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Research Note:
Democratic Leaders, Crises and War
August 17, 2019
Jonathan Renshon1, Keren Yarhi-Milo2 and Joshua D. Kertzer3
Word count: 6373 words in text + 1582 in bibliography = 7955 words
Abstract : Many of our theories of IR argue that leaders and publics alike use regime typeto draw inferences about actors’ behavior in crises and war, with important implicationsnot just for how other actors treat democracies, but also how democracies themselvesbehave. Yet although these beliefs about regime type are important, they are also di�cultto study directly. In this research note, we put democratic leaders’ beliefs directly underthe microscope, fielding a survey experiment on a unique elite sample of members of theIsraeli Knesset. We find that Israeli leaders perceive democracies as no more likely tostand firm in a crisis but more likely to emerge victorious in wars. We replicate ourfindings in six national samples in four democracies (Israel, South Korea, the UnitedKingdom, and the United States), suggesting that similar beliefs about democracies incrises and war hold across a range of democracies.
1Associate Professor & Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Chair, Department of Political Science, University ofWisconsin-Madison. Email: [email protected]. Web: http://jonathanrenshon.com.
2Professor of Politics and International A↵airs, Columbia University. Email: [email protected]. Web:https://polisci.columbia.edu/content/keren-yarhi-milo
3Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy, Department of Government, Harvard University. Email:[email protected]. Web: http:/people.fas.harvard.edu/˜jkertzer/.
Political leaders and mass publics alike often look at world politics through the lens of regime
type, frequently using states’ domestic political institutions as indicative of their foreign policy
behavior, underlying preferences, or levels of resolve. In discussing his country’s options in dealing
with the rising German threat in the 1930s, the French defense minister Edouard Daladier told
then British Foreign A↵airs minister Anthony Eden that “no democratic country could indulge in”
preventive war (Eden, 1962, 44). Adolf Hitler made similar arguments, famously noting in Mein
Kampf as well as during private deliberations with his advisors that because democracies were
corrupt and weak, they would not take a stand against Germany, writing that they “will be unable
to muster the courage for any determined act” (quoted in Press, 2005, 76). More recently, the
Clinton administration’s democracy promotion agenda was directly tied to the President’s belief —
itself influenced by academic research on the topic — that “democracies rarely wage war on one
another,”1 a sentiment later echoed by President George W. Bush (Gartzke, 2007, 167).
IR scholars have made similar arguments, o↵ering a variety of theoretical models in which actors
use regime type as a heuristic to draw inferences about others’ intentions, capabilities, or resolve.
Both rationalist (Bueno De Mesquita and Lalman, 1992, 156-7) and constructivist (Risse-Kappen,
1995) variants of democratic peace theory argue that the reason why democracies are less likely to
fight each other is because states use regime type as a heuristic for hawkish or belligerent preferences.
Other versions of this same theory pinpoint the public’s beliefs about regime type as critical in
constraining the use of force (Mintz and Geva, 1993a), or argue that decision-makers believe that
democratic states are likely to try harder and expend more resources than comparable autocratic
states (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 1999, 794). And a related literature on democratic credibility
posits that the targets of threats will believe those issued by democracies to be more credible than
those from other regimes (Fearon, 1994; Schultz, 1999). Even work on far-afield subjects such as
terrorism emphasize the importance of beliefs about regime type: Pape (2003), for example, argues
that terrorists target democracies because they believe them to be especially sensitive to casualties.
These beliefs about whether democracy is a blessing or a curse in foreign policy are both theoreti-
cally and politically consequential, with implications not just for how other actors treat democracies,
but also how democracies themselves behave. For example, if democratic leaders and publics believe
democracies are soft targets, democracies will be likely to work harder to signal their resolve in
crises, perhaps taking stronger actions than they would otherwise. Conversely, if democracies see
1https://2009-2017.state.gov/p/io/potusunga/207375.htm
1
themselves as at an advantage in war, they may be more cavalier, confident, or risk acceptant about
entering into war with autocracies and less inclined to seek conflict with other democracies.
In this research note, we study democracy in international politics from a new angle, focusing not
on the question of whether democracies behave distinctively in foreign a↵airs (e.g. Lake, 1992; Reiter
and Stam, 2002), but instead by putting democratic leaders and publics’ beliefs about democracy
under the microscope. Studying whether actors use regime type as a heuristic when assessing resolve
or predicting military outcomes requires disentangling democracy from its correlates — and although
democracy is many things, randomly assigned is not one of them. Democratic states are wealthier,
tend to be found in democratic “neighborhoods,” were united by common interests throughout the
Cold War, and happen to include the current global hegemon. Thus, like Tomz and Weeks (2013),
Mintz and Geva (1993b), Rousseau (2005) and others, we study beliefs about democracy using
experimental methods.
Unlike much experimental work in IR, however, we include evidence from a sample uniquely
positioned to give us direct insight into the beliefs of leaders: 89 current and former members of the
Israeli Knesset. Our participants are not only elite in every sense of the term (ranking all the way
up to that of Prime Minister), but also have a history of making decisions about war and peace,
with over two-thirds of the sample having served on the Foreign A↵airs and Defense Committee.
We take advantage of our participants’ experience and domain-specific knowledge by employing
an experiment directly related to international conflict, letting us test what elite decision-makers
believe about the role of regime type in crises and war — and in a country outside the United States,
particularly important given concerns about the American-centric nature of many of our conclusions
about democracy in IR (Colgan, 2019; Levin and Trager, 2019). We also replicate our study on six
di↵erent national samples across four democracies facing very di↵erent security environments: two
representative samples of the Israeli public, two in the United Kingdom, one in South Korea, and a
nationally diverse sample in the United States. These replications give us insight into whether and
how the beliefs of our sample of leaders di↵er from those of “average citizens” in how they think
about issues relating to war and peace, speaking to an important debate about the utility of mass
public samples for testing theories of elite decision-making.
Our results add to the growing literature on the link between regime type, crisis outcomes,
and war, as well as addressing methodological questions related to elite experiments in IR. We find
that the inferences drawn by world leaders are subtle and contextual; democratic leaders do not,
2
for example, view democracies as all-powerful, but nor are they entirely pessimistic. We find the
e↵ect of democracy is seen as contingent: both our foreign elite decision-makers and the publics
they govern view democracies as no more likely than their autocratic counterparts to stand firm in
disputes, but more likely to prevail in conflicts that escalate to war. Democracies’ reputations, then,
are mixed.
We investigated this pattern further in one of our follow-up studies, exploring potential mech-
anisms drawn from the IR literature on regime type. Our results suggest that our respondents
believe democracies are no more resolved in crises partially because they see democratic threats as
less credible, contrary to the predictions of the democratic credibility thesis. At the same time,
when evaluating war outcomes, the democratic advantage our respondents reported appear to stem
predominantly from beliefs that democracies have higher quality militaries, and to a lesser extent,
a belief that democratic leaders select into winnable wars.
1 Democracies and Beliefs
The beliefs of leaders and the public about regime type are critical to the study and practice of
international politics. George Kennan’s view on the importance of covert operations was directly
tied to his pessimistic view of democracy’s disadvantages in conflict (Gaddis, 2011). Similarly,
neoconservatives’ arguments about democracy promotion are inextricably linked to their concerns
about democratic weakness in war (Caverley, 2010) while the liberal variant of the same belief is
based on the logic— voiced by Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake — that democracies
“tend not to abuse their citizens’ rights or wage war on one another” (quoted in Mansfield and
Snyder, 1995, 5).
In other words, democracies in international politics have reputations.2 And just as reputational
considerations more generally shape both how actors are treated by others, and how strategic actors
themselves behave (Brutger and Kertzer, 2018), these beliefs about regime type not only a↵ect how
other states treat democracies, but also how democracies themselves conduct foreign policy. For
example, if democratic leaders buy into the Almond-Lippman consensus’ concerns about democratic
weakness in foreign policy crises, they should strive to insulate the public from foreign policy, and
2We follow Dafoe, Renshon and Huth (2014, 374) in defining reputations as “beliefs about persistent characteristicsor behavioral tendencies of an actor, based on the past actions of the actor” — in this case, beliefs about the behavioraltendencies of a type of system of government.
3
engage wherever possible in private rather than public diplomacy.
In addition to being critical for how actors act and respond to each other in world politics, these
beliefs are at the core of both theoretical and practical debates about democracies in conflict. In
some cases, the critical role of beliefs is readily apparent. For example, coercive threats are only
made credible via “beliefs about the genuineness” of the coercer’s communications (Schultz, 1999,
257). And in the canonical work on audience costs, the claim that leaders of democracies will find
it easier to signal resolve than their autocratic counterparts implies something very specific about
how leaders should calculate the credibility of threats made from di↵erent regimes. In fact, Fearon’s
(1994, 577) primary interest is in the question, “how do leaders come to revise their beliefs about
an opponent?”3
Although the beliefs of leaders play fundamental roles in signaling-based arguments for demo-
cratic distinctiveness, they loom similarly large in other accounts. One of the central insights of
Weeks’s 2014 disaggregation of authoritarian regimes is that “the impact of institutions depends on
the preferences and beliefs of the individuals who populate and lead” them. In fact, even theories
that on first glance seem to be about outcomes carry important implications for what beliefs we
should observe, or make assumptions about how leaders and publics perceive democratic distinc-
tiveness. For example, consider the body of literature focused on the question, “do democracies win
wars at a higher rate?” This is, at first glance, a simple matter of observing and coding outcomes at
the international level. However, nearly all of our theories about why democracies might have these
advantages hinge on beliefs. For example, one set of mechanisms that lie at the heart of the demo-
cratic triumphalist/defeatist debate involves dovish preferences. Democracies might be perceived as
being less likely to stand firm in crises out of the belief that democratic publics or decision-makers
subscribe to norms of liberal pacifism that proscribe the use of force except as a last resort (Schum-
peter, 1955; Kertzer and Brutger, 2016). Similarly, if democratic publics are believed to be especially
sensitive to either the human or financial costs of war (Mueller, 1971; Valentino, Huth and Croco,
2010), it is possible that democratic leaders would be more reluctant to risk escalation.
The democratic peace literature has similar implications for individuals’ beliefs. In some cases,
the beliefs that matter theoretically are those of the public: e.g., whether and how they use regime
type as a heuristic to understand the moral issues involved in attacking other regimes (Tomz and
3See also Prins (2003, 70): “domestic political opposition can only validate leader preferences or intentions if theforeign adversary believes such opposition can in fact impose costs on a leader.” Emphases added.
4
Weeks, 2013) or whether it a↵ects their expectations regarding the scale of casualties (Gartzke,
2001). Institutional variants of democratic peace theory posit a mechanism that relies on leaders’
perceptions that democratic states are likely to try harder and expend more resources than a com-
parable autocratic state (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 1999, 794). Similarly, Downes (2009, 11) notes
that the selection e↵ects argument used to support democratic triumphalism implies that “because
democratic leaders are cautious in selecting only those wars they are highly likely to win, democratic
elites who choose to initiate or enter wars should be confident of victory.” Thus, in their exploration
of democratic behavior in international crises, Gelpi and Griesdorf (2001) routinely make reference
to the beliefs that leaders in any regime type have about democracies: for example, that foreign
leaders are more likely to target democracies “because of their belief that democracies prefer not to
fight” (p. 642).
