R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Morgan, T. Clifton"

Browsing by Author "Morgan, T. Clifton"

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A domestic institutional approach to the study of foreign policy: Factors affecting dispute behavior
(1999) Moriarty, Patrick Joseph; Morgan, T. Clifton
Traditional approaches to the study of international disputes and war have generally aimed at providing very simple and broad explanations. Dominant among theories has been the explanation that war is a result of power politics between states competing in the international system. This type of explanation though, overlooks the study of how states make choices and how the resulting actions influence international relations. In this dissertation, I take a different theoretical approach by considering the influence of domestic factors as an important component for understanding international relations. I contend it is important to understand how the domestic political process influence foreign policy choices to best understand international affairs. In particular, I focus on the influence of institutional relationships and the role of the stakeholders as they relate to foreign policy decision-making. I present a general theory of foreign policy development that addresses the specific role of domestic political institutions and selectoral constraints. I treat the foreign policy process as a modified principal-agent model where three important actors have an influence on the development of policy: the chief policy maker, the primary oversight institution, and the relevant stakeholders of a state. I consider policies to be the result of the interaction between these three actors. In empirical examinations, I find moderate support for the expectations drawn from the theory. I find that domestic institutional relationships have an influence on foreign policy behavior, however the scope and strength of the influence still warrant further investigation. My primary theoretical contribution is the notion that the key domestic political factors that affect policy are institutional relationships combined with leadership selection factors. The theory presented in this research fully specifies this relationship and sheds light on how domestic political relationships affect policy development, and how the resulting policies influence international dispute behavior.
A theory of escalation: The use of coercive bargaining strategies in international conflict
(1994) Carlson, Lisa Jayne; Morgan, T. Clifton
This thesis is a theoretical and empirical investigation of the escalation process that results when states are in dispute over some issue(s) in the international system. Escalation is viewed as a cost-imposing bargaining strategy enacted by states for the purpose of eliciting concessions from the adversary. Each state has a cost tolerance which identifies the maximum costs a state is willing to suffer to achieve their demand on the issue at stake. A player determines the likelihood that escalation will produce the adversary's concession by comparing the cost tolerances of both players. Once a player decides that the opponent has a greater willingness to bear the costs of escalation, that player concedes and quits the escalation game. A formal theory of the escalation process is developed which produces several hypotheses identifying the conditions under which states are expected to escalate in conflict and, once the decision to escalate is made, the level of escalation that that state is likely to achieve. One advantage in developing a general theory of escalation is that the interrelationships among the variables are expected to hold across a wide variety of escalation contexts. These hypotheses are then tested empirically in order to assess the utility of the general theory of escalation. In one of these contexts, the extended deterrence crisis, potential attackers are expected to refrain from pursuing higher levels of escalation when the attacker can perceive the value that the defender attaches to its ally and when the defender has the capacity to impose serious escalation costs on its opponent. Another of the hypotheses tested produced the expectation that lower cost tolerant actors were more likely to achieve their highest level of escalation on their first move in the conflict given that they were unable to prevail in a long, drawn-out game of escalation with their stronger opponent. The results of the empirical tests indicate that the general theory of escalation developed in the thesis is useful in identifying the conditions that motivate states to escalate, the level of escalation that is likely to be achieved and the conditions under which states concede.
A theory of third-party intervention in disputes in international politics
(2001) Wohlander, Scott Barry; Morgan, T. Clifton
The occurrence of third-party intervention is a hallmark of many of the most devastating conflicts in world history, because the entrance of third parties into a conflict expands the scope of the violence, amplifies the severity and duration of the fighting, and increases the overall amount of death and destruction. Even in international conflicts in which intervention does not occur, the possibility that third parties may intervene can affect the behavior of disputants and therefore shape the way disputes evolve and are eventually resolved. This dissertation develops a theory of intervention by laying out a story about how strategic third parties and disputants make interdependent decisions in the context of an ongoing militarized dispute, and then formalizing this story into a simple-game theoretic model. The theory produces a general, causal explanation for third-party intervention that specifies the precise conditions under which it does and does not occur. Overall, the theory predicts approximately two-thirds of cases correctly when subjected to rigorous empirical tests. In addition, the theory produces theoretically-interesting, empirically-supported insights about the relationships between the resources of the actors involved in a militarized dispute and the likelihood that intervention occurs. The dissertation concludes with an application of the theory to the debate in the international relations literature over whether balancing or bandwagoning is the more common form of intervention. The application shows that the theory produces a more powerful explanation for the occurrence of balancing and bandwagoning than the existing literature offers, and suggests that the debate is misspecified.
