Volume 25, Issue 2

This paper examines the behavior of dictators when faced by an imminent threat of being overthrown in oil abundant countries. In the short run, the dictator’s survival strategies is argued to be confined to public spending and repression, whereas the choice of their levels is conditional upon the intensity of the mass threat (i.e. civil protest vs. mass violence) and the size of oil wealth. The empirical results indicate a possibility of mixing between spending and repression, and that oil wealth allows for differences in their employed levels in face of the same threat. Using a dataset of authoritarian regimes in 88 countries from 1981 to 2006, I found that mass violence is handled through increasing both spending and repression, whereas civil protest is only met by repression. Furthermore, greater oil wealth is found to provide a wider fiscal space to relatively increase spending, but only at low and intermediate levels of mass threats. As the threats intensify, the effect of oil wealth dissipates and oil wealth dictatorships behave the same as their non-oil wealth counterparts.

It is commonly assumed that perceived threats from a rival state will make individuals more likely to “rally-round-the-flag” and support military action. Previous studies have looked at how information about threats affects public support for military action. To date, however, there has been less attention to how information about the costs of conflict affects support for military action in response to threats. In this article, we present a survey experiment designed to evaluate how information about the likely military and economic costs of conflict influences support for military action. We provide Japanese respondents with information about relations with China, and probe how support for military action in the context of the ongoing territorial dispute changes with varying information on the military costs of conflict and its economic consequences. We find that information about trade ties and military capacity exerts a pacifying effect and strengthens opposition to military action. Consistent with our proposed mechanism, we show that greater awareness of military costs is associated with stronger opposition to military action. Our results indicate that even under the existence of external threats, greater awareness of the costs of conflict affects attitudes to military action and can increase support for peaceful solutions to territorial rivalries.

The requirements for global security and international stability vary according to the perspective brought to bear on the subject. Indeed, the structural realist and neoliberal paradigms present markedly different views on the sources of war and prescriptions for peace. Structural realism focuses on system-level capability distributions, alliances, and dyadic power balances as factors associated with the onset of war. Neoliberalism emphasizes the importance of international institutions, democracy, and economic interdependence in maintaining global security. This study develops an integrated model of war and peace based on system-level factors drawn from both paradigms and utilizes a new database reflecting the level of major power policy coordination. The findings for the period of 1816–2007 indicate that interaction effects of these realist and neoliberal variables complement their relationships with global patterns of interstate conflict. The basic conclusion to be drawn is that both concentrated power and managerial cooperation at the apex of the international system are required to produce a more peaceful world.

An international court’s ruling is expected to influence public opinion because of the perception of its legality and the subsequent costs of noncompliance. However, there has been little direct empirical evidence to support this claim. To close this lacuna, I conducted a survey experiment to examine the power of a court’s ruling in the context of a trade dispute. The experiment shows that citizens become less supportive of their government’s noncompliance with GATT/WTO agreements when the World Trade Organization issues an adverse ruling, compared to when their government is verbally accused of a violation of the same agreements by a foreign country. However, the experiment also finds that the impact of a ruling is conditional upon the level of compliance of the winner of the dispute.

This paper investigates convergence of military burdens in the Asia-Pacific countries. Two different datasets of military expenditure have been used in the analysis including the datasets from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (WMEAT). Unlike the existing papers on convergence of military burdens, we adopt a two-step method that allows the identification of countries that contribute to both stochastic and beta convergence. In the course of investigating the stochastic convergence, we use a residual augmented least squares (RALS) unit root test. The results suggest a weak evidence for convergence of military burdens in Asia-Pacific region, which is a departure from the majority of the existing studies that have provided substantial evidence of convergence. We further examine sigma convergence and the results suggest mixed evidence for convergence of military burdens. The policy implications of the results are discussed in the conclusion section.