Jonathan D. Caverley
Ph.D.
Candidate, Political
Science
Research Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs,
Harvard University
Address:
79 John F. Kennedy Street, Mailbox 134
Cambridge, MA 02138
Email:
caverley-AT-uchicago.edu
Dissertation:
Death and Taxes: A Rational Theory of Democratic Grand Strategy
How are the costs of defense and of war distributed within
democracies? How does variation in the distribution of these
costs affect international conflict? A near-general consensus in
political science exists that democracies are risk-averse in the wars
they fight, are less threatening to other states, and rarely engage in
overexpansion. Most scholars explain this as a function of the
“internalization of costs;” the people who pay the costs of war (the
average citizen) are also the holders of political power (through the
vote). I challenge this consensus by focusing on the distribution of costs within a
democracy, arguing
that the average
voter will find the aggressive use of the military more appealing if
the costs can be shifted to a wealthy minority by developing heavily
capitalized armed forces. In short, I
develop a theory of rational democratic grand strategy, in which the
median voter supports the building of an excessively strong military,
believes in its efficacy as a tool for international politics, and
shows a heightened willingness to employ it. The median voter is
as happy to go to war as any
unitary actor or despot (indeed perhaps even more so) as long as she
can get someone else to pick up the tab.