(iPoster) High Self-Monitors in Afghanistan: Bush, Obama, and War Continuation

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Formal Political Theory & Foreign Policy II – Alliances, Coercion, and Foreign Policy Decision-Making
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foreign Policy II – Alliances, Coercion, and Foreign Policy Decision-Making

Abstract

Following the conclusion of World War II, war durations and war outcomes have changed: wars are now lasting longer and increasingly ending with indecisive outcomes. Traditional literature on war termination assumes that war termination is largely dependent on structural outcomes, such as revealed information on the battlefield, credible commitments to stop fighting and domestic consequences at home. While there has been a recent trend in international relations literature to consider how individual leaders may influence the war termination process, these new approaches fail to consider the micro-foundations behind why a leader ultimately decides to end or continue a war. In this project, I offer a new dyadic theory of war termination that emphasizes leaders’ dispositional traits—specifically, their self-monitoring tendencies—and how these traits interact with norms governing war termination. Building on Snyder (1979) and Yarhi-Milo (2018), I argue that high self-monitors are more sensitive to status loss and therefore more likely to adhere to norms of accepted behavior, whereas low self-monitors are motivated less by status concerns and more by principled beliefs. In this paper, I conduct a survey on US Presidential experts and request they rank the monitoring tendency of President George W. Bush and President Barack Hussein Obama. I then identify pivotal points during each administration where the president chose to prolong the war, and will demonstrate how these decisions can better be explained by each president's high self-monitoring tendency, more so than alternative theories of war termination and war continuation.

Author

• Kathryn Shapiro, Rutgers University