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Morrison, Bradford H.

University of British Columbia

Political leaders are responsible for making decisions that can lead to, or avert, international violence and war. The goal of this dissertation is to better understand how the cognitive complexity, specifically integrative complexity, of political leaders relates to processes by which international crises or confrontations become violent. It tests two hypotheses that point in opposing directions. The strategic judgment hypothesis posits that leaders with high integrative complexity are better able to solve coordination problems, and therefore to avoid violence. The demonstration-of-resolve hypothesis posits that leaders with low integrative complexity are better able to deter aggression, and therefore to avoid violence. This investigation tests these hypotheses by scoring Auto IC, an automated measure of integrative complexity, from a large corpus of texts from American, British, and Russian/Soviet heads of government from the 19th to 21st centuries. It uses regressions to test whether, controlling for multiple variables, the integrative complexity of leaders, prior to and during international confrontations and crises, is a predictor of variables relevant to the use of violence. These include the initiation of violence, degree of reliance on violence, level of hostility, number of fatalities suffered, and degree of success achieved at the resolution of the crisis. Chapter 6 does this using the data in the Militarized Interstate Confrontations (MIC) dataset. Chapter 7 does this using the data in the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) dataset. The results show that lower integrative complexity is associated with greater reliance on violence, hostility, and number of fatalities suffered, giving more support to the strategic judgment hypothesis. The initial results concerning initiation of violence and success achieved, while not statistically significant, suggested additional exploratory analyses, and modifications to the hypotheses. Theoretical and methodological contributions, limitations, and opportunities for future research are discussed.

Text

2024-08-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89065

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/