Theories of democratic di↵usion similarly emphasize the important role of leaders’ and publics’
beliefs about democratic distinctiveness. Gunitsky (2014, 576) argues that democratization occurs in
waves after hegemonic shocks partially because victories on the battlefield change observers’ beliefs
about “relative regime e↵ectiveness”: the wave of democratization that occurred after both the First
and Second World War, he argued, was partially a function of other states seeking to emulate the
regime types that had come out on top. In a similar vein, Elkink (2011) agues that di↵usion of
attitudes among the public can help explain the spatial clustering of democracy and its di↵usion.
Beliefs about democratic distinctiveness similarly play a large role on theories of the democratic
peace that emphasize learning, as in Starr (1992, 210).
More generally, the new wave of literature on the role of leaders in IR consistently points to
beliefs as the mechanism through which individual leaders matter: Yarhi-Milo (2014) shows how
leaders’ beliefs systematically a↵ect what type of costly signals they see as informative indicators of
their adversary’s intentions; for Saunders (2011), it is because leaders vary in their causal beliefs that
they adopt di↵erent military intervention strategies; for Horowitz and Stam (2014), it is because
prior military experience changes leaders’ beliefs about the utility of force that leaders with combat
experience conduct foreign policy systematically di↵erently than leaders without; for Fuhrmann and
Horowitz (2015) it is because of di↵erent beliefs about the importance of maintaining independence
that former rebels are more likely to pursue nuclear weapons.
However, with few exceptions that we can find — mostly about the mass public rather than
political elites — scholars working on democracies in IR have not directly studied beliefs. For
5
example, as Hermann and Kegley (1995, 512) note, despite the mountains of work on democratic
distinctiveness, “this wave of research neglects sources of explanation that lie within the people
involved in making policy decisions.” This gap is understandable given the inherent challenges of
observational data, as well as the genuine di�culty of studying leaders’ assessments and private
beliefs. Still, we argue that there are potentially important advantages that might derive from
testing whether decision-makers believes the things that IR scholars expect them to. The majority
of our theories concerning democracies in crises and war are theories of intentional action; even if
we only care about outcomes, the mechanisms we use to explain them typically implicate the beliefs
of decision-makers (Elster, 2007); if these theories have any Verstehen to them, we should expect a
broad congruence between these theoretical predictions and the judgments of the decision-makers
about whom we are theorizing. While testing these predictions on observational data is beyond
the scope of this paper, our findings provide crucial foundations for moving forward in testing and
refining our theories of conflict behavior and regime type.
If previous work has focused less than perhaps it should have on beliefs, a related question
regards whose beliefs matter. In some cases, we care about the beliefs of leaders—whether their
assessments of credibility are shaped by the regime type of their adversaries—while in others, we
care about the beliefs of the general public. The beliefs of the average citizen matter for several
reasons. In some cases, the theories we are testing directly implicate mass beliefs: for example,
whether or not democratic publics are particularly cost-sensitive during conflicts or see regime types
as di↵erentially threatening. In others, understanding publics’ beliefs about democracy is useful
because of the importance of public opinion for theories of democratic constraint: if publics and
leaders share the same beliefs about democracies in crises and war, it suggests public opinion is
unlikely to act as a constraint on leaders’ abilities to act on those beliefs. It also valuable to use
mass public data to learn how widespread the reputations of democracies are (do they extend across
countries and types of democracy?).
Taken together, this discussion of research on beliefs about regime type and its implications
for democratic behavior and theories of IR suggest obvious ways forward. They call for a unique
research design, one based on a series of experiments, focused on questions related to democratic
distinctiveness and fielded on a combination of elite leader and mass public samples. We describe
exactly that approach in the following section.
6
2 Research Design
We study beliefs about democracies in crises and war by fielding an original experiment in seven
samples, from four di↵erent democracies, across a three year period. The first of our samples
consists of elite decision-makers: 89 current and former members of the Knesset in Israel. As we
show below, this is an unusual sample even by the standards of elite experiments in IR: two-thirds
of our respondents had experience serving as members of the Knesset’s Foreign A↵airs and Defense
committee; our least “elite” participant is a member of parliament; our most, a Prime Minister.
The other six surveys were fielded on mass public samples — two nationally representative samples
in Israel, two in the United Kingdom, one in South Korea, and one nationally diverse (though not
representative) sample in the United States. As we discuss below, by fielding the same experiment in
a range of democracies in very di↵erent foreign policy contexts, we not only probe the generalizability
of our results, but also draw inferences about beliefs about democracies in crises and war outside
the confines of the United States (Narang and Staniland, 2018).
We begin by discussing our elite sample of Knesset members — and why Israel is a particularly
interesting case to study leaders’ beliefs about democratic distinctiveness — before reviewing our
six mass public samples. We then present our experimental design.
2.1 Elite sample: the Israeli Knesset
For our elite sample, we field a survey experiment on current and former members of the Israeli Knes-
set. There are several important substantive advantages to studying the beliefs of Israeli decision-
makers. First, the most direct way to achieve our goal of examining decision-makers’ beliefs about
democratic reputations in war and peace is to sample from a population that has wrestled with
those issues outside the lab. This is, after all, what is unique about studying leaders rather than
the public. “Use of force” decisions are ubiquitous in Israel, and highly salient for Israeli decision-
makers: during our leaders’ time in o�ce (from 1996 onwards), Israel was involved in 16 Militarized
Interstate Disputes (MIDs). Our participants were involved in many of these cases. More broadly,
since earlier experiences of Israeli conflict might have shaped their beliefs, we note that Israel has
been involved in 128 documented MIDs since the state’s inception, and seven militarized compellent
threat episodes (Sechser, 2011).
Second, because of the structure of Israel’s parliamentary system, the vast majority of the
7
executive branch — e.g., the Prime Minister and ministers in the security cabinet — are also elected
members of the Knesset (the legislative branch of government). Thus, the Israeli Knesset — unlike,
e.g., the U.S. Congress — is comprised of policy makers who are directly and intimately involved in
use of force decisions. Because of political norms and relatively short election cycles, it is common for
former members of the executive branch to later become members of the opposition in the Knesset;
conversely, nearly all current members of the executive branch were at some point in their career
members of the opposition in the Knesset. Thus, even the Knesset members in our sample who are
currently part of the opposition have either been members of the executive branch in the past, or
are likely candidates to become members in the future. Put di↵erently, by sampling current and
former members of the Knesset, we are also e↵ectively sampling current, former, and potentially
future members of the executive.
Our elite survey was fielded July-October 2015. Of 288 potential subjects, 89 participated,
leaving us with a 31% response rate, relatively high for surveys of this type. The Knesset sample is
described in Table 1 and our recruitment procedures are described in Appendix §A.2; Appendix §A.3
describes our protocol to increase our confidence that the Knesset members themselves participated
in the study, rather than their sta↵. Of our Knesset participants, 25% were current members; the rest
(75%) were former Knesset members. A great many of our participants had experience in IR-relevant
contexts: 64% had active combat experience, and 67% had experience serving as members of the
Knesset’s Foreign A↵airs and Defense committee. They also had considerable political experience:
on average, our participants had served 3 terms in Parliament, and some had served as many as 9
terms. While 58% of the Knesset subjects had never served as a Minister, 29% had been at least
a Deputy Minister, and fully 12% of our sample was in our highest category of elite experience,
such that our participants include individuals who had served as Cabinet Members, and even Prime
Minister.
In Appendix §C.1, we show that our leader sample is fairly representative of the universe of Israeli
political leaders from the time frame we examined, although not surprisingly, our analysis reveals that
current members of the Knesset were less likely to participate than former members. As is evident,
this is an extremely unusual sample: our least “elite” participant is a member of parliament; our
most, a Prime Minister. In fact, even in many elite studies of decision-making, subjects are often
far removed from the actual decision makers of primary interest to IR theories. Renshon (2015), for
example, uses political and military leaders drawn from a mid-career training program at Harvard
8
Table 1: Knesset Sample (N = 89)
Proportion of respondentsKnesset Member:
Current 25%Former 75%
Exp. on Foreign A↵airs/Defense Committee . . .. . . as backup or full member 67%
. . . as full member 54%Highest level of experience:
. . . not a Minister 58%. . . Deputy Minister 29%
. . . Cabinet Member or higher 12%Male 84%Served in military 95%Active combat experience 64%
Mean SDAge 61.4 10.7Terms in Knesset 3.0 2.1Military Assertiveness 0.61 0.20Political Ideology 0.45 0.24Arab-Israeli Conflict 0.39 0.25International Trust 0.40 0.26
Note: individual di↵erences in bottom four rows scaled from 0-1.
Kennedy School, while Alatas et al. (2009) use Indonesian civil servants, Hafner-Burton et al. (2014)
use “policy elites” (including civil servants, corporate executives, former members of Congress, and
U.S. trade negotiators) and Mintz et al. (1997) use Air Force o�cers. While more elite than college
freshmen, to be sure, the samples used are still somewhat removed from the dictators, presidents,
leaders of the military and foreign ministry, trusted advisors, and generals who are the primary
decision makers in most interstate conflicts.4 This serves as a reminder that the use of quasi-elite
subjects, while interesting and helpful, does not completely obviate the necessity of extrapolating
from one population to another. The research design we employ here is thus perhaps most similar
to Findley et al. (2017), who field experiments about foreign aid on paired samples of Ugandan
parliamentarians and members of the mass public.
9
Table 2: Mass Public Samples (Total N = 9360)
Country Israel I Israel II Korea UK I UK II USAMale 0.53 0.52 0.54 0.44 0.45 0.52Age:<25 0.13 0.13 0.14 0.11 0.14 0.1825-34 0.27 0.26 0.17 0.25 0.25 0.4535-44 0.20 0.20 0.21 0.23 0.23 0.2145-54 0.17 0.17 0.33 0.22 0.20 0.09>55 0.24 0.24 0.15 0.18 0.17 0.07
Education:High School or less 0.35 0.27 0.20 0.54 0.54 0.11Some college 0.22 0.22 0.16 0.11 0.11 0.26College/university 0.27 0.31 0.54 0.25 0.24 0.51Postgraduate 0.15 0.19 0.10 0.10 0.10 0.12
Political Ideology 0.61 0.59 0.52 0.52 0.51 0.39Military Assertiveness 0.58 0.56 0.39International Trust 0.32 0.35Arab-Israeli Conflict 0.63 0.63Pol. Interest 0.45 0.47 0.46 0.56Interest in FP 0.40 0.51 0.51 0.54N 1599 1111 1797 1105 1691 2057
2.2 Mass public samples
While the Knesset sample is valuable both theoretically and methodologically — if we care about
democratic leaders’ beliefs about democracies in crises and wars, we surely especially care about the
beliefs of leaders of a democracy frequently engaged in both — we are also interested in ordinary
citizens’ beliefs about democratic distinctiveness, across a range of countries. We supplement our
elite sample by replicating our experiment in six mass public samples, fielded across four democracies
in very di↵erent foreign policy contexts.
