Intervention and the politics of information: US attention to foreign civil conflict

Abstract

To improve scholarly understanding of the domestic drivers of third-party intervention in civil conflicts, this dissertation borrows a theoretical framework from the policy process literature. Specifically, I explain intervention through the lens of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), a view which holds that the attention of government policymakers to most issues is persistently low but can be suddenly and dramatically mobilized. To apply this theory to the study of intervention, I collect data on US congressional speeches and US news coverage of foreign civil conflicts, 1946-1999. I then use the data to investigate the correlates of senior policymaker attention and its effects on intervention decisions. With respect to correlates, I find clear evidence that PET mechanisms motivate US congressional attention to civil conflict: I find that the distribution of change in attention to civil conflicts is leptokurtic, that civil conflicts are more likely to reach the attention of US senior policymakers if they have already reached the attention of actors lower in the policy process, and that congressional attention is subject to crowding effects. With respect to effects on policy, my findings are mixed. Congressional attention increases the likelihood of intervention when I look at all interventions but, when looking at only major interventions and controlling for prior US intervention, I find congressional attention has no statistically significant effect.