 2012. level heterogeneity also opens up opportunities to connect with a wider body of behavioral research in political science, including studies of public opinion. A number of contributions to this issue pursue this approach.…”

Country or leader? Political change and UN General Assembly voting

“…9 In this paper we do not focus on what individual attributes of leaders lead to differing behavior. See Horowitz et al (2005) for a discussion of how leader age affects international conflict. 10 McGillivray and Smith (2006) show that leader-specific punishment improves the credibly of threats.…”

Empirical Modeling of Policy Diffusion in Federal States: The Dyadic Approach

“…The dependent variable measures whether a state initiates a conflict against another state, and the independent variables capture attributes of the potential "initiator" and of the potential "target", notably democracy and power, and characteristics of the dyad such as geographic proximity and alliances. The model thus follows the general specification shown in equation (2), which is adopted also in several other studies (for example Horowitz, McDermott, and Stam 2005;Bussmann and Oneal 2007;Danilovic and Clare 2007). In sum, dyads are a natural level of analysis for many questions in the international relations literature.…”