The Sources of Interstate Signaling Failures

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel features research on how strategic choices, domestic institutions, and individual characteristics can lead to ineffective interstate signaling. Interstate signaling is at the core of the international relations discipline—ineffective signaling can lead to misperception, crisis and war, while effective signaling to bargains and peace. This panel seeks to diversify and deepen the field’s understanding of how, when, and why states communicate effectively at three levels of analysis. At the strategic level, Pauly introduces a novel theory of assurance that explain why states often dismiss coercive threats when they are not accompanied by signals assuring the target that they will not punish a target once their demands are met. Post examines how variation in the type of military demonstration (land, sea, air), as well as state capabilities (nuclear and non-nuclear) affects whether sunk-cost signals are effective in extracting bargaining concessions during interstate crisis. As the domestic institutional level, Jost introduces a novel dataset measuring institutions that regulate the exchange of information between military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers, finding that states with integrated designs are more effective in sending and receiving signals and are less prone to crisis. Finally, Landau-Wells shows how certain psychological characteristics, specifically perspective-taking, affects the accuracy of signal reception at the individual level. Together, these papers further the research agenda on how states credibly communicate with one another.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 20: Foreign Policy

Individual Presentations

• National Security Institutions and Interstate Crisis - Tyler C. Jost, Brown University

• Perspective-Taking Accuracy in the Domain of Threat Perception - Marika Landau-Wells, University of California, Berkeley

• The Dilemma of Coercive Assurance in International Politics - Reid Pauly, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Flying to Win? Nuclear Capabilities and Air Power in Crisis Bargaining - Abigail Post, Anderson University

Chair

• Todd S. Sechser University of Virginia

Discussants

• Austin Carson University of Chicago

• Allison Carnegie Columbia University