Aerial Strategies and their Effect on Conflict Characteristics
(2012-09-05) Martinez, Carla; Stoll, Richard J.; Morgan, T. Clifton; Leeds, Ashley; Subramanian, Devika
This project asks the question of how different aerial strategies can affect the characteristics of aerial campaigns in conflict. It begins by developing a new categorization of aerial strategies that distinguishes aerial strategies by how targeted thy are. Data is collected on the type of strategies that were used in aerial campaigns from 1914 to 2003. A preliminary analysis of aerial strategy choice is conducted, studying the effect of military doctrines on strategy choice. The project also takes into consideration the role that ground forces, both those of the state carrying out the aerial attack and of its opponent, will play in determining the effect of aerial strategies on campaign duration and outcome.
An Economic Theory of Pro-Government Militias
(2018-11-27) Sosa Norena, Santiago; Morgan, T. Clifton
Throughout the world, states delegate various and sundry security tasks to armed groups outside their regular forces. The main arguments in the literature are that governments use militias because of their logistic advantages (autonomy, informational advantages, and cheap deployment) and to provide the government with plausible deniability for human rights violations. However, not all militias victimize civilians and when they do the government usually does as well. Why, then, would states use militias at all? Moreover, why, despite the risks of side-switching, agency loss, and excessive use of force inherent to them, do states use armed groups outside their regular forces rather than spending more on the latter? This study develops a general framework to analyze the use of militias. It presents a formal model of the state's decision to spend on regular and irregular forces as if it was a firm producing a good: security. However, these forces also produce liabilities to the state, and so it is in balancing security and liability that the state optimizes its expenditures. The theory leads us to expect that militias are more likely to be used, all else equal, the greater the budget available is, the more cost-effective they are relative to the regular forces, the lower the risk of using them, and the more a state values security over liability. Likewise, there is substitutability between armed forces: that to spend on one force the state must necessarily spend less on the other one. Thus, all else equal, the more a state uses militias, the less it will use its regular forces, and vice-versa. I test some of these expectations with two studies. The first uses cross-national data on militias, judicial independence and civil wars between 1981 and 2007. I find that militias are more likely to be used in states that have a weak judiciary. The second is a case-study of Colombia's most recent civil war. Using municipality-level data between 2000 and 2006, I find that the Colombian armed forces decreased their activity against rebels in areas where the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia were active.
Bargaining and economic coercion: The use and effectiveness of sanctions
(2007) Krustev, Valentin L.; Morgan, T. Clifton
We address international economic sanctions from a bargaining perspective and explain the variation in states' decisions to employ economic coercion, in the objectives they pursue through it, and in the level of political concessions they are able to extract. The connection between military and economic coercion is examined first. Using a formalized bargaining model, we show that credible war options are of critical importance in determining whether economic coercion will be used and what distributional impact it might have. Evaluating the model's empirical implications reveals that state choices to initiate economic coercion and what coercion level to set indeed depend on both military and economic factors. We next show that the sanctions literature has not devoted sufficient attention to the strategic considerations behind state decisions to engage in economic coercion. We develop a non-cooperative game-theoretic model that endogenizes decisions to engage in economic coercion and what level of concessions to demand from the target. The model suggests that economically powerful challengers are more likely to engage in economic coercion, but, paradoxically, are not more likely to succeed because they also tend to demand greater concessions. Since the occurrence, type, and outcome of economic coercion are all endogenously determined, we estimate them simultaneously when testing the model's empirical implications. The empirical findings confirm that increasing senders' economic advantage indirectly worsens their success prospects. Our central conclusion is that ignoring either the military context of economic coercion or the strategic choices that precede it can result in misleading inferences about its effectiveness.