While fielding our experiment on democratic publics allows us to answer questions of theoretical
relevance to debates about democratic distinctiveness and reputations, the pairing of an elite and
mass public samples across multiple countries provides several additional benefits. The first is that
it lets us speak to debates about di↵erences between elites and masses in IR. To that end, two
of the samples are drawn from the Israeli general public. Including mass samples from the same
country as the elite survey provides leverage on the selection of leaders from the general population,
thereby giving us insight into the dimensions on which they di↵er and those which they resemble
4A focus on elites is more common within the literature on foreign policy attitudes, but those works have a similarlyexpansive view of “elites” (e.g., business executives) and were focused on broad foreign policy attitudes, rather thandynamic judgment and decision-making. See, e.g., Holsti and Rosenau (1988) and Wittkopf and Maggiotto (1983).
10
their compatriots. The second is the value inherent in any replication, increasing confidence in
the overall research program and generalizability of our findings. This is particularly germane
for the study of democratic distinctiveness, given Narang and Staniland’s call for IR scholars to
“disaggregate democracies”, and test our theories about democratic foreign policy across a wider
range of democracies, a point echoed by Levin and Trager (2019). We thus replicate our findings in
four other national samples in three other democracies (South Korea, the United States, and United
Kingdom), selected because they vary along multiple dimensions, including region, political system,
relative military capabilities, and the salience of foreign policy. Altogether, our four democracies
vary in a variety of ways: both Israel and South Korea, for example, face regional security threats
and have some form of mandatory military service, while the United States and United Kingdom do
not; both Israel and the United Kingdom are parliamentary democracies, whereas the United States
and South Korea are presidential systems, and so on.
The two Israeli public samples were fielded in September-October 2015, and January 2016, re-
spectively, by iPanel, an Israeli polling firm that has been used e↵ectively by other recent surveys
and experiments (e.g., Ben-Nun Bloom, Arikan and Courtemanche, 2015; Manekin, Grossman and
Mitts, 2015). Both samples are representative of the Israeli Jewish population, and stratified based
upon gender, age, living area and education.5 The third and fourth samples are national samples
in the United Kingdom, and were fielded in May and June 2018 by Survey Sampling International
(SSI). The fifth sample is a national sample in South Korea fielded by the Korean polling firm
Embrain in May 2018. The British and Korean samples were both stratified based on gender, age,
and location. The final sample was fielded on a nationally diverse, although not nationally repre-
sentative, sample in the United States, through Amazon Mechanical Turk in June 2015. In addition
to standard demographic data, participants in each survey completed questionnaires capturing a
variety of political orientations; the list of orientations varied based on the country, but in the Israeli
case included military assertiveness, political ideology, stance on to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and
international trust.6 Descriptive statistics for these six samples, totaling over 9000 respondents, are
presented in Table 2. Our combination of samples, while obviously not comprehensive of all democ-
racies, captures a wide range of democratic security environments, across a wide range of regions
5Our focus on the Israeli Jewish population is due entirely to logistical constraints, specifically the inability ofonline polling companies in Israel to provide anything close to a representative sample of the minority Israeli Arabpopulation.
6See Appendix §B.2 for the complete instrumentation.
11
(North America, Western Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia) and in a manner not usually
addressed with original data in a single study.
2.3 The Experiment
All respondents across all seven samples were presented with the same experiment, albeit in di↵erent
languages (Hebrew in Israel, Korean in South Korea, and English in the UK and the United States).7
Here is the situation:
• Two countries are currently involved in a public dispute over a contested terri-tory. The dispute has received considerable attention in both countries, becauseof the risk that disputes like these can escalate to the use of force.
• Country A is a [democracy/dictatorship]. Country B is a dictatorship.
• Both countries have moderately powerful militaries, with large armies, moder-ate sized-navies, and well-trained air forces.
• Neither country is a close ally of the United States.
• Country A is slightly larger than Country B, though their economies are ap-proximately the same size.
• Country A has moderate levels of trade with the international community.Country B has high levels of trade with the international community.
• The last time the two countries were involved in an international dispute, dif-ferent leaders were in power.
1. Given the information available, what is your best estimate about whetherCountry A will stand firm in this dispute, ranging from 0% to 100%?
2. If the dispute were to escalate and war were to break out, what is your bestestimate about whether Country A will win, ranging from 0% to 100%?
Figure 1: Experimental Vignette
All subjects read a vignette (reproduced in Figure 1), in which the regime type of Country A
was experimentally manipulated. In addition to our regime type manipulation, we described a
number of other characteristics of the individual states, as well as their relationship, both to avoid
“information leakage”8 and to avoid “putting our thumb on the scale”: if respondents are only
7Our experiments were fielded using the Qualtrics platform (aside from the few Knesset members who chose to fillout paper copies). In each study except for the Israel II sample, respondents took part in other, unrelated experimentsas part of their participation. The module orders were fixed because of the multi-mode nature of the Knesset study,which means that we cannot examine potential order e↵ects.
8See, e.g., Tomz and Weeks 2013; Dafoe, Zhang and Caughey 2018, as well as the discussion in Kertzer and Brutger2016.
12
provided information on one dimension, it is far more likely for them to weight that dimension
heavily. We thus described each country’s military, economy, geographic size, and so on, seeking to
avoid demand e↵ects for our treatment by ensuring the two countries slightly di↵ered on multiple
dimensions. Participants then indicated how likely they thought it was that Country A would stand
firm in the crisis, and, if the dispute escalated into war, how likely they thought that Country A
would win.9
3 Results
Table 3: Summary of results across samples
In crises In war[estimates of A standing firm] [estimates of A winning war]
Dictatorship Democracy �democracy Dictatorship Democracy �democracy
Knesset 59.14 53.25 -5.89 44.30 58.58 14.28Israel I 57.86 53.27 -4.59 48.52 53.49 4.96Israel II 59.91 58.24 -1.67 50.06 58.29 8.23Korea 61.15 61.17 0.02 47.43 53.75 6.32UK I 60.83 61.15 0.31 51.90 55.48 3.58UK II 60.91 61.36 0.45 52.70 56.29 3.59USA 66.57 65.42 -1.14 49.81 53.87 4.06
Di↵erences significant at p < 0.05 in bold, calculated via rank-sum tests for the Knesset sample, and t-tests for thepublic samples. Country B is fixed at “dictatorship” in all samples.
We present our results two di↵erent ways: numerically in Table 3, and graphically in Figure 2,
which displays bootstrapped density distributions of the average treatment e↵ects. In both Table
3 and Figure 2(a), four patterns are evident. First, across all seven samples, respondents never
perceived democracies as possessing an advantage in crises. In the Israel I sample, democracies
are actually viewed as 4.6 percentage points less likely to stand firm than dictatorships are, a
statistically significant e↵ect; the Knesset sample features a negative treatment e↵ect for democracy
of similar magnitude (�5.9 percentage points), although because of its small sample size, the e↵ect
is not statistically significant at the 95% level.10 On the whole, then, democracies do not have a
reputation for being particularly distinctive in their crisis behavior, and where they are, democracy is
9In the two Israeli public samples, we included a manipulation check asking participants to recall which regimetype condition they were in. In the Israel I sample, 85% correctly recalled their treatment condition; in IsraelII, the passage rate was 90%. In the analysis below, we include all respondents regardless of whether they passedthe manipulation check or not, although the results do not substantively change if those participants who failed themanipulation check are excluded.
10In Appendix §C.7, we show that these e↵ect sizes are comparable to those from large-N studies of democracyand victory in crisis bargaining drawn from the MID data. Full results for Knesset sample are depicted in Table 5 inAppendix §C.2. Results for the Israeli public are reproduced in Appendix §C.4.
13
Figure
2:Average
treatm
ente↵
ects
anddi↵erences-in-di↵erences
(a)Averagetrea
tmen
te↵
ects
-20
-1001020
...in
cris
es...
in w
ars
Effect of democracy(b
)Di↵eren
ce-in-di↵eren
ce
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2030
Diff
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-diff
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ce: e
ffect
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emoc
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ar -
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Sample
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el I
Isra
el II
Isra
el: K
ness
et
Rep
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orea
Uni
ted
Kin
gdom
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Uni
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Kin
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USA
Thedistributionsofav
eragetrea
tmen
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ects
(calculatedusingB
=1500bootstraps)
inpanel
(a)sh
owdem
ocracies
are
nev
erperceived
asbeingatanadva
ntagein
crises
(andin
theKnessetandfirstIsraelisample,are
believed
tobeatasignifica
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alw
aysbelieved
tobeatanadva
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bootstrapped
di↵eren
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ceresu
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panel
(b)sh
owth
atth
ee↵
ectofdem
ocracy
isseen
asbeingsignifica
ntlymore
positivein
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anin
crises
across
all
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samples.
Note
thatth
egreater
variance
inth
eKnessetsample
isdueto
itssm
aller
sample
size;seeAppen
dix
§C.6
forresu
ltswithdow
nsampledpublic
distributionsth
atfeatu
reasimilarsp
read.
14
believed to be a liability rather than an asset. Second, across all seven samples, respondents believe
democracies possess a significant advantage in wars; the e↵ect was particularly pronounced among
our Knesset respondents (14.3 percentage points), but are positive and statistically significant in
all of the other samples as well. Third, as Figure 2(b) shows, the di↵erence-in-di↵erence between
democracies and dictatorships in crises versus wars is statistically significant across each of our seven
samples: in each country, democracies are perceived as at a significantly greater advantage in wars
than crises.
Fourth, focusing specifically on the Israeli samples, our results reveal a general similarity in the
judgments displayed by our elite decision-makers in the Knesset and the mass public they represent.
As is starkly illustrated in Figure 2, both our elite and our public samples espoused democratic
pessimism in crises (most starkly in the Knesset sample and Israel I), and democratic triumphalism
in wars: democracies were believed to be perhaps less likely to stand firm in disputes, and more
likely to win conflicts that escalated to the use of force.
This congruence is notable given the intensity of debates about the extent to which elite decision-
makers di↵er from members of the mass public (e.g., Mintz, Redd and Vedlitz 2006; Druckman and
Kam 2011; Hafner-Burton, Hughes and Victor 2013; Kertzer 2016, Linde and Vis 2017). In both
cases, any di↵erence between the three samples was in magnitude, not direction: leaders were both
slightly more pessimistic about the odds for democracies in crises, and also a bit more optimistic
about their chances in war. While the congruence between our samples should be interpreted with
caution, our results remind us that di↵erences between elites and ordinary citizens should not be
overstated without a theory as to why we might expect characteristics of elites to moderate the
impact of treatment e↵ects (Renshon, 2015). Indeed, supplementary analyses find relatively little
sign of heterogeneous treatment e↵ects within our Israeli samples: current MKs behave similarly to
former MKs, more hawkish MKs behave similarly to more dovish MKs, and so on.11
11More formally, we estimate a series of simple regression models in which we regress each dependent variable (eitherresolve, or military e↵ectiveness), on the democracy treatment, the respondent-level characteristic under investigation,and the interaction between the two. The interactions lack statistical significance (on resolve: p < 0.13 for currentMK status, p < 0.40 for military assertiveness; on military e↵ectiveness: p < 0.71 for current MK status, p < 0.41 formilitary assertiveness). We present additional tests for heterogeneous treatment e↵ects in Appendix §C.5.
