Tough Enough: How Domestic Pressure to Use Force Affects Leaders Differently

Abstract

Abstract Existing literature assesses how prior military training affects the likelihood that leaders use military force in office. One gap in this literature is whether a leader's domestic environment also shapes individual propensity for use of force. I focus on militarism as a domestic factor that triggers variation in the conflict tendencies of leaders and operationalize militarism with a novel metric that compares military to welfare spending. The results show that militarism has an equal effect on the conflict propensity of leaders with civilian and military backgrounds. However, comparing military leaders with combat experience to those without combat experience, the results show that militarism produces the strongest effect on the conflict propensity of military-no-combat leaders, particularly in dictatorships. I posit that this outcome results from the pressure that these leaders confront to demonstrate toughness. I refer to the pressure to perform toughness as the “demonstration dynamic” and use this concept to explain the dramatic shift in Libyan foreign policy from King Idris to Muammar Qaddafi.