Chinese Foreign Policy in the 21st Century: Insights from the Two-Good Theory
(James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, 1999) Morgan, T. Clifton; Palmer, Glenn; James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
We analyze recent trends in Chinese international behavior through the use of the two-good theory of foreign policy. That general theory has states pursuing two desired goals change and maintenance, which refer to their abilities to alter or to protect specific aspects of the status quo. The extent to which countries pursue change and maintenance is a function of state preferences and of the relative capabilities of the country. The theory has been tested in other circumstances and has been shown to explain international behavior well. In this paper we introduce our theory briefly and the apply it to three components of Chinese foreign policy- the initiation of international conflict, the formation of alliances, and the donation of foreign aid. We find that the incidence of the Chinese initiation of international conflict is strongly affected by the growth of its economy. Nonetheless, our analysis indicates that, generally, China is significantly less active in seeking to bring about change in the international system than is sometimes alleged. Further, we argue that China has moderated its foreign policy in response to Western diplomatic overtures. We suggest that continued attempts to engage China diplomatically may prove fruitful.
Conflict management and negotiation arithmetic: Adding issues, adding parties
(1995) Schwebach, Valerie Lyn; Morgan, T. Clifton
The addition of new issues and parties to negotiations is often recommended as a means of conflict management at the international level. Such addition (or "negotiation arithmetic") contains an element of strategic interaction that is often ignored in the prescriptive work on conflict management. Though disputants in an international crisis may be seeking to avoid war, they are also trying to protect important national interests. For that reason, each disputant has an incentive to choose only those options that make her better off. Since what makes one disputant better off may make the other disputant worse off, conflict management is necessarily a matter of strategic choice. A game-theoretic analysis of disputants' incentives to pursue the conflict management options of issue linkage and mediation demonstrates that these strategies are complementary. The conditions that preclude the pursuit of one strategy encourage the pursuit of the other. Empirical tests of the resulting hypotheses indicate that the more likely a dispute dyad is to pursue mediation, the less likely it is to pursue issue linkage.
Determinants of Sanctions Effectiveness: Sensitivity Analysis Using New Data
(Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, 2013) Bapat, Navin A.; Heinrich, Tobias; Kobayashi, Yoshiharu; Morgan, T. Clifton
In the literature on sanctions effectiveness, scholars have identified a number of factors that may contribute to sanctions success. However, existing empirical studies provide mixed findings concerning the effects of these factors. This research note explores two possible reasons for this lack of consistency in the literature. First, informed by the recent theories that suggest threats are an important part of sanctions episodes, we analyze both threats and imposed sanctions. Second, to lessen model dependency of empirical findings, we employ a methodology that permits us to check systematically the robustness of the empirical results under various model specifications. Using the newly released Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions data, our analyses of both threats and imposed sanctions show that two factors—involvement of international institutions and severe costs on target states—are positively and robustly related to sanctions success at every stage in sanctions episodes. Our analyses also identify a number of other variables that are systematically related to sanctions success, but the significance of these relationships depends on the specific model estimated. Finally, our results point to a number of differences at the threat and imposition stages, which suggests specific selection effects that should be explored in future work.
Economic sanctions and corporate compliance: A game-theoretic model
(1999) Losey, Paula Elaine; Morgan, T. Clifton
This paper examines the question of when economic sanctions will be effectively instituted by states by looking at the role of the multinational corporation in the sanctioning process. Although governments have resources at their disposal with which to enforce their policies, the amount of resources that they are willing to devote to this enforcement are a function of their own cost/benefit calculations. They are also influenced by their predictions of the level of compliance of their private firms that conduct business in the target state. A game-theoretic model of the interaction between a sanctioning government and a private firm is offered and used to derive hypotheses on the conditions affecting a government's willingness to expend monitoring costs to enforce a sanctions policy. These hypotheses are then applied to the cases of the South African and Rhodesian oil embargoes.
Essays on Durations of War and Postwar Peace
(2012-09-05) Chiba, Daina; Leeds, Brett Ashley; Reed, William L.; Fang, Songying; Morgan, T. Clifton; Boylan, Richard T.
This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays that investigate the duration of war and the duration of postwar peace. The first essay studies both durations jointly, with a particular focus on the interdependence between the two processes. It demonstrates that membership in security organizations can prolong the durability of peace after conflict, but that the expected longer peace after conflict can also prolong the duration of conflict. The second essay analyzes the duration of war in a greater detail, exploring how third-party actors influence the process. It shows that balanced intervention can shorten the duration until a negotiated settlement is reached between the disputants. The third essay looks at the stability of postwar peace by focusing on the strength of cease-fire agreements. It argues that stronger agreements can maintain longer peace after wars by helping the disputants resolve the bargaining problems. The statistical analysis that corrects for the endogeneity of agreement strength provides support for the argument.
