Branislav L Slantchev | University of California, San Diego (original) (raw)
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Papers by Branislav L Slantchev
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy
Comparative Political Studies
Authoritarian rulers tend to prevent political action, but sometimes allow it even if it leads to... more Authoritarian rulers tend to prevent political action, but sometimes allow it even if it leads to social conflict. The collapse of preventive repression is especially puzzling when rulers have reliable security forces capable of preventing protests. We develop a game-theoretic model that explores the incentives of authoritarians to repress or permit political contestation. We show that rulers with the capacity to fully repress political action create despotic regimes, but rulers with more moderate capacity might opt to allow open contestation. The status quo bias that favors regime supporters weakens their incentive to defend it. Rulers take the authoritarian wager by abandoning preventive repression and allowing opposition that threatens the status quo. The resulting risk gives incentives to the supporters to defend the regime, increasing the rulers’ chances of political survival. Even moderate changes in the structural capacity to repress might result in drastic policy reversals i...
International Organization
International cooperation can fail even though governments have no distributional conflicts or in... more International cooperation can fail even though governments have no distributional conflicts or incentives to free-ride, face no informational or credibility problems, and even agree on the policies that need to be implemented. Germany's refusal to cooperate with the Eurogroup members on the Greek bailout in 2010 until the crisis threatened to derail the entire Eurozone is puzzling in that regard especially because Germany is the main beneficiary of the euro. It was alleged at the time that this was a dilatory tactic designed to postpone a domestically unpopular decision until after crucial regional elections. But why would voters allow themselves to be misled like that? And why did Merkel agree to the bailout before the elections took place? To analyze how citizen preferences affect international cooperation, we develop a game-theoretic model of the four-way interaction between two governments that must coordinate a response to a crisis affecting both countries but who also must...
The traditional approach to explaining international cooperation treats it as a "within-group" pr... more The traditional approach to explaining international cooperation treats it as a "within-group" problem: all actors can benefit from it but have individual incentives to free-ride, which ensure that cooperation is underprovided. Collective action, however, often creates negative externalities and splits the population of actors into supporters and opponents, all of whom can invest resources toward their preferred outcome. Cooperation becomes a "between-groups" problem which is especially severe when actors have private information about their preferences. We study how actors can communicate these preferences through voting in an environment where they are not bound either by their own vote or the outcome of the collective vote. We identify two organizations with endogenous enforcement-coalitions of the willing and universal organizations, and find that the optimal voting rule can be ex post socially efficient. We also analyze a non-coercive organization where actors delegate execution to an agent. Even though this institution is costlier, it does not depend on the shadow of the future, and thus is implementable when the others are not.
Abstract will be provided by author.
American Journal of Political Science, 2011
Blainey (1988) argued that crises are more likely to end in war when two nations disagree about t... more Blainey (1988) argued that crises are more likely to end in war when two nations disagree about their relative power. Fey and Ramsay (2007) claim that this widely used "mutual optimism" explanation is theoretically incoherent. Their criticism neglects the need to specify a behavioral causal mechanism that links beliefs to the outbreak of war. We show how the rationalist game-theoretic work on the causes of war provides such mechanisms-the risk-return trade-off and costly signaling-and demonstrate that these models are immune to Fey and Ramsay's critiques. We also show that the class of models Fey and Ramsay propose make the substantively unwarranted assumption that an actor can unilaterally impose peace on an opponent who strictly prefers war. Their finding that war does not occur in equilibrium has nothing to do with mutual optimism. We conclude that the mutual optimism explanation can be grounded on firm rationalist foundations.
The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace, 2000
The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace, 2000
The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace, 2000
The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace, 2000
It is very easy to derive the formula. First, note that we can factor out c because it's a consta... more It is very easy to derive the formula. First, note that we can factor out c because it's a constant. Second, let z = 1 + δ + δ 2 + δ 3 +. .. denote the sum of the infinite series. Now, δz = δ + δ 2 + δ 3 + δ 4 +. . ., and therefore z − δz = 1. But this now means that z = 1/(1 − δ), yielding the formula. Note that we had to use the fact that δ ∈ (0, 1) to make this work.
