Dissertation:
"Private Incentives, Public Outcomes: The Role of Target Incentives in Foreign Policy Success"
Abstract: When do foreign influence attempts succeed in obtaining concessions from targeted states, and why do they so often fail? Powerful states employ a broad range of foreign policy tools in their dealings with other countries. The effectiveness of some of the most common strategies – foreign aid and economic sanctions – has, however, proven notoriously questionable. This project seeks an explanation for the patchy record of such external influence attempts in the political incentives of targeted leaders. If we are to understand the process of foreign policy success and failure we must consider both the effect of intervention on leader survival and the domestic cost of providing concessions. In both respects, the type of sanction interacts with targets’ domestic context. Dynamic trends in leadership experience and political support, strength of political opposition, and institutions of representation condition both the probability of sanctions’ effectively tapping into target incentives and the difficulty of actually providing the concession. My theoretical framework and empirical analyses push beyond the conceptualizations of leader incentives and foreign policy in the extant literature in several ways. The framework unites positive and negative strategies rather than treating them as divergent phenomena. I also break open the traditional dichotomy between democratic and autocratic regimes, modeling dynamic political processes while explicitly incorporating the role of political opposition. I pursue a multi-stage modeling technique to more faithfully represent the strategic encounters between sending and targeted states and further our understanding of the interplay between external demands and domestic political incentives. Both theoretically and methodologically, the project contributes to the burgeoning literature on strategic incentives and political elites in international relations scholarship.
Progress Tracker:
June 16, full draft of theory chapter
June 31, full draft of first empirical chapter
July 15, rewrite of theory chapter and full draft of research design chapter
August, rewrite of first empirical chapter and research design chapter
September 20, first draft of second empirical chapter
Job Market Materials
Teaching Statement and Evaluations
Working Papers
Coming Into Money: the impact of foreign aid on leader tenure. Forthcoming Journal of Conflict Resolution, February 2010.
- Examines the institutional and temporal factors which condition the impact of aid on recipient leaders' tenure in office. Results indicate that nondemocratic leaders are signficantly insulated from the risk of losing office when receiving aid monies after their first few years in power. Money arriving early, however, can destabilize leaders in these systems where turnover is not institutionalized.
Change Comes with Time: interpreting nonproportional hazards in event history analyses.Under review
- Political methodologists have alerted us to the dangers of bias in event history models where the impact of variables may change over time, and they have expounded upon the statistical "fix" for this issue. Many researchers remain unclear, however, on the substantive interpretation of the resultant non-proportional hazards model. I outline a monte carlo process for producing clear, graphical displays of variables' non-proportional effects over time, which allow evaluation of statistical and substantive significance. I also discuss practical rules of thumb for evaluating hypotheses in light of the dynamic effect.
- link to paper
- link to program
Private Benefits, Public Concessions? Leaders’ instrumental incentives and strategic concessions to aid.
- Prepared for the 2009 MPSA annual meeting in Chicago, IL. This paper pursues the connection between leaders' ability to benefit personally from aid monies and their likelihood to provide strategic concessions in the UNGA.
Falling Out of Favor: Leader Survival under Economic Sanctions
- Sending states intend economic sanctions as a strong signal of disapproval, and intentionally target leaders whose domestic risks are elevated. In order for this policy tool to produce the desired destabilization of targets, however, it must take into account the leader's level of experience and the institutions of representation. Leaders who are insullated from public outrage by long-standing tenure and nondemocratic institutions can benefit from the imposition of sanctions which hurt the public. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, can be seriously destabilized by international punishments, though their sensitivity decreases over time.
In Whose Aid: Foreign Aid and the Stability of Regimes, with Brian Lai
Evaluating the Prospects for Liberal Hegemony
Ensuring a Smooth Ride: Regional Hegemons and the Choice Between Bandwagoning and Balancing Dynamics
Please email me if you have questions about any of these papers, or about the program described in "Change Comes with Time". I would appreciate any feedback from interested colleagues.
email: amanda-licht@uiowa.edu