15
Testing The Mechanisms
Thus far, we have shown that, in one elite and six mass public samples, democratic reputations are
mixed; democracy is believed to have a contingent e↵ect, displaying a significantly more positive
e↵ect on winning in war than in standing firm in crises. These results are broadly consistent with
a variety of predictions made in the IR literature, but given the multiplicity of causal mechanisms
discussed in this scholarship, it is unclear which ones are responsible for the e↵ects we see here.
To provide some evidence on the mechanisms that underlie judgments about the resolve and
e↵ectiveness of democratic states, we added a series of questions to the survey instrument fielded on
our Israel II sample. Following the completion of the scenario, respondents were presented with
a series of questions tapping into a series of potential mechanisms, depicted in Table 4.12 For the
purpose of the mechanism questions, we divided our subjects in half, with half being reminded of their
answer to the “resolve in a crisis” answer and being asked questions about the crisis scenario, and
half being reminded of their answer to the “e↵ectiveness in war” outcome and being asked questions
about the war scenario. In addition to this between-subject manipulation, we also included an order
manipulation to avoid potential downstream e↵ects, and estimate within-subject e↵ects for the two
of the domestic constraint mechanisms, described in greater detail in Appendix §B.3.13
In Figures 10-14 in Appendix §C.8, we present the first part of any mechanism analysis: probing
the e↵ects of our treatment on our mediators. To that end, we present density distributions for our
mechanism questions by treatment group, where Country A is either a Democracy or Dictatorship.
This allows us to address the first set of implications drawn from extant theories: do respondents
evince di↵erential beliefs about the characteristics of democratic and autocratic states?
In fact, they do. Our respondents in the Democracy treatment saw Country A’s citizens as
more likely (by 17%) to believe that force should be use as a “last resort,” but also perceived the
country’s leaders as more likely (by 31%) to evince the same pacifist beliefs. They believed that
country was being more casualty-sensitive (by 33%) and more sensitive to the financial costs of war
(by 21%) compared to subjects for whom Country A was described as a dictatorship. Similarly,
subjects believed democracies’ armies had better trained (by 7%) troops with higher morale (11%)
12Our full list of questions and closed-response options is contained in Appendix §B.3.13Despite the broad congruence between the results we find in all seven samples, it is important to note that the
mechanisms we find support for below need not necessarily be the same as those operating amongst elites, or inpublics in other countries — it is possible, for example, for elites and masses, or Koreans and Americans, to reachthe same conclusions about democracies for di↵erent reasons. Nonetheless, these mechanism tests o↵er us a chance togain further insight into the underpinnings of the public’s judgments in one of these cases, letting us test the extentto which their rationales correspond with our theoretical frameworks.
16
Table 4: Mechanism Questions
Crisis Mediators:
Dovish Preferences:
1. What proportion of the citizens do you think be-lieves force should only be used as a last resort?
2. What proportion of the national decision-makersdo you think believes force should only be usedas a last resort?
3. How sensitive do you think its citizens would beto casualties?
4. How sensitive do you think its citizens would beto the financial costs (e.g., increased taxes) offighting?
Credibility:
5. If the leader of Country A makes a public threat,how likely do you think it is that they’ll followthrough?
War Effectiveness Mediators:
Selection e↵ects:
6. If Country A initiated the dispute, how likely doyou think it is that it will prevail in the dispute?
Military Conduct
7. How likely do you think it is that other countrieswould come to Country A’s defense?
8. How well-trained do you think the soldiers ofCountry A are?
9. How strong do you think the morale of the sol-diers is in Country A?
How strong do you think the morale of the sol-diers is in Country A?
Mediators for both Crises and War:
Domestic Contraints:
[Thinking back to the original crisis, if Country A were to back down. . . ][If Country A were to lose thewar. . . ] � [Thinking back to the original crisis, if Country A were to stand firm. . . ][If Country A wereto win the war. . . ]
10. What e↵ect do you think it would have on public support for the government?*
11. What e↵ect do you think it would have on the likelihood of the government remaining in o�ce?*
12. What do you think is likely to happen to the leader?
*Within-subject e↵ects
17
than their autocratic counterparts. And not only did democratic armies have reputations for being
of higher quality, but they also had reputations for being more likely (by 24%) to be able to count
on assistance from allies.
To test whether these mechanisms mediate the relationship between beliefs about democratic
regimes and inferences about their resolve and military e↵ectiveness, we turn to nonparametric causal
mediation analysis (Imai et al., 2011). This allows for estimation of an average causal mediation e↵ect
(ACME), which can be interpreted as the expected di↵erence in the outcome when the mediator
took the value it would realize under the treatment condition as opposed to the control condition,
while the treatment status itself is held constant.14
Figure 3 presents the results of our causal mediation analysis. The top panel presents the
potential mediators for the e↵ect of democracy on beliefs about standing firm in a crisis. As is
evident, the “credibility” ACME is negative and statistically significant, implying that one reason
why our subjects believed democracies were slightly less likely to stand firm was that they believed
democracies were less likely to follow through on their threats compared to autocracies, counter
to the predictions of the democratic credibility literature. In contrast, we do not find evidence
that respondents’ beliefs about standing firm in a crisis were mediated by any of the “domestic
constraints” suggested by the literature on leadership turnover or public support. On the whole, the
varying signs of the di↵erent ACMEs in Figure 3(a) suggest that one explanation for the weak or null
total e↵ect of democracy in crises in some samples may be due to the presence of an “inconsistent
mediation e↵ect,” in which di↵erent causal mechanisms push in di↵erent directions.
The bottom panel of Figure 3 presents our analysis for our war outcome mediators. Here, we
find strong evidence consistent with explanations that focus on democracies’ reputation for military
e↵ectiveness: mediators relating to the morale and training of democracies as well as their likelihood
of being aided by allies all presented significant and positive ACMEs. We also found evidence that
subjects’ inferences were in part mediated by beliefs about the selectivity of democracies, consistent
with a number of extant works (e.g., Reiter and Stam, 2002). However, as before, we found little
evidence that subjects evinced beliefs consistent with the “domestic constraints” school of democratic
e↵ectiveness.
In sum, our respondents in the Israel II sample view democracies as more cautious and peace-
ful, and (perhaps as a result) less credible in their use of coercive diplomacy during crises; however,
14Causal mediation analysis was implemented via the mediation package in R (Imai et al., 2010).
18
ACME
-4 -2 0 2 4
Dovish public
Dovish leaders
Casualty sensitivity
Financial sensitivity
Leader turnover
Public support
Leader's fate
Follow through
Dovishpreferences
Domesticconstraints
Credibility
(a) Crisis mediators
ACME
-4 -2 0 2 4
Pr(Victory | Initiate)
Leader turnover
Public support
Leader's fate
Allies
Training
Morale
Selectivity
Domesticconstraints
Militaryeffectiveness
(b) War Mediators
Figure 3: Causal Mediators for E↵ect of Democracy in Crisis and War (with 95% quasi-BayesianCIs)
19
this perceived weakness appears to subside when the crisis escalates into a full blown war. At that
stage, di↵erent calculations come into play, and the military e↵ectiveness of democracies is seen as
a major asset.
4 Conclusion
If we take leaders at their word, actors in international politics frequently use regime type to draw
inferences about states’ future behavior. Democracies have reputations, which a↵ect both how other
actors treat them, and how they themselves behave. Yet, although there is large and robust liter-
ature exploring the ways that democracy matters in international politics, it largely focuses on the
direct e↵ects of domestic institutional configurations on state behavior, rather than examining this
perceptual pathway, in which institutions a↵ect behavior through actors’ beliefs. In this research
note, we therefore sought to place beliefs about democracies in crises and war under the microscope,
fielding a survey experiment on an unusually elite sample of past and present Israeli Knesset mem-
bers, thereby providing direct evidence on the beliefs of political leaders. We also replicated our
findings on six national samples in four democracies to thoroughly assess the generalizability of our
findings as well as provide evidence on causal mechanisms. Across all seven samples, we find that
democracies have mixed reputations: they are perceived as no more likely to stand firm in crises
than their autocratic adversaries, but are believed to be significantly more likely to prevail on the
battlefield. On a broader level, our results therefore o↵er one more data point demonstrating that
we should not uncritically assume that leaders and the public will di↵er dramatically.
Our experimental design also allowed us to evaluate the mechanisms leading to those assess-
ments, intervening in some prominent debates in the literature. We find support for the notion that
democracies are believed to select into winnable wars, as our participants viewed conflicts that were
initiated by democracies as more likely to succeed compared to ones initiated by non-democracies.
Respondents also evince beliefs consistent with some variants of democratic triumphalism that focus
on the role of higher morale, more e↵ective armies, and greater support from alliance partners.
In contrast, we find mixed or weak support for other mechanisms. In line with norms of liberal
pacifism, participants saw democracies as less likely to use force unless as a last resort, but they
also saw them as no more sensitive to the costs of war, and beliefs about dovish preferences did
not mediate the relationship between regime type and resolve in crises. Our results also cast doubt
20
on theories that rely on leaders’ beliefs about the advantage democracies have in sending credible
public threats in crises. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case: our participants viewed public
threats that were issued by democracies as less credible than ones issued by non-democracies. Taken
together, our results suggest that while some claims about the distinctiveness of democracies accord
with our participants’ beliefs, others did not. While our results by no means constitute the final
say on the empirical validity of these claims, at the very least they point to a potentially large
discrepancy between what our theories assume leaders’ beliefs to be, and what we find when we
examine them directly.
Our results suggest a number of implications. For instance, our finding that democratic leaders
and publics perceive themselves as having no advantage over autocracies in signaling resolve in crises
suggests that perhaps democratic leaders might attempt costlier signals than they would otherwise
to compensate for their perception of weakness in “contests of will.” In addition, our finding that
democratic leaders and their publics see themselves as more likely than other regimes to win wars
suggests that we might see observe overconfidence and increased risk-acceptance among those groups
in the lead-up to war. Finally, if reputations for resolve and war-winning adhere to regime type—
as our findings indicate—we should expect democratic leaders to show systematic di↵erences in
their willingness to engage in conflict with democracies versus autocracies. Indeed, in this sense,
our findings provide microfoundational support for the democratic peace’s primary finding that
democracies are significantly less likely to fight each other.
Our method—paired experimental designs that focus on di↵erent stages of the conflict process—
also allows us to connect our results to contemporary bargaining theories of war, which tend to views
crises and war as one part of a continuous process. Because we ask all of our respondents about
both crises and war, we are able to provide insight on how beliefs about democracies in each phase
of conflict interact. In Appendix §C.8 we show that for five of our seven samples, our respondents’
beliefs about democratic advantages in war swamp concerns about democratic disadvantages in
crises.