We now begin the study of noncooperative game theory, the analysis of interdependent decision-mak... more We now begin the study of noncooperative game theory, the analysis of interdependent decision-making. Before we can analyze any situation, we need to describe it formally. That is, we must have the specification of the model that describes the situation, or game, that we are interested in. There are two important ways in which to do that, the extensive form and the strategic form, sometimes also called the normal form. Of these, the extensive form is richer and the strategic form is usually conceptualized as being derived from an extensive form. However, the strategic form is simpler and usually more convenient for analysis. In this lecture, we shall learn how to describe all kinds of situations that we might be interested in analyzing. We shall learn to distinguish between different classes of information, when information becomes available, and how. The goal is to get a solid grasp on model description before proceeding to the study of model solutions.
American Political Science Association
Armed forces strong enough to protect the state also pose a threat to the state. We develop a mod... more Armed forces strong enough to protect the state also pose a threat to the state. We develop a model that distills this “Guardianship Dilemma” to its barest essentials, and show that the seemingly ironclad logic underlying our existing understanding of civil-military relations is flawed. Militaries contemplating disloyalty must worry about both successfully overthrowing the government and defeating the state’s opponent. This twin challenge induces loyalty as the state faces increasingly strong external threats, and can be managed effectively by rulers using a number of policy levers. Disloyalty can still occur when political and military elites hold divergent beliefs about the threat environment facing the state, since militaries will sometimes have less incentive to remain loyal than the ruler suspects. Consequently, it is not the need to respond to external threats that raises the risk of disloyalty—as conventional wisdom suggests—but rather uncertainty about the severity of these ...
The traditional approach to explaining international cooperation treats it as a "within-grou... more The traditional approach to explaining international cooperation treats it as a "within-group" problem: all actors can benefit from it but have individual incentives to free-ride, which ensure that cooperation is underprovided. Collective action, however, of-ten creates negative externalities and splits the population of actors into supporters and opponents, all of whom can invest resources toward their preferred outcome. Cooperation becomes a "between-groups" problem which is especially severe when actors have private information about their preferences. We study how actors can communicate these prefer-ences through voting in an environment where they are not bound either by their own vote or the outcome of the collective vote. We identify two organizations with endogenous en-forcement — coalitions of the willing and universal organizations, and find that the optimal voting rule can be ex post socially efficient. We also analyze a non-coercive organization where...
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy
Comparative Political Studies
Authoritarian rulers tend to prevent political action, but sometimes allow it even if it leads to... more Authoritarian rulers tend to prevent political action, but sometimes allow it even if it leads to social conflict. The collapse of preventive repression is especially puzzling when rulers have reliable security forces capable of preventing protests. We develop a game-theoretic model that explores the incentives of authoritarians to repress or permit political contestation. We show that rulers with the capacity to fully repress political action create despotic regimes, but rulers with more moderate capacity might opt to allow open contestation. The status quo bias that favors regime supporters weakens their incentive to defend it. Rulers take the authoritarian wager by abandoning preventive repression and allowing opposition that threatens the status quo. The resulting risk gives incentives to the supporters to defend the regime, increasing the rulers’ chances of political survival. Even moderate changes in the structural capacity to repress might result in drastic policy reversals i...
International Organization
International cooperation can fail even though governments have no distributional conflicts or in... more International cooperation can fail even though governments have no distributional conflicts or incentives to free-ride, face no informational or credibility problems, and even agree on the policies that need to be implemented. Germany's refusal to cooperate with the Eurogroup members on the Greek bailout in 2010 until the crisis threatened to derail the entire Eurozone is puzzling in that regard especially because Germany is the main beneficiary of the euro. It was alleged at the time that this was a dilatory tactic designed to postpone a domestically unpopular decision until after crucial regional elections. But why would voters allow themselves to be misled like that? And why did Merkel agree to the bailout before the elections took place? To analyze how citizen preferences affect international cooperation, we develop a game-theoretic model of the four-way interaction between two governments that must coordinate a response to a crisis affecting both countries but who also must...
The traditional approach to explaining international cooperation treats it as a "within-group" pr... more The traditional approach to explaining international cooperation treats it as a "within-group" problem: all actors can benefit from it but have individual incentives to free-ride, which ensure that cooperation is underprovided. Collective action, however, often creates negative externalities and splits the population of actors into supporters and opponents, all of whom can invest resources toward their preferred outcome. Cooperation becomes a "between-groups" problem which is especially severe when actors have private information about their preferences. We study how actors can communicate these preferences through voting in an environment where they are not bound either by their own vote or the outcome of the collective vote. We identify two organizations with endogenous enforcement-coalitions of the willing and universal organizations, and find that the optimal voting rule can be ex post socially efficient. We also analyze a non-coercive organization where actors delegate execution to an agent. Even though this institution is costlier, it does not depend on the shadow of the future, and thus is implementable when the others are not.
