Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Peace Science Society (International) at Yale University, October 2000. Published version - Clark, David H., 2003. "Can Strategic Interaction Divert Diversionary Behavior? A Model of US Conflict." Journal of Politics, 65(4): 1013-1039.
Current conflict research increasingly suggests the relevance of unobserved strategic processes in determining how and why states engage in conflict. Alastair Smith's (1996, 1998) work, in particular, highlights the likelihood that diversionary foreign policy behavior is inhibited by the very fact that democratic leaders' political needs are abundantly apparent to their potential targets. Accordingly, their potential scapegoats seek to avoid becoming the diversionary opportunities democratic leaders need. So, the very factors that give democratic leaders the incentive to divert also give their targets incentives to maintain low profiles. Yet, few empirical tests of this proposition exist in diversionary work or elsewhere. This paper seeks to provide such a test in the context of Fordham's (1998) innovative explanation for American diversionary behavior. In addition to a new approach to domestic sources of US conflict behavior, Fordham also provides an opportunity to examine the extent to which unobserved strategic interaction actually ameliorates the likelihood of diversionary conflict. I test the strategic interaction hypothesis in a Zero--Inflated Poisson (ZIP) model and evaluate the utility of the ZIP model for modeling an unobserved process. The results suggest both the importance of strategic interaction, providing evidence supporting Smith's hypothesis, and the power of the ZIP model in accounting for strategic interaction in world politics.
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Address all correspondence to : David Clark , Center on Democratic Performance (CDP), Department of Political Science, Binghamton University, SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, USA. Tel: (607) 777-6786; Fax: (607) 777-2675; E-mail: dclark@binghamton.edu .