Abstract
Forming a military coalition during an international crisis can improve a state’s chances of achieving its political goals. We argue that the involvement of a coalition, however, can have unintended adverse effects on crisis outcomes by complicating the bargaining process and extending the duration of crises. This argument suggests that crises involving coalitions should be significantly longer than crises without coalitions. However, other factors that affect crisis duration are also likely to influence coalition formation. Therefore, taking into account the endogeneity of the presence of a coalition is essential to testing our hypothesis. To deal with this inferential challenge, we develop a new statistical model that is an extension of instrumental variable estimation in survival analysis. Our analysis of 255 post–World War II interstate crises demonstrates that, even after accounting for the endogeneity of coalition formation, military coalitions tend to extend the duration of crises by approximately 284 days.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2019
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1086/704598
Related Content
Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the JOP Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jop).
Repository Citation
Chiba, Daina and Johnson, Jesse C., "Military Coalitions and Crisis Duration" (2019). Political Science Faculty Publications. 6.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/polsci_facpub/6
Notes/Citation Information
Published in The Journal of Politics, v. 81, no. 4.
© 2019 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
The copyright holder has granted the permission for posting the article here.
The corrigendum to this article is available at the end of the downloadable document.