Introducing the LEAD Dataset (original) (raw)

Introducing Archigos: A Dataset of Political Leaders

Journal of Peace Research, 2009

Scholars for a long time theorized about the role of political leaders, but empirical research has been limited by the lack of systematic data about individual leaders. Archigos is a new dataset with information on leaders in 188 countries from 1875 to 2004. We provide an overview of the main features of this data. Archigos specifically identifies the effective leaders of each independent state; it codes when and how leaders came into power, their age, and their gender, as well as their personal fate one year after they lost office. We illustrate the utility of the Archigos dataset by demonstrating how leader attributes predict other features of interest in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Crisis interactions differ depending on whether leaders face each other for the first time or have had prior interactions. Irregular leader changes can help identify political change in autocracies not apparent from data that consider only the democratic nature of institutions. Fi...

How Prior Military Experience Influences the Future Militarized Behavior of Leaders

Policy-makers and the electorate assume political executives' life experiences affect their policy choices once in office. Recent international relations work on leaders focuses almost entirely on how political institutions shape leaders' choices rather than on leaders' personal attributes and how they influence policy choices. This article focuses the analytic lens on leaders and their personal backgrounds. We theorize that the prior military background of a leader is an important life experience with direct relevance for how leaders evaluate the utility of using military force. We test several propositions employing a new data set, building on Archigos, that encompasses the life background characteristics of more than 2,500 heads of state from 1875 to 2004. The results show that the leaders most likely to initiate militarized disputes and wars are those with prior military service but no combat experience, as well as former rebels.

Presidential Leadership in the Americas since Independence

2016

What is presidential leadership and why have some presidents been considered “great” – or rather “transformational” – while others are not? What are the drivers which distinguish these presidents from the rest? Presidential Leadership in the Americas since Independence answers these questions through a systematic study of leadership across the Americas over 200 years, from independence to the present day. Having surveyed who the most cited presidents are in the Americas, Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel examine the experience of presidents from across the western hemisphere: the US, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. They study the relationship between these men and women’s actions within the constraints they faced during four political periods: independence, national consolidation during the nineteenth century, state-building from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries and neoliberalism since the 1970s-80s. The most “transformational” presidents are found to be those who are not only able to innovate and build new political consensuses at a time of crisis, but also consolidate them so that the reforms becoming lasting – and extending beyond an individual president’s own political (even biological) lifetime.

Methodological Diversity of Research on Leaders and International Conflict A Review

International Journal of Social Inquiry, 2020

Why leaders decide to go to war or when they decide to make peace? It can be one of the most common questions of classical thinkers and current scholars of international relations. The basic idea behind this question is to find out a solution to the war phenomenon. However, the other question is how we understand and explain the behaviors of leaders and their inner circles? Do rationality, strategic calculations or only cognitive variables sufficiently explain the violent behaviors? This research discusses how different methodologies can contribute to theorizing or understand the international conflict behaviors of leaders. In this context, on a qualitative basis, psychobiography, psychohistory, leadership trait analysis, integrative complexity method are explained along with the quantitative findings and theories of leaders and international conflict. The methodological diversity provides both deep insights about specific leaders’ war decisions and general theories that can contribute to the scientific study of international conflict. I argue that the field is open to any new methodology.

Leadership Changes and Civil War Agreements: Exploring Preliminary Links

Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 2016

The emergence of civil wars as the predominant type of conflict in the twenty-first century has prompted scholars to reformulate and revisit many of the questions treated in the interstate conflict literature. One of these questions concerns the impact of leadership changes on policy decisions within the realm of war and peace. Studies have suggested that in interstate disputes, the coming to power of new leaders in one or both of the disputing governments increases the prospects of war termination. We argue that within the context of intrastate disputes this relationship is more complex and multilayered due to factors that are characteristic of rebel groups and civil wars. We suggest that leader overturns in rebel groups are likely to lead, under certain conditions to more, rather than less, hardline conflict positions, at least in the short term, thus hindering possible negotiation processes. We test our hypothesis on a dataset of leadership changes and agreements ending civil war...

Leadership Trait Analysis in Foreign Policy.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH CULTURE SOCIETY, 2018

Leadership has for quite some time been perceived as a standout amongst the most essential factors affecting the achievement or discontent of different activities, going from military crusades, to hierarchical execution in business and administration, to the character and nature of country state foreign and domestic policies. In fact, it may be the most initial case of foreign policy analysis, Thucydides, amid his depiction of the Peloponnesian War amongst Athens and Sparta, highlighted exactly how on a very basic level vital the idea of individual pioneers and their styles were with his difference between the respectable Pericles (who carefully and logically composed a triumphant military methodology against Sparta) and his successor, the foolhardy, greedy globe-trotter Alcibiades (who relinquished Pericles' arrangement for military adventurism, in the long run driving Athens to destroy). Likewise, the thought that "individual leaders" can have any kind of effect was plainly represented in the compositions of Machiavelli, who in The Prince gave a manual to youthful rulers giving them, generally, a format to direct their individual activities to help guarantee their prosperity. Many have discussed the issue of at which level of analysis International relations ought to be considered keeping in mind the end goal to make inductions about foreign policy. A developing assortment of writing has underscored the identity of the individual policymaker as an essential variable that shapes foreign policy. The analysis of people in foreign policy analysis, nevertheless, adapts to the issue of summing up to a bigger universe of cases. Consequently, the point of this study is to come to testable, generalizable theories about the part of individuals in foreign policy making.

Civil war, interstate conflict, and tenure

Internal and international conflict have long been studied separately by different sub-fields in political science. Because of this unfortunate balkanization in the disci-pline, the relation between international and internal conflict remains understudied and poorly understood. To begin to remedy this situation, we examine the reciprocal relationships between internal war, international conflict and the tenure of leaders. We estimate a Bayesian three-way simultaneous hierarchical probit model and find strong evidence for the endogeneity of internal and international conflict, as well as for the endogeneity of the loss of office and both forms of conflict. Specifically, we find ev-idence of a positive feedback loop between internal and international conflict. Thus, as the risk of internal conflict increases, the risk of international conflict increases as well, and vice versa. We also find a positive feedback loop between the loss of office and internal conflict. We find evidence for...

The American State Administrators Project: A New 50‐State , 50‐Year Data Resource for Scholars

2021

Word Count=146) We present the American State Administrators Project (ASAP), a decades-long survey of state agency leaders. This remarkable dataset provides a 50-state chronological portrait of state administrative leaders, what they think, and what their agencies do. The dataset has traditionally been closely held but is now being shared with the broader scholarly community for the first time. We use this article to demonstrate the dataset’s potential to advance theory and knowledge of the modern administrative state through the example of principal-agent theory. As we show, the ASAP data allow us to reorient scholarship away from an empirical focus on how the president/governor, legislature, and other political principals try to influence the bureaucracy and toward a fuller appreciation of how bureaucrats formulate and administer public policy in a political environment. Such a refocusing is critical because it better recognizes the “agency” held by bureaucratic agents within mode...