The nature of the samples also suggests fruitful avenues for replications and extensions. While
our subjects were drawn from a variety of di↵erent democratic societies, future research should
examine similar questions in non-democratic societies. A more constructivist reading of our results
might also lead scholars to seek to replicate our results among decision-makers in countries where
alternative understandings of “democracies” might be present. Lastly, future research on the role of
21
regime type in international security could formulate and test domain-specific claims about the e↵ects
of democracy in contexts such as counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and low-intensity conflicts.
22
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Democratic Leaders, Crises, and War
Supplementary Appendix
Contents
A Recruitment protocol 2A.1 Recruitment letter to Knesset Members . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Figure 1: Recruitment Letter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2A.2 Recruitment procedures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2A.3 Participant verification protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
B Study instrumentation 6B.1 Experimental protocol (translated to English) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6B.2 Individual di↵erence measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
B.2.1 Military assertiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8B.2.2 International trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8B.2.3 Right-wing ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9B.2.4 Arab-Israeli conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
B.3 Mechanism questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
C Supplementary analysis 13C.1 Representativeness and survey non-response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Table 1: Gauging the representativeness of the sample . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14C.2 Knesset results table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Table 2: Regression model: Knesset sample . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16C.3 Israeli public samples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Table 3: Israeli Public Samples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18Table 4: Elite-Mass Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
C.4 Israeli public results table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20Table 5: Regression models: Israeli public samples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
C.5 Heterogeneous e↵ects in the Israeli sample . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22C.6 Downsampling Israeli public results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Figure 2: Downsampled crisis results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25C.7 Comparison of e↵ect size magnitude with large-N work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Table 6: The probability of crisis reciprocation: Bilateral MIDs . . . . . . . . . . . . 27Table 7: Predicted probabilities of crisis reciprocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
C.8 Exploiting the two-stage nature of the experimental design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29Figure 3: Exploiting the two-stage structure of the experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
C.9 E↵ect of regime type treatment on mechanism questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32Figure 4: Dovish preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32Figure 5: Selection e↵ects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33Figure 6: Domestic constraints: leader costs of war . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33Figure 7: Credibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34Figure 8: Military conduct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
1
A Recruitment protocol
A.1 Recruitment letter to Knesset Members
. , ,
..
:! !" . .
.
: , . .
, :
! . , , . : XXXXX
, ). (! ,
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Figure 1: Recruitment Letter
A.2 Recruitment procedures
We began the recruitment process for the elite sample by compiling a dataset of all 408 individuals
who had served as members of the Parliament of Israel (i.e., the Knesset) from the beginning of
the 14th Knesset in June 1996 through the 20th Knesset (the current Knesset) that was sworn in in
2
March 2015. We compiled a data set that included the following information about our population:
1. full name
2. party a�liation while in Knesset
3. names of all Knesset committees on which (s)he served
4. number of terms served
5. whether (s)he served as a minister in the government, and if so, what portfolios (s)he held
6. whether (s)he was a member of the Cabinet
Contact information for our participants was obtained through a variety of channels, including
the Secretary of the Knesset, the Knesset Channel, the di↵erent parties’ leadership o�ces in the
Knesset and other government o�ces where former Knesset members are currently employed. Email
addresses for all current members of the Knesset were obtained through the Secretary of the Knesset.
To verify whether the contact information we obtained was correct, we either called or emailed all
the former Knesset members from the last twenty years and asked them if they would be interested
in taking a “10 minute electronic survey by a team of professors from leading American Universities.”
29.4% of the initial population was removed from the sampling frame at this stage, either because
the members were deceased, were too sick to participate, or because their contact information was
out of date and newer contact information could not be found. This process left us with a sample
of 288 potential candidates to take our survey. This pool included all 120 current members of the
Knesset along with 168 former members whose contact information was available.
On July 10, 2015, we executed a soft launch of our on-line survey. The survey included a
recruitment email, written in Hebrew (reproduced in Appendix §A.1), a link to our on-line survey,
and an individual six-digit password that was pre-assigned to each member. In the following days,
we emailed the invitation to all current and former members in our dataset. A few weeks later,
we sent a reminder email to those who had not responded to the survey. We sent a third round
of reminders a few weeks later. In between these rounds, we phoned former and current Knesset
members or their assistants to remind them to take the survey. In early August, the Director
of Academic A↵airs at the Knesset, together with the Secretary of the Knesset, sent an email to
all current Knesset members encouraging them to take the survey, repeating essentially the same
information we provided in the introductory email.
3
In addition to the on-line survey, we created identical hard-copy versions of our survey. In
mid-August we sent those who had not responded to our survey a reminder email and attached an
electronic copy of our survey that could be opened in Microsoft Word. Respondents were given the
option of either faxing or emailing the completed survey back to us. That same six-digit code was
the only identifying information on the paper copies of the survey, allowing us to track completion
among our sample population. Members of our research team also traveled to the Knesset on four
separate occasions to invite current members to participate.
The entire recruitment process was done in Hebrew. Two Hebrew-speaking research assistants
and one member of the research team who is a native Hebrew speaker corresponded with the members
of the Knesset or their assistants. Participants were informed that there would receive no financial
reward for taking the survey, but that we would be happy to share with them the results of the
survey. Moreover, participants were promised full anonymity: with the exception of the research
team, participants were assured that identifiable information would not be released or reported.
A.3 Participant verification protocol
We took several steps to increase our confidence that the current and former decision-makers partic-
ipated in the study rather than members of their sta↵. First, in the introductory email we explicitly
indicated that the questionnaire should be fielded by the decision-maker himself, and not by mem-
bers of his or her sta↵. We explained that the code we provided to access the on-line survey was
personal, and should not be shared with others. Importantly, we did not o↵er any material incentives
for filling out the survey, to dissuade decision-makers and assistants for taking the survey for those
material reasons.
Second, in the survey itself we asked the participants to enter their complete date of birth.
This allowed us to compare this information with the date of the decision-makers in o�cial Knesset
records. Third, for the 75% of our sample consisting of former Knesset members, a Hebrew-speaking
research assistant and one of the authors were both in touch with the decision-maker directly via
phone or email, and confirmed with him/her that they were the ones taking the survey. Anecdotally,
our research team found that many of our participants were quite eager for the opportunity to opine
on issues of foreign policy to an outside audience.
In the case of some current Knesset members, after receiving approval from their parliamentary
assistant, a Hebrew-speaking research assistant from our team or one of the authors gave the Knesset
4
members the survey directly and picked it up from them within a two-hour window. However, some
Knesset members wished to maintain their anonymity and thus were not in direct contacted with
the research team.
Finally, although we follow best practices, as is always the case with elite experiments, we should
note that decision-makers who wished to “cheat” and delegate their participation to others could
have probably found ways to do so. However, the combination of the types of questions asked in
the survey, the absence of material compensation for survey completion, our explicit request the
survey not be filled out by others, and the enthusiastic response to our survey from most of the
decision-makers who took the survey leave us confident that the vast majority of them participated
directly.
5
B Study instrumentation
B.1 Experimental protocol (translated to English)
There is much concern these days about the spread of conflict. We are going to describe a situation
the international community could face in the future. For scientific validity, the situation is general,
and is not about any specific countries in the news today. Some parts of the description may strike
you as important; other parts may seem unimportant. After describing the situation, we will ask
you to make predictions about what you think will happen.
Here is the situation:
• Two countries are currently involved in a public dispute over a contested territory. The dispute
has received considerable attention in both countries, because of the risk that disputes like these
can escalate to the use of force.
• Country A [is a democracy/is a dictatorship]. Country B [is a democracy/is a dictatorship].
• Both countries have moderately powerful militaries, with large armies, moderate sized-navies,
and well-trained air forces.
• Neither country is a close ally of the United States.
• Country A is slightly larger than Country B, though their economies are approximately the
same size.
• Country A has moderate levels of trade with the international community. Country B has
high levels of trade with the international community.
• The last time the two countries were involved in an international dispute, di↵erent leaders
were in power.
Given the information available, what is your best estimate about whether Country A will stand
firm in this dispute, ranging from 0% to 100%? [scaled from 0 (A will definitely not stand firm) to
100 (A will definitely stand firm)]
Now, we’d like to ask you a di↵erent question about the same situation. As a reminder, here is
the situation:
6
• Two countries are currently involved in a public dispute over a contested territory. The dispute
has received considerable attention in both countries, because of the risk that disputes like these
can escalate to the use of force.
• Country A [is a democracy/is a dictatorship/recently transition to democracy]. Country B [is
a democracy/is a dictatorship/recently transition to democracy
• Both countries have moderately powerful militaries, with large armies, moderate sized-navies,
and well-trained air forces.
• Neither country is a close ally of the United States.
• Country A is slightly larger than Country B, though their economies are approximately the
same size.
• Country A has moderate levels of trade with the international community. Country B has
high levels of trade with the international community.
• The last time the two countries were involved in an international dispute, di↵erent leaders
were in power.
If the dispute were to escalate and war were to break out, what is your best estimate about whether
Country A will win, ranging from 0% to 100%? [scaled from 0 (A will definitely not win) to 100 (A
will definitely win)]
7
B.2 Individual di↵erence measures
As discussed in the main text, both our Knesset and Israeli public participants completed question-
naires measuring military assertiveness, political ideology, stance on to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and
international trust.1 Military assertiveness (Herrmann, Tetlock and Visser, 1999) classifies individ-
uals along a single “hawk-dove” dimension and has long been considered a key dimension of foreign
policy beliefs. Recent work has also established its continued relevance, as military assertiveness
remains as related to the decision to use force, even among a sample of U.S. leaders, as it was during
the Cold War (Herrmann and Keller, 2004; Herrmann, Tetlock and Diascro, 2001; Kertzer and Brut-
ger, 2016). This construct is equally predictive of foreign policy preferences in non-U.S. samples (see,
e.g., Hurwitz, Pe✏ey and Seligson 1993, Bjereld and Ekengren 1999 and Reifler, Scotto and Clarke
2011). Our political ideology item asks subjects to classify themselves along a single dimensions
from “left” to “right” in politics, while a separate measure asks subjects to do the same with respect
to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Our international trust measure is adapted from work by Brewer et al.
(2004), which finds that generalized trust of other countries in the international system helps to
structure beliefs about the foreign policy arena. The US sample includes these same items, apart
from the Arab-Israeli conflict measure; the Korean and UK samples include the political ideology
measure, but not the military assertiveness, international trust, or Arab-Israeli conflict measures.
B.2.1 Military assertiveness
1. The best way to ensure peace is through military strength
2. The use of force generally makes problems worse
3. Rather than simply reacting to our enemies, it’s better for us to strike first.
All scaled from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). Items 1 and 3 reverse-coded such that
higher scores indicated higher level of military assertiveness.
B.2.2 International trust
1. Some people say that Israel can trust other nations, while others think that Israel can’t be
too careful in dealing with other nations. Where would you place yourself on this scale from
1 (Israel can count on other countries) to 7 (Israel cannot count on other countries)?
