What They Say and What They Do: Hawkishness, Hostility, and Conflict Escalation
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Terechshenko, Zhanna
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 15, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Glenn Hunter Palmer, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Glenn Hunter Palmer, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Douglas William Lemke, Committee Member
Zita Oravecz, Outside Member
Burt Monroe, III, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Marie Hojnacki, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Conflict escalation
Hostility
Hawkishness - Abstract:
- Despite its theoretical centrality, relatively few studies have endeavored to empirically measure or analyze the escalation of militarized conflict, choosing instead to focus on the factors that lead to the onset of hostilities. As a result, there is still no consensus on why some interstate disputes lead to war while other do not. This dissertation contributes to this literature by empirically measuring escalation and linking it conceptually and empirically to a leading potential cause: leader hawkishness. The first substantive chapter introduces a latent measure of interstate hostility that can be used as a basis for measuring conflict escalation. The model I construct provides a granular, conceptually precise, and validated measure of hostility and allows for the systematic evaluation escalation within and across military conflicts. Furthermore, I introduce a dynamic modeling structure that reduces the problem of temporal reporting bias in machine coded event data sets commonly used by researchers in the political science and policy-making communities. In my second substantive chapter, I extend existing research on hawkishness by providing not only a precise conceptualization but also constructing a new, valid measure of hawkishness based on leader rhetoric. I show that the rhetoric deployed by American presidents has, with some exceptions, become significantly more dovish over time. My third substantive chapter illustrates the effect of hawkishness on escalation and de-escalation processes.