Embargo
Essays on legislative and multilateral bargaining
(2022-04-21) Evdokimov, Kirill; Eraslan, Hulya; Morgan, T. Clifton
In this dissertation, I present a game-theoretic analysis of three models of collective decision-making, with a particular focus on the effects of decision-making institutions on the produced outcomes. In Chapter 1, I study a model of bargaining in which an agenda-setter proposes a spatial policy to voters and can revise the initial proposal if it gets rejected. Voters can communicate with each other and have distinct but correlated preferences, which the agenda-setter is uncertain about. I investigate whether the ability to make a revised proposal is valuable to the agenda-setter. When a single acceptance is required to pass a policy, the equilibrium outcome is unique and has a screening structure. Because the preferences of voters are single-peaked, the Coase conjecture is violated and the ability to make a revised proposal is valuable. When two or more acceptances are required to pass a policy, there is an interval of the agenda-setter's equilibrium expected payoffs. The endpoints have a screening structure, leading to the same conclusions as in the case of a single acceptance. Interestingly, an increase in the required quota may allow the agenda-setter to extract more surplus from voters. In Chapter 2, I analyze a distributive model of legislative bargaining in which the surpluses generated by coalitions equal the sums of productivities of coalition members. The heterogeneous ability of players to generate surplus leads to asymmetric bargaining prospects in otherwise symmetric environments. More productive players are recruited more often by other players despite having higher expected payoffs; however, the players who are recruited in every coalition have equal expected payoffs despite having different productivity. I show that an increase in the required quota raises equality as measured by the Gini coefficient. In Chapter 3, I provide a sufficient condition for the uniqueness of equilibrium payoffs in a model of stochastic bargaining with unanimity rule and risk-averse players.
Expected utility calculation and alliance reliability
(1999) Ji, Xiaoling; Morgan, T. Clifton
The existing studies on determinants of alliance reliability focus exclusively on alliance types and alliance attributes. One big weakness of this approach is that it depicts the decision making of upholding or disregarding alliance commitments as largely externally determined, and thus downplays the role of individual states. The present study assumes that states are rational utility maximiers and contends that the decision of whether or not to uphold alliance commitments is determined by the utility calculations at the time when an alliance is formed and the time when an ally is called upon. An ally will assist its defense pact partner under attack only when the expected costs of upholding commitment are lower than the expectations held at the time of alliance formation. Empirical testing, however, fails to lend strong support for the expectation. A discussion of the performance of the model leads to some interesting conclusions about the existing literature and possible future studies.
Implementation of Economic Sanctions
(2013-09-16) Kobayashi, Yoshiharu; Morgan, T. Clifton; Leeds, Brett Ashley; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Sickles, Robin
This dissertation investigates implementation problems in economic sanctions and how a state's concerns about policy implementation affect its decisions and the outcomes of sanctions. This study builds on the premise that sanctions are carried out by firms within a sanctioning state, not the state itself. First, using a game-theoretical model, I show that firms' non-compliance with sanction policies not only undermines the effectiveness of unilateral sanctions, but also has a counter-intuitive effect on a sanctioning state's decision to impose sanctions. The model suggests that a state is more likely to impose sanctions when it anticipates firms' non-compliance. A number of empirical implications are derived from the model and corroborated with data. Second, this study also investigates a sanctioning state's decision to sanction multilaterally or unilaterally, and how its expectations about the enforcement of sanctions influence this decision. When the enforcement of unilateral sanctions is expected to be difficult, the state is more likely to sanction multilaterally, but only when it has enough resources and the bureaucratic capability to help other states enforce their sanctions. The empirical evidence also buttresses these theoretical results. This study highlights the importance of incorporating expectations about enforcement into a full understanding of the sanctions processes. The conclusion is that states' ability to influence firms' decisions at home as well as abroad is a crucial determinant of whether they impose, how they design, and the effectiveness of sanctions.
Japanese Security In The Twenty-First Century: Whose Job Is It Anyway?
