General
Attributes of decision makers, roles of decision makers, structure of government, characteristics of society, bilateral relations, regional/global system
What are the six levels of analysis?
This is how we describe an international system where there is no authority above the nation-state that can enforce agreement between states.
What is anarchic?
The range of outcomes that both parties prefer to war.
What is the bargaining range?
The primary reason why democracies can more credibly signal resolve and intent in conflicts than autocracies.
What are higher audience costs?
This concept refers to how actors lack information about one another's resolve and/or capabilities
What is incomplete information?
This refers to actors adjusting their behavior to make at least one of the actors better off than the status quo (aka not doing anything).
What is cooperation?
What is a balance of power?
An alliance between professional military, legislators, and the industries that benefit from defense spending that may influence the bargaining range?
What is the military-industrial complex?
The empirical observation underlying the democratic peace hypothesis.
What is that mature democracies rarely, if ever, fight wars with one another?
The believability or trustworthiness of an actor's threats or commitments.
What is credibility?
This is the main difference between a nation and a state.
What is states must have a territory, bureaucracy, and monopoly on the legitimate use of force (among 2 other key characteristics), while nations only need to have a shared history and identity, often based on shared religious, ethnic, and/or linguistic identity
This term refers to a situation in which one country's gain is considered to be another country's loss, implying there will always be winners and losers.
What is a zero-sum game?
The outcome that would be achieved if a bargain is not reached and thus influences how players bargain
What is the reversion outcome?
A type of war that a leader may start in order to distract the public from other domestic issues and rally domestic support.
What is a diversionary war?
The tendency for voters to increase their support of leaders in response to crises and conflicts, which gives leaders a diversionary incentive.
What is the rally around the flag effect?
In game theory, the best strategy a player can play, regardless of what the other player does (hint: defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma).
What is a dominant strategy?
The realist idea that an increase in one state's security (e.g., increasing military strength) leads other states to fear for their own security, thus potentially escalating conflict and starting a war
What is the security dilemma?
This happens to the bargaining range when leaders consider the diversionary war incentive.
What is a decrease in the bargaining range?
Something credibility requires because cheap talk is pervasive.
What are costly signals? (an action or policy that inflicts nontrivial costs on the sender of the signal)
The dilemma whereby states want to choose strategies that maximize their potential gain while also minimizing their costs.
What is the risk-return trade-off?
The set of outcomes that are pareto optimal/pareto efficient, such that no player can be made better off without making another player worse off.
What is the pareto frontier?
According to liberalism, the two main ways that international institutions allow states to cooperate and achieve joint gains in positive-sum games.
What is reduce uncertainty and lower transaction costs?
These are the main differences between bargaining theory and realism.
What is their belief of the true cause of war and potential to avoid it?
Bargaining theory argues conflict is due to bargaining failure (due to information problems and commitment problems, so war can be avoided when these failures are avoided as war is inherently costly and inefficient. Realism thinks power imbalances and security dilemmas cause war and make it inevitable.
In addition to information problems, these are two other causes of war in the bargaining framework.
What are commitment problems (failure to credibly commit and signal resolve and capabilities) and issue indivisibility?
Two key reasons why democracies are more successful in bargaining and thus less likely to fight wars (think: democratic peace hypothesis).
What is the argument that democracies have (1) more mechanisms of accountability (due to more transparency) and (2) higher audience costs, allowing them to more credibly signal their intentions and overcome information problems that might otherwise cause bargaining to fail