Commitment to Military Intervention: The Democratic Government as Economic Investor

Donna J. Nincic and Miroslav Nincic
Additional contact information
Donna J. Nincic: Hoover Institute, Stanford University
Miroslav Nincic: Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis

Journal of Peace Research, 1995, vol. 32, issue 4, 413-426

Abstract: Much of the work on US military intervention addresses the patterns it exhibits and the circumstances that lead to the decision to resort to force. This article deals with a somewhat different aspect of the issue: the structure of the incentives that determine the US government's commitment to persevere in the armed interventions it has chosen to undertake. Commitment is modeled in terms of the costs of the intervention and public support for the venture, and the model is based on an economic metaphor. The hypothesis is that the public responds to costs in the manner of consumers, making its support an inverse function of costs. By contrast, Government responds to costs in the fashion of an investor, viewing costs as an investment to be redeemed: up to a point, the higher the cost, the greater the commitment. The parameters of the model are statistically estimated for the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the point at which public and governmental support coincide is discussed.

Date: 1995
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/32/4/413.abstract (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:joupea:v:32:y:1995:i:4:p:413-426

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().