(James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, 2000) Morgan, T. Clifton; Palmer, Glenn; James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Non-state actors and political conflict
(2004) Bapat, Navin A.; Morgan, T. Clifton
In the vast majority of international relations literature, states are assumed to have a monopoly on the use of force throughout their territory. However, states are increasingly facing considerable security challenges from militant non-state actors. In the vast majority of these cases, state/non-state actor conflict is terminated through violent conflict, often with devastating consequences. Given this empirical pattern, a disturbing trend is the internationalization of conflicts between states and non-state actors. Increasingly, non-state actors move their base of operations to foreign host states in order to increase the target's cost of retaliation. This behavior holds the potential to escalate conflicts from civil war to interstate or regional wars. Due to the devastation associated with such conflicts, this project examines the possibilities for the peaceful conflict resolution of state/non-state political violence. Specifically, this project attempts to identify the conditions under which peaceful conflict resolution can succeed as an alternative to the use of force. This project addresses three puzzles. First, at what point do states and non-state actors agree to negotiate? Second, what factors promote successful negotiation to conflicts involving a target state and non-state actors? Finally, what are the consequences of failing to achieve negotiated settlements? This project addresses each of these questions by constructing game theoretic models. The models examine the strategic interaction between non-state actors, host states, and targets of non-state violence. The models are empirically tested using several data sources, including the International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events, State Failure data, and source date from the RAND corporation.
Publicly-Conducted Missile Tests in International Politics
(2019-08-06) Birol, Cem; Morgan, T. Clifton
This dissertation investigates the role of publicly-conducted missile tests in international politics. The first paper introduces a new dataset including 11 countries’ missile tests between 1949 and 2015. It also overviews these countries’ indigenous missile development programs. The second paper empirically investigates what factors may affect changes in how frequently countries test-fire their missiles publicly. The results suggest that a country’s public missile tests are intrinsic to missile development programs and transpire more frequently with greater economic wealth. On the other hand, being under a military threat, major or severe economic sanctions have either weak or no consistent impact on countries’ public missile tests. The third paper investigates whether conducting public missile tests is associated with countries’ subsequent militarized interstate dispute, or war involvement. Statistical analyses show that there is little or no evidence that suggests that public missile tests have a discernible impact on countries’ militarized dispute or war involvement. Ultimately, this dissertation stands as the first large-N statistical work on publicly-conducted missile tests. In addition, it is the first one to empirically downplay the potential relationship between militarized conflicts and public missile tests.
Strategic Choices in Foreign Aid
(2013-09-16) Heinrich, Tobias; Morgan, T. Clifton; Stevenson, Randolph T.; Fang, Songying; Vannucci, Marina
This dissertation addresses three important questions surrounding the politics of foreign aid, namely what leads to its provisions by donor countries, and what are some of its consequences on those receiving it. Using arguments rooted in political economy models and large-N statistics, this dissertation provides three core findings: (i) Foreign aid can be driven by heterogenous motives in the donor country. (ii) This heterogeneity determines whether a donor lives up to the promises over foreign aid that it makes. (iii) Inflows of foreign aid tend to restrain the government’s propensity to engage in killings.
Target types and the efficacy of economic sanctions
(1999) Al-Sowayel, Dina; Morgan, T. Clifton
This study of economic sanctions examines the contribution of the target country to sanction outcomes. The theoretical foundation of this research is predicated on the role that target country political attributes play in fashioning a response to the imposition of economic sanctions. Accordingly, these attributes are instrumental in creating the countermeasures that target countries employ in resisting sanction effects. Therefore, the success of sanction episodes is influenced by target country political characteristics. The developed hypotheses are tested in two ways. First, an aggregate analysis on one hundred fifteen cases is conducted. This is complimented by a series of in-depth case study analyses on select sanction episodes. Both results indicate that some political attributes of the target country play an important role in determining the disposition of sanction episodes.
The Power Distribution between Allies, Alliance Politics and Alliance Duration
(2014-08-14) Chung, Jaewook; Leeds, Brett Ashley; Morgan, T. Clifton; Stoll, Richard J.; Lewis, Steven W.
This dissertation is composed of three independent essays devoted to the study of the duration of military alliances. In Chapter 2, I investigate how the power distribution and the geographical distance between allies interact and affect alliance duration. I find that geographically remote and unequal alliances are more likely to endure than geographically close and unequal alliances. In Chapter 3, I examine how the economic dependence of weaker states on their major power allies and their capability change interact and affect alliance duration in asymmetric alliances. I find that alliances with minor powers whose capabilities increase and whose economic dependence is low tend to terminate earlier than those with minor powers whose economic dependence is high. In Chapter 4, I undertake a case study of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. I find that the U.S.-Korean military alliance is deeply embedded in the socioeconomic structure of Korean society generated by export-led growth and its economic dependence on the U.S, consequently making the U.S.-ROK alliance more resilient.

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