4 - Domestic competition and signaling in international crises

Summary

This chapter merges the arguments from the previous two by showing how domestic political competition affects crisis outcomes through the signals sent by rival parties. It combines the basic crisis bargaining game from Chapter 2 with a simple model of two-party electoral choice. In doing so, it moves away from the unitary state assumption by breaking down one of the rival states into two strategic actors: a governing party and an opposition party. These parties vie for the support of the electorate through their public actions in the international crisis – in particular, the government's decision whether or not to threaten force and the opposition's decision to support or oppose such a threat. Because these actions are observable, they reveal to the rival state information about the government's underlying political incentives and, hence, its willingness to wage war.

The model shows how the government's decision to use threats, the rival state's response, and the probability of war are influenced by public competition. Introduction of an opposition party creates two effects. First, the opposition party can lend additional credibility to a government's threats when it chooses to publicly support those threats in a crisis. The decision to support the government reveals that there are political incentives to carry through on a threat to wage war. Hence, the opposition can bolster the government's signal with a “confirmatory signal” of its own. Second, the existence of an opposition party forces the government to be more selective about the threats it makes.