1Beliefs related to international trust were assessed only in Public I and the Knesset sample.
8
Reverse-scored such that higher scores indicate more higher levels of trust.
B.2.3 Right-wing ideology
1. There is much talk of “left” and “right” in politics. How would you rate yourself on a left-right
scale, from 1 (right) to 7 (left)?
Reverse-scored such that higher scores indicate more right-wing ideology.
B.2.4 Arab-Israeli conflict
1. How would you rate yourself on a scale from “left” to “right” with respect to the Israeli-Arab
conflict where 1 one is on the far right and 7 is on the far left?
Reverse-scored such that higher scores indicate more right-wing ideology.
9
B.3 Mechanism questions
The following mechanism questions were presented following the administering of the resolve and
military e↵ectiveness outcome questions. The questions were presented in a mixed factorial design,
which included both between- and within-subject manipulations. First, the mechanism questions
were presented in three blocks: one consisting of general beliefs about Country A, one soliciting
beliefs about the consequences if Country A were to win the crisis/war, and one soliciting beliefs
about the consequences if Country A were to lose the crisis/war. The order of the win/lose blocks
was randomly assigned, to avoid potential downstream e↵ects. Moreover, participants were either
given the win/lose blocks in reference to the crisis scenario, or the war scenario. Asking questions
about both types of scenarios as a between-subject factor allows us to reduce the length of the
mechanism instrumentation, while including mechanism questions about both positive and negative
outcomes allows us to construct within-subject measures of the e↵ect of losing on leader-level costs
of war, for each participant.
1. What proportion of the citizens do you think believes force should only be used as a last resort?
(1) 0-20% (2) 20-40% (3) 40-60% (4) 60-80% (5) 80-100%
2. What proportion of the national decision-makers do you think believes force should only be
used as a last resort?
(1) 0-20% (2) 20-40% (3) 40-60% (4) 60-80% (5) 80-100%
3. How sensitive do you think its citizens would be to casualties?
(1) Very sensitive (2) sensitive (3) somewhat sensitive (4) not very sensitive
4. How sensitive do you think its citizens would be to the financial costs (e.g., increased taxes)
of fighting?
(1) Very sensitive (2) sensitive (3) somewhat sensitive (4) not very sensitive
5. If Country A initiated the dispute, how likely do you think it is that it will prevail in the
dispute?
(1) Very unlikely (2) unlikely (3) neither unlikely nor likely (4) likely (5) very likely
10
6. If the leader of Country A makes a public threat, how likely do you think it is that they’Aoll
follow through?
(1) Very unlikely (2) unlikely (3) neither unlikely nor likely (4) likely (5) very likely
7. How likely do you think it is that other countries would come to Country A’s defense?
(1) Very unlikely (2) unlikely (3) neither unlikely nor likely (4) likely (5) very likely
8. How well-trained do you think the soldiers of Country A are?
(1) Very well trained (2) somewhat well trained (3)neither well trained nor poorly trained
(4) somewhat poorly trained (5) very poorly trained
9. How strong do you think the morale of the soldiers is in Country A?
(1) Very strong (2) somewhat strong (3) neither strong nor weak (4) somewhat weak (5)
very weak
[Thinking back to the original crisis, if Country A were to back down. . . ][If Country A were
to lose the war. . . ]
10. What e↵ect do you think it would have on public support for the government?
(1) Significantly increase (2) somewhat increase (3) not a↵ect (4) somewhat decrease (5)
significantly decrease
11. What e↵ect do you think it would have on the likelihood of the government remaining in o�ce?
(1) Significantly increase (2) somewhat increase (3) not a↵ect (4) somewhat decrease (5)
significantly decrease
12. What do you think is likely to happen to the leader?
(1) Remain in power (2) voted out of power (3) removed by a coup (4) exiled (5) death
[Thinking back to the original crisis, if Country A were to win. . . ][If Country A were to win
the war. . . ]
13. What e↵ect do you think it would have on public support for the government?
11
(1) Significantly increase (2) somewhat increase (3) not a↵ect (4) somewhat decrease (5)
significantly decrease
14. What e↵ect do you think it would have on the likelihood of the government remaining in o�ce?
(1) Significantly increase (2) somewhat increase (3) not a↵ect (4) somewhat decrease (5)
significantly decrease
12
C Supplementary analysis
C.1 Representativeness and survey non-response
There are two ways of thinking about the representativeness of our elite sample. The first asks how
our participants compare to the complete population of individuals who served in the Knesset from
1996 to the present. The second asks how our participants compare to our sampling frame, a di↵erent
group than the complete population because it does not include members who had passed away,
were too sick to participate, or for whom we were unable to acquire up to date contact information.
Thus, whereas the first quantity explores whether our participants look like the universe of Knesset
members in this time period, the second explores survey non-response. We explore both questions
in Table 1 below, which presents a set of linear probability models comparing our participants to the
universe of Knesset members from 1996-2015 (models 1-2) and to only those Knesset members who
had been sent the survey (models 3-4). The results show that unsurprisingly, current members of
the Knesset were less likely to participate in the survey than former members, but that interestingly,
our participants are not significantly less “elite”, as measured by the proportion of respondents with
experience as deputy ministers, or as cabinet members or higher. If anything, our sample is slightly
more experienced than the universe of decision-makers, though the number of terms in o�ce did not
significantly predict survey response.
Israeli legislative politics features a number of characteristics that makes calculating an sum-
mary partisan representativeness score somewhat complex, including a high degree of fragmentation,
parties frequently splintering and forming, frequent party switching, and the presence of Arab and
religious parties that cannot be cleanly positioned on unidimensional partisan space. As a result,
after coding all parties in the Knesset from 1996-2015 as being either left, center, right, Arab, re-
ligious, or none of the above, we look at partisan representativeness in two di↵erent ways. First,
we focus on the representation of MKs from Arab parties (e.g. Hadash, Ra’am, Ta’al, Balad, the
Joint Arab list, etc.), and religious parties (e.g. Shas, United Torah, Tkuma, Jewish Home, etc.),
which are orthogonal to the left-right spectrum and thus are separated from the main analyses. We
find that although both Arab and religious MKs are included in the sample, they are both slightly
underrepresented: MKs from Arab parties make up approximately 7% of the population of MKs
in this time range, but only 3% of the sample; MKs from religious parties make up approximately
13
Table 1: Gauging the representativeness of the sample
Compared to...All Knesset members Sampling frame
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Current member �0.043 �0.049 �0.210⇤⇤⇤ �0.184⇤⇤⇤
(0.045) (0.057) (0.054) (0.065)Highest level of experience:. . . Deputy minister 0.017 0.044 0.035 0.079
(0.054) (0.071) (0.072) (0.088). . . Cabinet member or higher �0.044 �0.098 �0.075 �0.096
(0.076) (0.098) (0.093) (0.114)Male 0.025 0.081 0.072 0.097
(0.053) (0.063) (0.067) (0.076)Terms 0.011 0.021 0.008 0.013
(0.012) (0.016) (0.015) (0.018)Left-right party membership �0.070⇤⇤ �0.063
(0.030) (0.038)Constant 0.177⇤⇤⇤ 0.312⇤⇤⇤ 0.320⇤⇤⇤ 0.436⇤⇤⇤
(0.054) (0.087) (0.070) (0.108)N 415 295 288 225R2 0.007 0.043 0.063 0.080⇤⇤p < .05; ⇤⇤⇤p < .01
20% of the population of MKs in this time frame, but only 7% of the sample.2 Second, we take the
members who were exclusively associated with parties on the main ideological spectrum (left, center,
and right), and calculate a left-right ideology score averaging across their terms in o�ce within the
sampling period, such that the lowest score (1) is assigned to an MK who consistently represented
a left-wing party, and the highest score (3) is assigned to an MK who consistently represented a
right-wing one. So, for example, an MK that served two terms in a left-wing party and a third
term in a centrist party would be coded as being slightly more conservative (1.33) than an MK that
served all of their terms in a left-wing party (1), and much less conservative than MK who served
their terms in right-wing parties (3). Models 2 and 4 in Table 1 show that our sample is slightly
more left-wing than the population of MKs in this time period as a whole, but interestingly, that
this skew is not due to non-response bias, in that left-leaning MKs were not significantly more likely
2Given the presence of party switching, we code a�liation for Arab and religious parties here using a simple binarydecision rule, in which an MK is classified as having a religious or Arab a�liation if they represented a religious orArab party at any point in time during the time period under investigation. Thus, an MK who served a term asa member of a religious party, but then switched to a non-religious party in a subsequent term would retain theirreligious classification for the purpose of this analysis, and would be excluded from the left-right ideology analysisdiscussed below.
14
to participate in the survey than right-leaning ones. The partisan di↵erence thus appears to stem
from the probability of entering the sampling frame rather than the probability of response.3
3Supplementary analyses suggest that the average left-right ideology amongst deceased MKs is more conservative(2.4) than living MKs (2.0), potentially explaining some of this e↵ect.
15
C.2 Knesset results table
Table 2: Regression model: Knesset sample
Resolve Military E↵ectiveness
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Democracy �5.886 �6.971 14.279⇤⇤⇤ 14.128⇤⇤⇤
(4.324) (4.378) (3.145) (2.969)Male 2.228 6.960
(6.565) (4.404)Military assertiveness �0.107 25.794
(19.128) (12.990)International trust �14.226 8.190
(9.559) (6.423)Combat experience �7.430 �0.590
(4.720) (3.181)L-R ideology 0.178 �31.778⇤⇤
(19.735) (13.274)Hawk (Arab/Israeli conflict) �4.950 18.234
(21.214) (14.435)Constant 59.136⇤⇤⇤ 70.048⇤⇤⇤ 44.302⇤⇤⇤ 27.360⇤⇤⇤
(3.057) (10.820) (2.224) (7.310)N 88 82 86 80R2 0.021 0.096 0.197 0.312⇤⇤p < .05; ⇤⇤⇤p < .01
16
C.3 Israeli public samples
The first study of the Israeli public (Israel I ) was piloted on September 30, 2015 and fielded from
October 6-9, 2015. The second study of the Israeli public (Israel II ) was piloted on January 17,
2016 and fielded from January 18-25, 2016. Descriptive statistics for each of these samples can be
found in Table 3. Descriptive statistics for the Korean, and UK, and US samples are presented in
the text.
Table 4 compares our three Israeli samples along several dimensions, all scaled from 0 to 1 for
ease of interpretability. First, we note that current and former Knesset members do not di↵er very
much on observed covariates; the only statistically significant di↵erence between the two subsamples
is that current leaders are on average 12 years younger than former leaders. The di↵erences along
the ideational dimensions are all small, and none of them are statistically significant. Unsurpris-
ingly, our leader sample averages about 20 years older than our respondents from the Israeli public,
and is generally less conservative, less hardline on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and more trusting of
international institutions than the public at large.
Along the ideational dimensions that we measured, Israeli leaders are notably less conservative,
less hawkish with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict and more trusting of international institutions
than the general public. For example, with respect to general ideology, Knesset members averaged a
score of 0.45, a score that places them nearly an entire standard deviation less conservative than the
mean score in the Israeli public samples. With respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, our leaders were
an entire standard deviation below the mean for the public samples. They also scored higher on
international trust, and lower on military assertiveness, though those di↵erences were not significant.
