Crisis Bargaining and War Initiation Before a Domestic Audience

Studies of crisis bargaining have traditionally focused on the strategies for signaling resolve to other states, even when incorporating a domestic audience into the analysis. In this dissertation, I examine crisis bargaining strategies meant primarily to send signals to the domestic audience. Using game theoretic models, historical case studies and a survey experiment, I show that governments can successfully bait adversaries into minor incidents and deceive the public into authorizing war even though minor incidents can also be highly informative about an adversary's intentions under certain conditions. I also show that public opinion can lead governments to forgo preemptive strikes and preventive war, and that democracy can therefore reduce public welfare in some circumstances. I discuss the implications of these findings for the conventional wisdom on crisis behavior and on the value of democracy in foreign policy.