State Power, Linkage Mechanisms, and Diversion against Nonrivals

Dennis M. Foster
Additional contact information
Dennis M. Foster: Department of International Studies and Political Science Virginia Military Institute Lexington, Virginia, USA, fosterdm@vmi.edu

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2006, vol. 23, issue 1, 1-21

Abstract: Mitchell and Prins (2004) have recently found that diversion from high levels of inflation is observed only among enduring rivals. However, neither this nor any other cross-national test of the relevance of opportunity to diversion has included a potentially important determinant of diversionary capacity : major power status. I contend that since militarily powerful states have both more extensive sets of international commitments and much greater physical capacities to divert against broader sets of opponents, they are less likely to limit their diversionary behavior to enduring rivals. Cross-national time series analyses of the association between inflation and militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation for the period 1960—1999 reveal several differences between the diversionary activity of major powers and that of all other states. Models that account for the interaction between inflation and rivalry reveal that while nonmajor powers seemingly divert only against enduring rivals, major powers are marginally less likely to do so against rivals than they are against nonrivals. However, more detailed analyses indicate that these latter findings are being driven by the American case: While the United States is more likely to initiate MIDs against nonrivals than rivals at the highest levels of inflation, other major powers are more likely to initiate MIDs against rivals than nonrivals at all points. Moreover, the United States is, on average, more likely than all other states to initiate MIDs at all levels of inflation. At minimum, these findings imply that the United States is unique among major powers both in its capacity to divert from inflation and in its propensity to link diversion from inflation against nonrivals to its most important rivalries.

Keywords: diversionary conflict; domestic politics; state power; United States (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/07388940500503770 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:compsc:v:23:y:2006:i:1:p:1-21

DOI: 10.1080/07388940500503770

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Conflict Management and Peace Science from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().