The Decider's Dilemma: Leader Culpability, War Outcomes, and Domestic Punishment

Abstract

A leader's culpability for involving his state in a conflict affects both his war termination calculus and his domestic audience's willingness to punish him if he loses. I define a culpable leader as any leader who either presides over the beginning of a war, or comes to power midwar and shares a political connection with a culpable predecessor. Using a data set created specifically for this study, I find that culpable leaders are more likely than nonculpable ones to achieve favorable war outcomes. I also find that domestic audiences will be willing to punish culpable leaders who lose, yet spare nonculpable leaders who do the same. Taken together, my findings underscore the need to appreciate more fully the role individual leaders play in bringing their states to war.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 249 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.