Conflicting Accounts
Divisions at Home, Broken Promises Abroad? How Domestic Politics Shapes the United States' Nuclear Credibility
Helen Webley-Brown & Lauren Sukin
International Studies Quarterly, June 2026
Abstract:
How will the intensifying political challenges in the United States affect Washington's nuclear credibility? Although the implications of US domestic politics often extend past American borders, few studies examine how foreign publics assess the US political environment. In the nuclear security domain, where the United States must maintain challenging extended deterrence commitments, domestic political conditions have especially destabilizing potential. Drawing on a novel, cross-national survey experiment, we test how four defining characteristics of US policymaking -- political party, presidential ideology, polarization, and divided government -- affect foreign publics' evaluations of US nuclear credibility. We find little evidence that party stereotypes meaningfully inform such perceptions, but other political characteristics -- particularly polarization -- affect favorability toward the US government and decrease confidence in US deterrence. This could pose significant risks to the United States' international standing in the security domain, which could persist even when party control changes.
The Domestic Political Economy of War: Evidence from Russia
Alena Gorbuntsova, Gaurav Khanna & Sultan Mehmood
NBER Working Paper, April 2026
Abstract:
Wars are often framed as responses to external threats or shifts in the regional balance of power. Yet they can also serve domestic political ends. This paper studies how Russia's escalations against Ukraine reshaped support for the regime and redistributed the burdens of war across the population. Combining ethnic Russian shares with election and independent polling data, we exploit two sharp geopolitical shocks, the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 full-scale invasion, in a difference-in-differences event-study design. We find that provinces with larger ethnic Russian populations exhibit sharp increases in support for President Putin following both episodes. At the same time, battlefield casualties fall disproportionately on regions with lower ethnic Russian shares, and attitudes toward the US and EU deteriorate sharply. On the Ukrainian side, Russian attacks are concentrated in areas with higher ethnic Russian shares rather than in resource-rich provinces. Explanations based on material extraction, Soviet symbolism, or differential exposure to external threats do not account for these patterns. Instead, the evidence is more consistent with ethnic identity playing a central role in the domestic political economy of the war. Our conclusions remain similar in fraud-adjusted electoral outcomes, with alternative ethnicity measures, under bounded departures from parallel trends, and after accounting for several baseline regional differences.
Thankless Task: Alliance Defense Investments and U.S. Public Support for War
Brian Blankenship
International Studies Quarterly, June 2026
Abstract:
This article explores whether U.S. public support for using force to defend American allies is shaped by alliance burden-sharing, in the form of those allies' efforts to invest in their own defense. Using four survey experiments conducted on samples of the U.S. public, this article finds that improvements in allied military capabilities can decrease U.S. public support by reducing the perceived need for U.S. intervention. These findings have implications for understanding alliance bargaining and U.S. public support for war. The results point to conditions under which alliance bargaining is more difficult due to the inherent incredibility of assuring allies that they will not be abandoned if they concede. Moreover, they suggest that research showing higher U.S. public support for war when the costs are lower, and ease of victory is higher, overlook an important confounding factor.
Detection of sperm whale covert communications using deep learning
Andres Ruiz, Maria Grafov & Michele Maasberg
Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent advances in covert underwater acoustic communication have demonstrated the feasibility of embedding signals within marine mammal sounds, such as dolphin clicks and whale vocalizations. While most research focuses on developing concealment techniques, limited work addresses the detection of such covert embeddings. This study investigates the detection of covert messages hidden within authentic sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) vocalizations. Using audio from the Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database, covert messages were embedded using short-duration, high-frequency chirps masked by natural whale clicks and codas. The chirps corresponded to bits using Baudot code to represent characters. Acoustic features, including high-frequency band energy and spectral variance, were extracted as two-dimensional feature vectors. A Siamese neural network was trained on 690 paired feature samples to classify authentic versus embedded sperm whale audio. The model achieved an accuracy of 97.10% with an F1 score of 96.22%. The results highlight the vulnerabilities of marine acoustic environments and contribute to securing underwater communication environments from adversarial acoustic masking.
Testing Allies Through Conflict: Loyalty, Adverse Selection, and War
Jacque Gao & Evan Resnick
International Studies Quarterly, June 2026
Abstract:
This article introduces a formal model showing how a powerful state, the patron, can ascertain the loyalty of a weaker ally, the client, by inducing a conflict between the client and a shared opponent. If the patron enjoins the client to adopt a more confrontational policy toward the opponent while only moderately preparing to intervene militarily, it will be able to differentiate a loyal client from a disloyal one. A loyal client will proceed to credibly signal its fidelity to the patron by proposing a confrontational policy that will provoke a conflict with the opponent, while a disloyal client will refrain from adopting such a policy. Knowledge of the client's type enables the patron to subsequently dispense large-scale military and/or economic aid to a loyal client and eschew providing aid to a disloyal one, thereby reducing the cost of future abandonment by a disloyal client.
Leader Similarity and International Sanctions
Jerg Gutmann, Pascal Langer & Matthias Neuenkirch
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is well-established that political leaders matter for domestic outcomes, but statistical evidence for their relevance in international politics is comparatively scarce. We ask whether the personal relationship between political leaders can change the propensity for nonviolent conflict between nation-states in the form of sanctions. Panel probit models with data from 1970 to 2004 are estimated to evaluate whether more similar leaders are less likely to sanction each other. Our results indicate that higher leader similarity reduces the likelihood of sanction imposition. The effect is most pronounced for sanctions imposed through unilateral political decisions. The probability of such sanctions ranges from 2.3 percent at the highest observed leader similarity to 7.2 percent at the lowest. Leader similarity especially matters for sanctions aimed at democratic change or human rights, for non-trade sanctions, and when at least one autocracy is involved. Finally, leader similarity has become more important after the Cold War.
