IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/joupea/v32y1995i4p413-426.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Commitment to Military Intervention: The Democratic Government as Economic Investor

Author

Listed:
  • Donna J. Nincic

    (Hoover Institute, Stanford University)

  • Miroslav Nincic

    (Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis)

Abstract

Much of the work on US military intervention addresses the patterns it exhibits and the circumstances that lead to the decision to resort to force. This article deals with a somewhat different aspect of the issue: the structure of the incentives that determine the US government's commitment to persevere in the armed interventions it has chosen to undertake. Commitment is modeled in terms of the costs of the intervention and public support for the venture, and the model is based on an economic metaphor. The hypothesis is that the public responds to costs in the manner of consumers, making its support an inverse function of costs. By contrast, Government responds to costs in the fashion of an investor, viewing costs as an investment to be redeemed: up to a point, the higher the cost, the greater the commitment. The parameters of the model are statistically estimated for the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the point at which public and governmental support coincide is discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Donna J. Nincic & Miroslav Nincic, 1995. "Commitment to Military Intervention: The Democratic Government as Economic Investor," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 32(4), pages 413-426, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:joupea:v:32:y:1995:i:4:p:413-426
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/32/4/413.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:joupea:v:32:y:1995:i:4:p:413-426. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.prio.no/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.