SECURITY, PEACE, & CONFLICT WORKSHOP: William Minozzi (Ohio State University)

William Minozzi presents, "Man, State, and War: An Experimental Approach" for the Robert R. Wilson Lecture series.

Abstract: Both scholars and interested observers of international politics share the intuitive sense that "leaders matter" in determining the onset and prevention of war. Much of the international relations literature on this question, however, has struggled to identify systematic causal effects. The difficulty in identifying the causal impact of leaders on the outbreak of war is primarily rooted in two issues: 1) the measurement of individual characteristics at a distance, and 2) the confounding of leadership characteristics with other national and international covariates in observational data. We propose a method for overcoming these problems through the online experimental analysis of crisis bargaining.