A Preference for War: How Fairness and Rhetoric Influence Leadership Incentives in Crises

We conduct a survey experiment to examine the effects of international compromise, war, and foreign government rhetoric on presidential approval. We find that, in certain conflicts, popular approval tracks fairness heuristics—leaders seeking to maximize voter approval prefer equitable divisions of disputed goods and are risk acceptant for divisions below this threshold. Moreover, aggressive rhetoric by a foreign leader increases domestic leaders’ expected approval from war, decreases the value of compromise, and provides them with powerful incentives to fight harder. Thus, leaders motivated by popular approval have preferences that are inconsistent with the non-satiated, risk-averse preferences defined over shares of an objective good—that is, with those that much of the rationalist literature on conflict assumes. Fairness heuristics and the rhetorical framing of disputes during the conflict process may be at least as important as material factors in understanding why some disputes result in war.