17
Table 3: Israeli Public Samples
Israel I Israel II
Male 53% 52%Education:
No High School degree 2% 2%High School degree 33% 26%
Some college 23% 22%College degree 27% 31%Masters degree 14% 17%Doctoral degree 2% 2%
Military Experience:Did not serve 22% 20%
Served, no active combat 50% 49%Combat experience 28% 31%
Location:Jerusalem 10% 10%Tel Aviv 12% 15%
Central Zone 18% 18%Haifa 15% 14%
Northern Region 11% 13%Southern Region 12% 9%
Lowland 10% 11%Sharon Area 8% 9%
Yehuda and Shomron 3% 2%Religiosity:
Secular 60% 54%Traditional 19% 30%Religious 15% 14%Orthodox 5% 3%
Birth Country:Israel 81% 81%
Former USSR 10% 11%Other 9% 9%
Mean (SD) Mean (SD)Age 41.8 (14.6) 41.8 (14.8)Military Assertiveness 0.58 (0.19) 0.56 (0.20)Right Wing Ideology 0.61 (0.25) 0.59 (0.24)Hawkishness (Arab-Israeli conflict) 0.63 (0.25 ) 0.62 (0.25 )International Trust 0.32 (0.27) —
18
Elite–PublicKnesset Israeli Public Gap
Current Former Overall I II I IIAge 52.2 64.4 61.4 41.8 41.8 19.6 19.5Military Assertiveness 0.61 0.61 0.61 0.58 0.56 0.03 0.05Right Wing Ideology 0.47 0.44 0.45 0.61 0.59 –0.16 –0.14Hawkishness (Arab/Israeli) 0.44 0.37 0.39 0.63 0.62 –0.24 –0.23International Trust 0.37 0.41 0.40 0.32 — 0.08 —
Table 4: Elite-Mass Comparison: Statistically significant di↵erences in means between public sampleand leader (overall) sample depicted in bold; p-values calculated via Wilcoxon rank-sum tests.
19
C.4 Israeli public results table
20
Tab
le5:
Regressionmod
els:
Israelipublicsamples
Resolve
Militarye↵
ectiveness
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Dem
ocracy
�4.591⇤
⇤⇤�4.752⇤
⇤⇤�1.675
�1.857
4.964⇤
⇤⇤4.984⇤
⇤⇤8.227⇤
⇤⇤7.948⇤
⇤⇤
(1.232)
(1.237)
(1.273)
(1.281)
(0.985)
(0.986)
(1.114)
(1.118)
Male
�2.174
�3.176⇤
⇤�1.366
�1.947
(1.405)
(1.449)
(1.119)
(1.265)
Age
0.03
50.028
0.071
0.086⇤
⇤
(0.047)
(0.047)
(0.037)
(0.041)
Education
�3.825
0.258
�2.128
�6.630⇤
⇤⇤
(2.760)
(2.877)
(2.198)
(2.512)
Political
know
ledge
5.028
6.370
�2.491
1.040
(3.635)
(3.540)
(2.896)
(3.088)
Com
bat
0.717
�1.339
�0.980
�0.679
(1.509)
(1.530)
(1.202)
(1.335)
Militaryassertiveness
3.803
0.781
9.819⇤
⇤⇤7.002⇤
⇤
(4.051)
(4.048)
(3.227)
(3.532)
International
trust
�0.780
0.034
(2.474)
(1.970)
Ideology
5.323
2.523
1.694
6.681
(4.452)
(4.781)
(3.546)
(4.171)
Haw
k(A
rab-Israeli)
�1.474
2.239
�1.630
�3.282
(4.334)
(4.552)
(3.452)
(3.977)
Bornin
Israel
0.118
3.355⇤
⇤�0.239
�0.029
(1.631)
(1.682)
(1.299)
(1.467)
Con
stan
t57.864
⇤⇤⇤
50.825
⇤⇤⇤
59.913
⇤⇤⇤
49.681
⇤⇤⇤
48.523
⇤⇤⇤
43.914
⇤⇤⇤
50.062
⇤⇤⇤
44.474
⇤⇤⇤
(0.876)
(4.701)
(0.897)
(4.379)
(0.701)
(3.745)
(0.784)
(3.825)
N1,100
1,089
1,111
1,102
1,100
1,089
1,110
1,101
R2
0.012
0.023
0.002
0.016
0.023
0.042
0.047
0.069
Sam
ple
#I
III
III
III
II⇤⇤p<
.05;
⇤⇤⇤ p
<.01
21
C.5 Heterogeneous e↵ects in the Israeli sample
Our main approach in the paper to test whether the results generalize outside of the Israeli context
is to field the study in a range of other democratic countries (the United States, South Korea, and
the United Kingdom), where we find broadly similar results. Nonetheless, we can also invesitgate
the question of generalizability from a di↵erent angle, following best practices suggested by many
comparativists and qualitative IR scholars (e.g. George and Bennett, 2005), by exploring within-
case variation: though Israel may di↵er from other countries in important ways, we can exploit
within-country variation along those dimensions to provide further insight into our findings’ scope
conditions.
In the case of Israel, three features in particular are worth noting. First, it may the be case
that Israeli citizens’ unique familiarity with the military (nearly all non-Orthodox Jewish Israelis
serve at some point in their lives) a↵ects their attitudes towards the use of force. Consequently,
our sample of public citizens may be more knowledgeable and more experienced with “use of force”
decisions than the typical democratic citizen in another country. Despite compulsory service in the
IDF, however, there is variation in who actually experiences combat. We exploit this variation to
estimate whether there are heterogenous treatment e↵ects with respect to combat experience.Yet
participants’ combat experience does not appear to a↵ect their beliefs about the e↵ects of regime
type on resolve or military e↵ectiveness.4 This suggests that our results are not particular to Israel
by virtue of that country’s unique and intimate familiarity with conflict.
Two additional potentially unique features of Israel present themselves as dimensions on which
our subjects might di↵er systematically from citizens in other democracies: knowledge of interna-
tional politics and the high proportion of citizens who immigrated from former communist countries.
As with military experience, however, the dimensions are ones in which we can use the variation
within our samples to address potential concerns about generalizability. As in our analysis of com-
bat experience above, we find no significant interaction e↵ect between political knowledge and our
treatment (for resolve: p < 0.884; for military e↵ectiveness: p < 0.901). A related concern is that
the waves of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union — nearly a million Jews immigrated to
Israel from the former Soviet states between 1989-2006 — may a↵ect our results if citizens socialized
4More formally, we pool the two Israeli public surveys and estimate a series of regression models, regressing eachdependent variable (either resolve or military e↵ectiveness) on the democracy treatment, combat experience, theinteraction between the two, and a set of demographic controls. The interactions lack statistical significance (onresolve: p < 0.348; on military e↵ectiveness: p < 0.361).
22
in non-democratic states display a distinctive set of political attitudes (Pop-Eleches and Tucker,
Forthcoming). Here again we fail to find heterogenous treatment e↵ects (p < 0.399 for resolve;
p < 0.435 for military e↵ectiveness), suggesting that this aspect of the composition of Israeli society
is not a strict boundary condition for our findings.
Related to issue of generalizability are the potential concerns about confounding. For example,
the repeated conflicts in which Israel has been involved might cause Israelis to see their adversaries
as more resolved than participants in other countries, a particular danger if those subjects also
interpreted the scenario as being about Israel. To preempt this, we designed our studies to invoke
two hypothetical countries with features that are inconsistent with those of Israel: only half the
participants see a country described as a democracy, and that democracy is described as not being
a close ally of the United States. Yet even if participants did have Israel in mind, it is unlikely
to change the interpretation of our findings. For example, if Israelis simply see every adversary as
more resolved (than a Canadian respondent would, for example), this might explain why we see a
negative e↵ect of democracy on beliefs about resolve in crises, but would not explain the positive
e↵ect of democracy on beliefs about resolve in military battles.
Finally, Israeli participants might be more likely to interpret the scenario in the context of the
Middle East, while participants in other regions might be more likely to rely on other analogies or
mental models instead (Khong, 1992). To test whether our findings are contingent on the mental
models participants employ, we presented participants with a list of potential regions (Central Asia,
North America, Western Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East/North Africa), and asked them to
rank the regions in terms of their likelihood of experiencing the scenario described in the experiment.
In this manner, we can assess whether participants who imagine the scenario taking place in di↵erent
parts of the world understand the relationship between democracies, resolve, and war di↵erently. We
employ Yilmaz, Aslam and Robertson’s (2008) ⌧ap statistic, a weighted rank similarity measure,5 to
test whether participants who imagine the scenario taking place in di↵erent regions make di↵erent
predictions about the relationship between democracy, crises, and war. Reassuringly, we find no
evidence of heterogeneous treatment e↵ects across rank similarity scores, indicating that the regional
context participants have in mind does not a↵ect the conclusions we reach.6
5We assigned each participant a rank similarity score in reference to a ranking consisting of the average positionof each region. Unlike unweighted rank similarity statistics like Kendall’s ⌧b, weighted rank similarity measures,commonly used in information science, assign di↵erential penalties based on the position in the ranking at which theyoccur. We also replicate our analyses using Kendall’s ⌧b, and find the results hold.
6As before, we estimate a set of regression models, regressing each dependent variable on the democracy treatment,
23
the regional similarity measure, the interaction between the two, and a variety of demographic controls. The interactionlacks statistical significance across all four models (on resolve: p < 0.972 for ⌧ap, p < 0.580 for ⌧b; on militarye↵ectiveness: p < 0.793 for ⌧ap, p < 0.450 for ⌧b).
24
C.6 Downsampling Israeli public results
Figure 2: Downsampled crisis results
In Crises...
-20 -10 0 10Effect of democracy
Density
SampleIsr Public I (Downsampled)
Isr Public II (Downsampled)
Knesset
The figure shows that the heavier tails in the distribution of treatment e↵ects in the Knesset results in the mainpaper is due to the relatively small sample size rather than peculiarities about the sample; when we downsample theresults from the two public samples, sampling N = 89 observations with replacement rather than N = 1000, we find
similar distributions as in the Knesset survey.
25
C.7 Comparison of e↵ect size magnitude with large-N work
The experimental results found fairly consistent patterns across all seven samples. One question
that remains concerns the substantive size of the e↵ects: how important is democracy in crises if
participants only see it as having at most a 6% e↵ect? How does this compare to the observed e↵ect
of democracy in crises as measured in large-N work?
To address this question, we use replication data that Downes and Sechser (2012) provide for
Schultz’s (2001) pathbreaking exploration of democratic performance in disputes. Table 6 presents
four sets of models taken from models 3 and 4 from table 5.5 in Schultz (2001, 146-147). The
data consist of bilateral militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) using version 2.1 of the MID data;
because of missingness, the analysis focuses on the years 1816-1984.7 The dependent variable is a
dichotomous variable indicating whether the MID was reciprocated. The first two columns of Table
6 include data from the two world wars, while the second two do not; each model is estimated using
either a logistic regression, or a linear probability model.
