NSCC/SA: Collaborative Research: How Politics Inside Dictatorships Affects Regime Stability and International Conflict

该奖项由国家安全、冲突和合作竞争的社会和行为维度资助，这是美国国家科学基金会和国防部的合资企业。政策制定者需要更好地了解独裁，以便制定有效的外交政策，但系统研究可能导致对不同情况下的独裁行为进行更可靠的预测，但由于数据不足，系统研究一直受到限制。研究独裁的学者一致认为，在谁有权做决定、哪些精英和社会团体对这些决定有影响力、制度是否约束专制独裁行为、罢免领导人的容易程度以及罢免领导人的代价等方面，它们都存在差异。他们还一致认为，这些差异应该会影响国际和国内的行为。为了解释独裁者的行为，并对他们的行为做出更可靠的预测，分析人士需要能够区分不同类型独裁的信息，因为由不同的参与者领导、对不同精英和社会群体做出反应的独裁以不同的方式行事。作为该项目的一部分，私人情报员将收集大约175个威权政权的信息。对于每个政权，大约60个与解释或预测威权行为相关的特征将被编码(或更新并检查其准确性)，并公开提供。如果分析师要预测独裁者的行为，他们还需要能够估计独裁者的时间范围。时间范围影响关键的政策选择，从在国内提供公共产品到在国外引发冲突。那些预计将长期掌权的独裁者有理由投资于有助于经济增长的政策，而不是那些感到即将被赶下台的人。受到威胁的独裁者也倾向于从事鲁莽的国际行为。该项目将产生威权时间范围的衡量标准。时间范围将通过估计个人独裁者被赶下台和威权政权失败的预测概率来建模。初步分析表明，两者都取决于所讨论的独裁政权的具体特征，例如，像萨达姆·侯赛因这样的“苏丹主义”独裁者的时间范围与像中国这样的政党政权的统治者不同。

This award was funded through the Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation competition, a joint venture between NSF and the Department of Defense.Policy makers need to understand dictatorships better in order to craft effective foreign policy, but systematic research that could result in more reliable predictions about dictatorial behavior in different situations has been limited by inadequate data. Scholars who study autocracies agree that they differ from each other in terms of who has the power to make decisions, which elites and societal groups have influence on these decisions, whether institutions constrain arbitrary dictatorial behavior, how easy it is to remove leaders, and the cost of ouster to leaders. They also agree that these differences should be expected to affect international and domestic behavior. In order to explain and make more reliable predictions about dictators' behavior, analysts need information that allows them to make distinctions among different kinds of autocracy because dictatorships led by different actors and responsive to different elite and societal groups behave in different ways. As part of this project, the PIs will gather information about approximately 175 authoritarian regimes. For each regime, about 60 characteristics relevant for explaining or predicting authoritarian behavior will be coded (or updated and checked for accuracy) and made publicly available. Analysts also need to be able to estimate dictators' time horizons if they are to predict their behavior. Time horizons influence key policy choices ranging from the provision of public goods at home to the initiation of conflict abroad. Dictators who expect to be in power for a long time have reason to invest in policies that contribute to economic growth, in contrast to those who feel threatened by imminent ouster. Threatened dictators also tend to engage in rash international behavior. The project will generate measures of authoritarian time horizons. Time horizons will be modeled by estimating the predicted probabilities of individual dictator ouster and authoritarian regime failure. Preliminary analysis shows that both depend on specific characteristics of the dictatorship in question, e.g., a "sultanistic" dictator like Saddam Hussein has a different time horizon than does the ruler of a party-based regime like the Chinese.