7 - Empirical results for decisions to challenge the status quo

Summary

In this and the next two chapters we assess the explanatory power of the international and domestic politics hypotheses we derived in the previous four chapters. In particular, we evaluate the relative ability of each of our four models – the International Politics Model, the Political Accountability Model, the Political Norms Model, and the Political Affinity Model – to explain the actions of state leaders in each of the three stages of territorial disputes laid out in Chapter 2. Once again, the three decisions we want to understand are: (1) the decision of challenger states regarding whether and how to challenge the territorial status quo, (2) the decisions of both challengers and targets to offer concessions during rounds of talks over disputed territory, and (3) the decisions of challengers and targets to escalate initial military confrontation by mobilizing or employing higher levels of force. In Chapter 7 we examine the decisions of challengers in the Challenge the Status Quo Stage, and then in Chapters 8 and 9 we examine the decisions of both states in the Negotiations and Escalation Stages, respectively. We test our slate of hypotheses through a series of quantitative tests using our data set on 348 territorial disputes that span the period 1919–1995 (as described in Chapter 2 and in Appendices B–E).

While we employ a different statistical model for the Status Quo Stage as opposed to the Negotiations and Military Escalation Stages, there are a few model estimation features common to all of our statistical tests.