RESEARCH

Secret but Constrained: The Impact of Elite Opposition on Covert Operations (International Organization)

Recent international relations scholarship has argued that political elites constrain the use of military force by democracies. Despite the persuasiveness of this research, scholars have largely ignored the ability of elite dynamics to constrain the initiation of covert operations. This omission is consequential because scholars of U.S. foreign policy often assume that covert operations serve as a substitute for the overt use of force; secrecy allows leaders to limit information to congressional elites and thus weaken their oversight capabilities. Do elite political dynamics constrain the ability of presidents to act secretly or do they only affect the overt use of force? I argue that elite political constraints—particularly opposition from Congress—extend to the president’s ability to initiate covert operations. By examining the trade-off between U.S. military force and CIA initiated covert operations during the Cold War, I find the likelihood that covert operations are initiated decreases significantly during periods of divided government and that there is no distinguishable trade-off between covert operations and overt military force. Furthermore, the results suggest that constraints on covert operations became more uniform across unified and divided government following congressional oversight reforms in 1975 that reduced the information asymmetry between the majority and minority party. Finally, this paper has important ramifications for the nascent literature on back-door bargaining and covert signalling. Because democratic leaders frequently face domestic political costs even when acting in secret, covert operations should allow leaders to credibly convey their resolve.

Manuscript and Supplementary Materials

Sources of Change in International Politics

Despite the persistence of change, academic work frequently presupposes that the effects of policies remain constant. Absent from most debates is the awareness that causal relationships vary in response to changes in context and the actors themselves. The possibility that causal relationships change over time poses a vexing problem for policymakers: policies that initially appear to be ineffective may be prematurely discarded while policies that have an immediate effect may be erroneously repeated. This paper identifies three novel mechanisms to systematize the study of change and predict the conditions under which causal relationships will vary over time. These mechanisms include the obsolescence of costly signals, behavioral tendencies such as habituation and hedonic adaptation, and cost-mitigation strategies that actors employ to reduce the effects of coercive policies and punishments. This project's primary implication is that a large proportion of social research is insufficient for understanding the world or crafting policy since scholars theorize about and estimate the wrong quantities of interest. However, the proposed mechanisms offer a new foundation for dynamic theories and a way to adjudicate between longstanding debates.

Power Today is Not Power Tomorrow: Adaptation and the Declining Effectiveness of Coercion

At its core, strategy is the study of interdependent decisions. An optimal strategy must account for an opponent’s set of moves and countermoves. Despite this basic insight, existing theories examine coercion almost entirely from the perspective of the initiating state. This approach ignores the fact that coercion creates inherent pressure for the target to adapt in ways that reduce the effectiveness of an imposed policy. I develop a theory of strategic adaptation that identifies the conditions under which the effects of policies will increase, decrease, or remain constant over time. The most salient implication of this theory is that power today does not imply power tomorrow even when material capabilities remain constant. Because actors are continuously adapting, policies that are effective at coercing an opponent today are likely to become ineffective or even counterproductive in the future.

The Dynamic Effect of Bombing in Vietnam

Existing research on bombing widely presupposes that the effect of bombing remains constant. Scholars ignore the fact that bombing creates pressure for the target to adapt in ways that mitigate the effects of the imposed policy. During the Vietnam War, for example, the North Vietnamese adapted to U.S. bombing by moving surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) into restricted zones around Hanoi and Haiphong that were off-limits to U.S. aircrews. This study introduces a new dynamic theory of bombing and measures how the effect of bombing changed throughout the Vietnam War by using instrumental variable models and a new variant of Marginal Structural models that rely upon Extreme Gradient Boosted Trees. The results suggest that North Vietnamese insurgents moved into the areas surrounding hamlets to avoid U.S. bombing campaigns. In addition to challenging static theories of coercion, the results contradict the popular supposition that bombing is necessarily counterproductive due to the fact that it increases local support for the insurgent group.