Examining Whether Social Anxiety Influences Satisfaction in Romantic Relationships

Research investigating social anxiety and the impacts on romantic relationships remains scarce. An online questionnaire examining romantic relationship status, social anxiety and depression symptomology, relationship satisfaction, and several relationship processes was completed by 444 adults. Individuals with higher social anxiety were less likely to be in romantic relationships. For the 188 adults in our sample in current relationships, relationship satisfaction was not influenced by social anxiety when controlling for depression. Although it was proposed that self-disclosure, social support, trust, and conflict initiation might influence romantic relationship satisfaction, none of these mechanisms interacted with social anxiety to explain additional variance in relationship satisfaction. These findings indicate that depression symptomology may be a treatment target for socially anxious individuals wishing to improve romantic relationship satisfaction.

Regime Uncertainty and Interstate Conflict

Regime type is an important variable in international relations. Numerous scholars have theorized its effects on actors’ crisis behavior and outcomes. Despite regime type's importance, the literature has not focused on the role its uncertainty might play in interstate politics. This is in stark contrast to the scholarly attention given to uncertainty about other similarly important variables like actor capabilities, intentions, or fighting costs. In this paper, we aim to address this gap in the literature by providing a theory of regime uncertainty's effects on conflict and developing a novel measure of uncertainty about regime type in interstate relations to test our hypotheses. We find that regime uncertainty breeds caution rather than conflict: higher uncertainty about the opponent's regime type makes conflict initiation and escalation less likely in disputes, and dyads with more uncertainty are less likely to experience conflict onset.

Generals in the Cabinet: Military Participation in Government and International Conflict Initiation

How does the presence of military officers in national government affect a state's likelihood of international conflict? We know a great deal about how overall regime type affects international conflict, but there is substantial variation within regime types in the participation of military officers in the government. We know little about how this variation affects a state's conflict propensity. In this Research Note, I examine three competing arguments for the effect of military participation in government on conflict initiation: Military Aggression, Military Conservatism, and Civil–Military Competition. Military Aggression suggests that military involvement in government will tend to guide the state toward conflict, given a military predisposition to favor the use of force. In contrast, Military Conservatism argues that military officers in government will lead the state to less conflict, given their personal familiarity with its costs. Civil–Military Competition holds that when military officers and civilians share political power, a variety of pathologies in national security deliberation and decision-making emerge, increasing conflict propensity. I test these three propositions cross-nationally using data on the number and type of positions held by military officers in cabinets and state councils and international conflict and find the strongest support for Civil–Military Competition.

Bringing the boys back home: Campaign promises and US decision-making in Iraq and Vietnam

This article argues that electoral politics acts as an important constraint on presidential decision-making in war. Going beyond the existing literature’s focus on cases of conflict initiation, it outlines how electoral pressures push and pull presidents away from courses of action which may otherwise be deemed strategically optimal. Importantly, however, these electoral constraints will not just apply on the immediate eve of an election but will vary in strength across the electoral calendar. Together, this conceptual framework helps explain why presidential fulfilment of rhetorical pledges made on the previous campaign trail may be belated and often inconsistent. To probe the plausibility of these arguments, case studies of the closing stages of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are outlined, drawing on archival and elite interview material. These episodes demonstrate that electoral accountability can be a powerful factor affecting wartime decision-making, but its effect is non-linear, and not easily observed through a narrow focus on particular timeframes.