The centerpiece of the models is the first three rows, which indicate the regime type of the
initiator and target in each dispute. Schultz is interested in particular in the coe�cient estimate for
the democratic initiator variable, which is negative and significant across all four models, suggesting
that democracies fare better in crises because their targets “back down without a fight.” (p. 9). The
coe�cients in columns 2 and 4 are already on a probability scale, but to interpret the substantive
e↵ects for the logit model, we calculate the predicted probabilities, presented in Table 7, which
depicts predicted probabilities using models 1 and 3, for contiguous dyads, a non-democratic target
state, and a policy demand, for with all other covariates set to their mean values for each of the four
power configurations. The results suggest e↵ect sizes ranging from -6.3% to -8.5%. In this sense,
they are similar to the results from the linear probability models in columns 2 and 4, which depict
e↵ect sizes for democratic initiators facing non-democratic targets as ranging from -6.6% to -7.9%.
A direct comparison between Schultz (2001) and our experimental results is di�cult, for any
number of reasons: questions about the limitations of the MID data for testing these types of
questions (Downes and Sechser, 2012), questions about the limitations of observational data more
generally in causally identifying the e↵ects of democracy (Tomz and Weeks, 2013), di↵erences be-
tween the setup of our experimental scenario and the covariate profile in the MID data, and so on.
Despite these caveats, and the di↵erent conclusions we draw from our data, it is notable that the
7For more details about the sources of the variables in the model, see Schultz (2001); Downes and Sechser (2012).
26
Table 6: The probability of crisis reciprocation: Bilateral MIDs
(1) (2) (3) (4)World wars World wars World wars World warsincluded included excluded excluded
Democratic Initiator �0.314⇤ �0.066⇤ �0.374⇤ �0.079⇤
(0.181) (0.038) (0.191) (0.041)Democratic Target �0.003 �0.002 �0.051 �0.012
(0.159) (0.034) (0.169) (0.036)Both Democratic 0.364 0.077 0.489 0.102
(0.343) (0.073) (0.361) (0.077)Major Power Initiator-Major Power Target �0.171 �0.036 �0.314 �0.067
(0.285) (0.061) (0.306) (0.065)Major Power Initiator-Minor Power Target �0.254 �0.054 �0.242 �0.054
(0.201) (0.043) (0.210) (0.045)Minor Power Initiator-Major Power Target 0.218 0.045 0.232 0.051
(0.252) (0.054) (0.263) (0.057)Initiator’s share of capabilities 0.070 0.017 0.060 0.012
(0.240) (0.052) (0.247) (0.053)Contiguous 0.501⇤⇤⇤ 0.110⇤⇤⇤ 0.547⇤⇤⇤ 0.120⇤⇤⇤
(0.145) (0.031) (0.155) (0.033)Alliance portfolio similarity 0.143 0.033 0.167 0.039
(0.223) (0.048) (0.234) (0.050)Status quo evaluation of initiator �0.134 �0.026 �0.083 �0.016
(0.192) (0.041) (0.205) (0.043)Status quo evaluation of target �0.219 �0.048 �0.261 �0.057
(0.215) (0.046) (0.229) (0.049)Territory 0.288⇤ 0.069⇤ 0.273 0.063⇤
(0.165) (0.036) (0.174) (0.038)Government 0.327 0.074 0.236 0.053
(0.375) (0.080) (0.383) (0.082)Policy �1.142⇤⇤⇤ �0.259⇤⇤⇤ �1.215⇤⇤⇤ �0.279⇤⇤⇤
(0.149) (0.032) (0.158) (0.034)Other �0.649 �0.151 �0.608 �0.141
(0.569) (0.127) (0.588) (0.132)Constant 0.051 0.513⇤⇤⇤ 0.075 0.521⇤⇤⇤
(0.269) (0.058) (0.281) (0.061)N 1,305 1,305 1,153 1,153AIC 1,646.909 1,447.088Model type Logit OLS Logit OLSWorld war years dummies Yes Yes No No⇤p < .1; ⇤⇤p < .05; ⇤⇤⇤p < .01
27
Table 7: Predicted probabilities of crisis reciprocation
Initiator-Target Nondemocratic initiator Democratic initiator E↵ectWorld wars included
Major Power - Major Power 30.8% 24.6% -6.3%Major Power - Minor Power 31.7% 25.4% -6.4%Minor Power - Major Power 39.7% 32.5% -7.2%Minor Power - Major Power 39.1% 31.9% -7.2%World wars excluded
Major Power - Major Power 27.8% 20.9% -6.9%Major Power - Minor Power 32.2% 24.7% -7.6%Minor Power - Major Power 39.9% 31.4% -8.6%Minor Power - Major Power 39.3% 30.8% -8.5%
Predicted probabilities calculated using the coe�cient estimates from Table 6, columns 1 and 3. The predictionsshown are for a contiguous dyad, a nondemocratic target state, and a policy demand, with all other variables set to
their mean values within each power configuration.
e↵ect sizes we find for democracies in crises in our experiment are similar to those found in one of
the canonical large-N studies of this question. In this sense, our maximum e↵ect size of democracy
in crises of 6% is substantively meaningful in the context of other work that has also explored this
question.
28
C.8 Exploiting the two-stage nature of the experimental design
As noted in the main text, one of the innovations of our experimental design is that we study
respondents’ beliefs about democracies in both crises and war, which not only broadens the scope
of the investigation to democracies’ reputations, but also more closely connects our research design
to contemporary bargaining theories of war, which view crises and war as part of one continuous
process (Smith and Stam, 2004; Powell, 2004). This also enables us to explore questions in the
like the di↵erence-in-di↵erence between democracies vs dictatorships in crises vs wars: one of the
striking patterns we show in Figure 2 in the main text is that across all seven samples, respondents
believe democracies are at a significantly larger advantage in wars than in crises.
But to what extent do democratic advantages in war outweigh potential disadvantages in crises?
We can exploit the two-dimensional structure of our experiment to get at this question more directly.
The top panel in Figure 3 presents a series of mosaic plots. Here, for each of our seven samples, we
dichotomize each dependent variable at the 50% mark (dropping those respondents in each sample
who provided answers right at 50%, such that crisis observations are coded either as standing firm
or backing down, and war observations as either winning or losing). The x axis therefore presents
the proportion of respondents who thought the state in question was more likely to stand firm
versus back down in the crisis, while the y axis depicts the proportion of respondents who thought
the state in question was more likely to win versus lose in the war; in each sample, responses
in the democracy condition are presented in red, and responses in the dictatorship condition in
aquamarine. The mosaic plots show considerable variation across our samples in terms of the
proportion of respondents who believe democracies are at an advantage in both crises and wars (with
most respondents perceiving a democratic advantage in war across most samples, but more between-
sample variation in beliefs about democratic performance in crises). To more clearly illustrate
respondents’ beliefs, then, we conduct a simple bootstrapping exercise, in which, for each sample,
we:
• Create a simulated dataset by sampling from the actual data with replacement
• Using the simulated dataset, calculate the product of both dependent variables, expressed as
a percentage (e.g. if a respondent saw the country as having a 50% chance of standing firm
and a 60% chance of winning, the score would be 0.5 x 0.6=30%)
• Calculate the mean score for respondents in the democracy condition, and the mean score for
29
respondents in the dictatorship condition
• Subtract the mean score for respondents in the dictatorship condition from the mean score for
respondents in the democracy condition, to calculate the overall e↵ect of democracy
• Repeat B = 1500 times to derive the bootstrapped distribution of scores
We plot these scores in the density plots in the bottom panel of Figure 3. They show that for one
sample (USA), democracies’ perceived disadvantage in crises outweighs their perceived advantage
in war, another sample (Israel I), the two phases cancel each other out, and in the remaining five
samples, democracies’ advantage in war outweighs their perceived disadvantage in crises.
30
Figure
3:Exp
loitingthetw
o-stagestructure
oftheexperim
ent
Isra
el I
Isra
el II
Isra
el: K
ness
etR
epub
lic o
f Kor
eaU
nite
d K
ingd
om I
Uni
ted
Kin
gdom
IIUSA
Democracy Dictatorship
Back
Down
Stand
Firm
Back
Down
Stand
Firm
Back
Down
Stand
Firm
Back
Down
Stand
Firm
Back
Down
Stand
Firm
Back
Down
Stand
Firm
Back
Down
Stand
Firm
Lose
Win
Lose
Win
Crisis
War
Reg
ime
Type
Democracy
Dictatorship
-50
510
15O
vera
ll ef
fect
of d
emoc
racy
(Pr(
Sta
nd F
irm) *
Pr(
Win
))
Sample
Isra
el I
Isra
el II
Isra
el: K
ness
et
Rep
ublic
of K
orea
Uni
ted
Kin
gdom
I
Uni
ted
Kin
gdom
II
USA
Thetop
panel
presents
aseries
ofmosaic
plots,in
which
resp
onsesto
each
dep
enden
tva
riable
within
each
sample
hav
ebeen
dichotomized
at50%,to
dep
ictth
eproportionofea
chsample
whoperceives
thestate
inquestionasbeingmore
like
lyto
standfirm
vsback
dow
nin
acrisis
(onth
exaxis),
andwin
vslose
inwar(on
theyaxis).
Thebottom
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elpresents
thebootstrapped
distributionofth
eov
eralle↵
ectof
dem
ocracy,ca
lculatedasth
eproduct
ofth
elikelihoodth
atth
estate
inquestion
willstan
dfirm
inacrisis,an
dwin
inawar.It
show
sth
atin
general,dem
ocrac
ies’
adva
ntage
sin
war
areperceived
asou
tweigh
ingan
ydisad
vantage
sin
crises,althoughth
isva
ries
across
samples.
31
C.9 E↵ect of regime type treatment on mechanism questions
Figure 4: Dovish preferences
p < 0 p < 0 p < 0 p < 0
Dovish public Dovish leaders Casualty sensitivity Financial sensitivity
1
2
3
4
5
Density
Regime TypeDemocracy
Dictatorship
32
Figure 5: Selection e↵ects
p < 0
Pr(Victory | Initiate)
1
2
3
4
5
Density
Regime TypeDemocracy
Dictatorship
Figure 6: Domestic constraints: leader costs of war
Pr(Govt stays in office) Public support
p < 0.272
p < 0.068
p < 0.093
p < 0.202
-3
-2
-1
0
1
-3
-2
-1
0
1
Effect of losing crisis
Effect of losing w
ar
Density
Leader's fate
p < 0.021
p < 0
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
4
5
Effect of losing crisis
Effect of losing w
ar
Density
Regime TypeDemocracy
Dictatorship
33
Figure 7: Credibility
p < 0.001
Follow through on threat?
1
2
3
4
5
Density
Regime Type
Democracy
Dictatorship
Figure 8: Military conduct
p < 0 p < 0 p < 0
Allies to the defense Soldiers' training Soldiers' morale
1
2
3
4
5
Density
Regime TypeDemocracy
Dictatorship
34
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