Does Public Diplomacy Sway Domestic Public Opinion? Presidential Travel Abroad and Approval at Home
Benjamin Goldsmith, Yusaku Horiuchi & Kelly Matush
International Studies Quarterly, June 2026
Abstract:
Political leaders travel abroad to attend bilateral and multilateral meetings, engage in public diplomacy, and send signals of commitment or deterrence. However, their incentive to use this foreign policy tool depends in part on how the domestic audience responds to it. We leverage a powerful dataset of daily surveys during the Obama administration to examine whether US presidential trips abroad change domestic public approval ratings. Specifically, we compare the approval of respondents interviewed just before or after each of Barack Obama's fifty-one diplomatic trips. We find a decrease in approval and an increase in disapproval. The magnitude of these effects is modest to large, but the measurable effect is short-lived, diminishing rapidly over time. We observe a similar pattern or no effect in monthly surveys available during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations. Our results suggest that, contrary to the expectation of some scholars and practitioners, on average, it is unlikely that presidents can leverage foreign travel for an immediate increase in a key indicator of their success-domestic public approval. We discuss the implications for theories of foreign policy and international signaling.
Unlocking the combat equation: Do attackers or defenders have an extra advantage?
Vesa Kuikka
Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, forthcoming
Abstract:
Closed-form combat equations, such as the Lanchester and Helmbold relations, have long been used to describe battle outcomes at an aggregate level, but they do not directly provide probabilities of victory or expected combat duration. Building on this tradition, this paper introduces a probabilistic combat equation that predicts both quantities within a symmetric modeling framework for attackers and defenders. The model is evaluated using historical combat data and an empirical probability formulation, with results expressed as functions of the fractional exchange ratio. A systematic comparison of attacker and defender perspectives reveals a statistically significant asymmetry in how the two views diverge from empirical probabilities, even though the underlying model contains no built-in attacker advantage. This divergence varies nonlinearly with the fractional exchange ratio and remains robust across alternative linear and quadratic specifications, including a localized analysis near unity exchange. Importantly, the implied attacker advantage does not necessarily indicate intrinsic operational superiority. Rather, it may reflect asymmetries in the historical record, including unbalanced classification of battle outcomes, differing interpretations of attacker and defender victories, and a concentration of observations in exchange ratio regimes favorable to attackers. The results highlight both the strengths and limitations of probabilistic combat models when applied to historical data.
Human Allele Frequency Distributions Contradict Current Narratives of Imminent Danger From Genetically Targeted Bioweapons
Subhayan Chattopadhyay et al.
Health Security, forthcoming
Abstract:
Warnings of pathogens manufactured to target a specific ethnic group, so-called genetic bioweapons, have recently received considerable media attention. Genetic bioweapons figure prominently in reports on potential future risks emerging from combining genetic research, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. They are also part of political narratives signaling imminent danger because of ongoing weapons development. However, little is known about the feasibility of genetically targeted weapons from the vantage point of natural genetic variation. To validate the fact base behind the narrative of genetic bioweapons, we analyzed the distribution across ethnic groups of 149 well-validated genetic variants with a role in modulating infection. We found only 3 variants that could be used as a basis for ethnic targeting with high specificity, all associated with indolent, treatable infections. In contrast, analysis of 136 variants modulating human response to pharmaceutical agents yielded 6 variants, all associated severe drug side effects in certain ethnicities, while others remained unaffected. We concluded that genetic weapons in the form of targeted pathogens have received unwarranted attention, while misuse of prescription drugs for ethnic targeting is a more imminent risk.
Elite Misperceptions in Foreign Policy
Joshua Kertzer et al.
British Journal of Political Science, April 2026
Abstract:
Many models of domestic politics in international relations presume that political elites correctly perceive public preferences, even as a growing body of research in political behavior calls this assumption into question. Leveraging seven paired surveys of 4,852 foreign policy elites and 13,687 members of the American public from 2004-24 on twenty-four different questions, we show elites systematically misperceive public opinion in foreign policy, misperceiving the public as more isolationist and inward-looking than it actually is. We replicate this finding with a paired experiment showing that elites effectively underestimate the public's responsiveness to cues from international organizations, and that elites with isolationist stereotypes underestimate public approval the most. These dynamics -- which operate predominantly through stereotyping, rather than projection -- have important implications for the study of political elites, public opinion about foreign policy, and efforts to test theoretical models of domestic politics in international relations using public opinion data alone.
A Seat at the Table: How Security Council Membership Shapes Public Opinion about the UN
Richard Clark, Christoph Mikulaschek & Julia Morse
University of California Working Paper, March 2026
Abstract:
In an era of rising anti-globalist sentiment, opposition to international organizations (IOs) often centers on concerns over inadequate control. How does countries' influence within IOs shape citizen support for these institutions? We argue that elevated institutional influence improves public opinion about the IO through preferences for policy impact and heightened international status. The static nature of IOs' rules complicates empirical tests; however, we overcome this by analyzing the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where member states' influence varies over time. Using difference-indifference analyses of repeated cross-sectional survey data (N>900,000), we examine shifts in public opinion about the UN when countries join the UNSC. We complement this with a case study of India, combining a survey experiment with media content analysis. These findings reveal how shifts in institutional influence can sway public opinion, suggesting that struggles for influence within IOs are not just battles among states, but also levers in winning hearts and minds.