The conflict inititation and resolution rules in constitutional and municipal law

The subject. The article is devoted to analysis and classification of different constitutional and municipal legal rules that may cause and resolve the constitutional conflicts. The purpose of the article is to confirm or disprove hypothesis that there is a set of constitutional and municipal legal rules with common conflict initiation nature as well as with common conflict resolution nature. The methodology of the study includes general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, description) and legal interpretation of Russian Constitution and laws. The main results, scope of their application. There is a whole set of legal norms in constitutional and municipal law, that focus on the conflict component due to the conflict nature of the constitutional act itself as the basic law of the country. They need to be studied and classified due to the different content and legal nature of these rules. The author attempts to research the constitutional and municipal legal norms that may cause and resolve the constitutional conflicts, offers their classification on certain grounds, analyzes scientific researches on this topic. Constitutional and municipal legal rules that may cause and resolve the constitutional conflicts can be classified for two types depending on their content: rules generating constitutional conflicts and rules that establish methods and principles for resolving constitutional conflicts. Conclusion. The constitutional and legal rules that give rise to constitutional and legal conflicts include the norms of constitutional law that enshrine constitutional values that are in a state of real or imaginary competition. The norms that establish ways to resolve a constitutional and legal conflict include: 1) collision rules of constitutional and municipal law – rules determining which legal regulation should be applied to the relevant conflict legal relationship. They have a reference character and are applied only together with substantive legal norms that resolve the issue; 2) constitutional and municipal regulations governing the methods and principles for the resolution of constitutional conflicts.

Biding time versus timely retreat: Asymmetric dependence, issue salience, and conflict duration

Trade-conflict studies focus on whether and how economic interdependence suppresses interstate conflict initiation. Meanwhile, formal theories of war show that conflict initiation is inherently tied to its termination. In this article, I seek to bridge the two literature by utilizing a war of attrition model to formalize the relationship between economic dependence and conflict duration. I theorize that the strategic calculation ultimately comes down to a trade-off between biding one’s time and retreating in a timely manner. In the context of economic attrition, states weigh the relative costs of suffering an additional round of economic disruption against the potential benefits of winning the disputed good. As such, economic dependence can have both coercive and informational effects and these effects are contingent upon issue salience. When the issue salience is low, the coercive effect dominates; states are more likely to quit conflicts as they suffer proportionally larger economic costs. When the issue salience is high enough, the informational effect can kick in; states are less likely to quit conflicts with increasing economic costs. I test these implications on the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) and the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data, finding strong support for the informational effect and suggestive evidence for the coercive one.

The latent characteristics that structure autocratic rule

Research on autocratic regimes in comparative politics and international relations often uses categorical typologies of autocratic regimes to distinguish among different forms of autocracy. This paper introduces historical data on dozens of features of dictatorships to estimate latent dimensions of autocratic rule. We identify three time-varying dimensions of autocracy that correspond to ideal types proposed in the literature: party dominance, military rule, and personalism. We show that dimensions of autocratic rule are orthogonal to commonly-used measures of democracy–autocracy, and compare these dimensions to existing typologies of autocracies, showing that time-varying information on personalism is unique. We discuss a measurement model of personalism and illustrate the time-varying features of this measure in applied research on conflict initiation and regime collapse.

International reputation and alliance portfolios: How unreliability affects the structure and composition of alliance treaties

Why do states ever form military alliances with unreliable partners? States sign offensive and defensive military alliances to increase their fighting capabilities in the event of war and as a signal to deter potential aggressors from initiating a crisis. Yet, signing an alliance with an unreliable partner is at odds with both of these rationales. This should be particularly concerning for peace scholars and policymakers, since the uncertainty generated by unreliable partners may increase system-wide conflict. This article provides an answer to this puzzle by arguing that states continue to form alliances with unreliable partners because they can adopt rational portfolio-diversification strategies. Drawing on well-developed models from portfolio theory, we present evidence that states design their overall alliance portfolios to minimize the risks posed by allies with a reputation for being unreliable. Specifically, we show that unreliable allies are more likely to be pooled into multilateral alliances that dilute risk rather than bilateral alliances, and that states allied with unreliable partners form a greater number of alliances to hedge against the added risk of default. Together, our results demonstrate why unreliable partners may not lead to increased conflict initiation, while also providing a novel explanation for previously unexplained variation in the structure of alliance portfolios. The article contributes to the literatures on international reputation and the rational design of international institutions by demonstrating how international reputation matters in subtle and often overlooked ways.