Cabinets and Interstate Conflict

• In Event: Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy

Abstract

We study the relationship between cabinet composition and the international conflict behavior of leaders and states. While a large literature has looked at leader-characteristics and war, the field has yet to consider cabinet-characteristics. Drawing on audience-constraint theories of interstate conflict, we hypothesize that leaders that are more constrained by their cabinets, in both democracies and dictatorships, are less likely to engage in risky conflict behavior. To test our arguments, we leverage new minister-level data on cabinets in 120 countries in the period 1966-2021, and combine this with data on international disputes.

Authors

• Jacob Nyrup, University of Oslo

• Tore Wig, University of Oslo