Abstract will be provided by author.
American Journal of Political Science, 2011
Blainey (1988) argued that crises are more likely to end in war when two nations disagree about t... more Blainey (1988) argued that crises are more likely to end in war when two nations disagree about their relative power. Fey and Ramsay (2007) claim that this widely used "mutual optimism" explanation is theoretically incoherent. Their criticism neglects the need to specify a behavioral causal mechanism that links beliefs to the outbreak of war. We show how the rationalist game-theoretic work on the causes of war provides such mechanisms-the risk-return trade-off and costly signaling-and demonstrate that these models are immune to Fey and Ramsay's critiques. We also show that the class of models Fey and Ramsay propose make the substantively unwarranted assumption that an actor can unilaterally impose peace on an opponent who strictly prefers war. Their finding that war does not occur in equilibrium has nothing to do with mutual optimism. We conclude that the mutual optimism explanation can be grounded on firm rationalist foundations.
The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace, 2000
The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace, 2000
The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace, 2000
The Costs of Coercion and the Price of Peace, 2000
It is very easy to derive the formula. First, note that we can factor out c because it's a consta... more It is very easy to derive the formula. First, note that we can factor out c because it's a constant. Second, let z = 1 + δ + δ 2 + δ 3 +. .. denote the sum of the infinite series. Now, δz = δ + δ 2 + δ 3 + δ 4 +. . ., and therefore z − δz = 1. But this now means that z = 1/(1 − δ), yielding the formula. Note that we had to use the fact that δ ∈ (0, 1) to make this work.
We now begin the study of noncooperative game theory, the analysis of interdependent decision-mak... more We now begin the study of noncooperative game theory, the analysis of interdependent decision-making. Before we can analyze any situation, we need to describe it formally. That is, we must have the specification of the model that describes the situation, or game, that we are interested in. There are two important ways in which to do that, the extensive form and the strategic form, sometimes also called the normal form. Of these, the extensive form is richer and the strategic form is usually conceptualized as being derived from an extensive form. However, the strategic form is simpler and usually more convenient for analysis. In this lecture, we shall learn how to describe all kinds of situations that we might be interested in analyzing. We shall learn to distinguish between different classes of information, when information becomes available, and how. The goal is to get a solid grasp on model description before proceeding to the study of model solutions.
American Political Science Association
Armed forces strong enough to protect the state also pose a threat to the state. We develop a mod... more Armed forces strong enough to protect the state also pose a threat to the state. We develop a model that distills this “Guardianship Dilemma” to its barest essentials, and show that the seemingly ironclad logic underlying our existing understanding of civil-military relations is flawed. Militaries contemplating disloyalty must worry about both successfully overthrowing the government and defeating the state’s opponent. This twin challenge induces loyalty as the state faces increasingly strong external threats, and can be managed effectively by rulers using a number of policy levers. Disloyalty can still occur when political and military elites hold divergent beliefs about the threat environment facing the state, since militaries will sometimes have less incentive to remain loyal than the ruler suspects. Consequently, it is not the need to respond to external threats that raises the risk of disloyalty—as conventional wisdom suggests—but rather uncertainty about the severity of these ...
The traditional approach to explaining international cooperation treats it as a "within-grou... more The traditional approach to explaining international cooperation treats it as a "within-group" problem: all actors can benefit from it but have individual incentives to free-ride, which ensure that cooperation is underprovided. Collective action, however, of-ten creates negative externalities and splits the population of actors into supporters and opponents, all of whom can invest resources toward their preferred outcome. Cooperation becomes a "between-groups" problem which is especially severe when actors have private information about their preferences. We study how actors can communicate these prefer-ences through voting in an environment where they are not bound either by their own vote or the outcome of the collective vote. We identify two organizations with endogenous en-forcement — coalitions of the willing and universal organizations, and find that the optimal voting rule can be ex post socially efficient. We also analyze a non-coercive organization where...