When Leaders Matter: Rebel Experience and Nuclear Proliferation

Abstract

This paper contributes to a growing literature on leaders in international politics by explaining why and how the background experiences of leaders influence nuclear proliferation. Given nuclear weapons' crucial role in world politics, examining the importance of leaders for nuclear proliferation represents a key development in research on leaders. We argue that leaders with a particular experience-participation in a rebellion against the state-are more likely than their non-rebel counterparts to pursue nuclear weapons. Former rebels are aware of the contingency of their rule and more likely to value weapons that could bolster national independence. Drawing on a new dataset on leader participation in rebel activities, we analyze 1,322 leaders in office from 1945 to 2000. The results strongly support our theory, even when accounting for leader selection. Our findings underscore the value in using leaders-not just states-as a unit of analysis in international relations research.

Correlates of Sensitive Technologies

“…Aside from such widely used generic datasets, data also are widely synthesized for the purposes of studies employing QEA to study various specific issues. For example, Figure 1 shows a representative example of the dataset employed in [25] to study the hypothesis that "Countries with former rebels as heads of state are more likely than states with nonrebel leaders, on average, to pursue nuclear weapons programs." A publicly accessible link to the dataset used for this study exists at [26].…”

“…The rows are organized so as to facilitate the use of either leader or state-year as the unit of analysis. The columns having names that are not more-or-less selfevident are associated to variables as follows [25]:…”

“…As previously mentioned, Fuhrmann and Horowitz [25] used the QEA methodology to study the hypothesis that "countries with former rebels as heads of state are more likely than states with nonrebel leaders, on average, to pursue nuclear weapons programs." They concluded that although: Here we note in particular the contrast between the empirical confirmation of such a trend among national leaders, and the observation from the NAS study that "host-state motivation is … difficult to assess because it ultimately depends on the subjective decision making of political leaders.…”

Historical Legacies and Leaders’ Worldviews: Communist Party History and Xi’s Learned (and Unlearned) Lessons

“…Instead of attempting another foray into "Peking-ology," this article tries a different approach-asking what we can learn about Xi by looking to his past. As political scientists have shown, the ideas leaders develop before coming to power as the result of specific experiences often have significant explanatory power for their later behaviour (Whitlark 2017;Fuhrmann and Horowitz 2015;Saunders 2009;Goldgeier 1994).…”

When Do Leaders Free-Ride? Business Experience and Contributions to Collective Defense

“…A recent wave of research highlights the importance of leadership turnover and culpability (Croco 2011;Wolford 2007) as well as the means of entry and exit from office (Chiozza and Goemans 2011) for understanding world politics. In addition, there is growing evidence that leaders' professional backgrounds (Colgan 2013;Fuhrmann and Horowitz 2015;Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis 2015;Nelson 2014), education (Gift and Krcmaric 2017), and beliefs (Rathbun, Kertzer, and Paradis 2017;Saunders 2011;Yarhi-Milo, Kertzer, and Renshon 2018) affect their behavior. This article pushes the research agenda on leaders forward by suggesting that heads of government, like all people, vary in their cooperative preferences-and that this variation helps explain contributions to public goods, particularly when the executive faces few domestic political constraints.…”