Personalist dictators and the choice of military intervention in civil conflicts
Abstract
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Are all personalist dictators equally prone to intervene in civil conflicts? The current bulk of work on authoritarianism and international relations shows that personalist autocrats are more prone to be hawkish in foreign policy when compared, for example, to military dictators. What is missing, however, is a better understanding as to whether different personalist dictators behave similarly to one another in world politics. In this study, I argue that not all personalist dictators behave in the same way on military intervention due to the interaction between their personality traits and the military capabilities available to them. Drawing on an original dataset on personalist dictators' personality traits, I employ leadership trait analysis - using 386,510 words of text and 1,580 documents from twenty dictators in the period between 1990 and 2009. I find that personality traits do indeed matter for leaders' choices to intervene militarily abroad. Specifically, I show that dictators' level of sensitivity to advice and information (conceptual complexity) in interaction with military capabilities is a significant factor shaping whether they send weapons or deploy troops into a civil conflict abroad. I illustrate my findings and the mechanisms with one case study: Hugo Chavez and his decision to support the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -FARC).
Degree
Ph. D.
Thesis Department
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