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

该奖项是由NSF和国防部联合举办的"国家安全、冲突与合作的社会与行为维度"竞赛资助的。政策制定者需要更好地了解独裁者，以便制定有效的外交政策，但由于数据不足，系统研究可能会导致对不同情况下独裁行为的更可靠预测。 研究专制的学者一致认为，在谁有权做出决定、哪些精英和社会团体对这些决定有影响力、制度是否约束专断的独裁行为、罢免领导人的难易程度以及罢免领导人的成本等方面，它们彼此不同。 他们还同意，这些差异应该会影响国际和国内行为。 为了解释独裁者的行为并做出更可靠的预测，分析师需要能够区分不同类型独裁的信息，因为由不同行为者领导的独裁政权，以及对不同精英和社会群体的反应，都有不同的行为方式。 作为该项目的一部分，PI将收集大约175个独裁政权的信息。 对于每一个政权，大约60个与解释或预测独裁行为相关的特征将被编码（或更新和检查准确性），并公开提供。 分析家们还需要能够估计独裁者的时间范围，如果他们要预测他们的行为。 时间范围影响着关键的政策选择，从在国内提供公益物到在国外引发冲突。 那些希望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下台的威胁的人。 受到威胁的独裁者也倾向于从事鲁莽的国际行为。该项目将产生独裁时间范围的衡量标准。 时间范围将通过估计个别独裁者下台和独裁政权失败的预测概率来建模。 初步分析表明，两者都取决于有关独裁政权的具体特点，例如，像萨达姆·侯赛因这样的“苏丹式”独裁者与像中国这样的政党政权的统治者有着不同的时间跨度。

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.