The forthcoming article “Shifting power, interstate war, and domestic politics” by Scott Wolford and Yuji Masumura is summarized by the author(s) below.
National leaders are rarely punished for winning wars, yet that seems to be precisely what happened after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese war. Public dissastisfaction with the Treaty of Portsmouth boiled over into violence and the fall of the government, leaders’ remonstrations that they’d won a significant preventive victory not withstanding. Why?
We answer this question with a game-theoretic model in which shifting power undermines foreign states’ commitments to the status quo, yet domestic leaders can’t credibly communicate the true scale of averted shifts after preventive war. Publics prefer war only for large prospective power shifts, but preventive war renders the true size of averted shifts unobservable, incentivizing leaders to lie ex post to avoid political punishment. When publics are ex ante skeptical over shift size and war outcomes are middling, the probabilities of war and political punishment, as well as public skepticism over averted shifts and the chances of erroneous punishment, all increase in war outcomes. Public strategies of punishing military failures are particularly unsuccessful at discouraging undesirable preventive wars, yet the same conditions that encourage preventive war undermine its political benefits.
We use intra-elite debates in prominent Japanese newspapers before and after the war to show that (a) there was prewar skepticism over the true scale of the looming power shfit in Russia’s favor and (b) the government’s claims that matters would’ve been worse without war were honest yet couldn’t convince a skeptical domestic audience.
About the Author(s): Scott Wolford is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and Co-Director of the Correlates of War Project and Yuji Masumura is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research “Shifting power, interstate war, and domestic politics” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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