Commitment to Military Intervention: The Democratic Government as Economic Investor

Abstract

Much of the work on US military intervention addresses the patterns it exhibits and the circumstances that lead to the decision to resort to force. This article deals with a somewhat different aspect of the issue: the structure of the incentives that determine the US government's commitment to persevere in the armed interventions it has chosen to undertake. Commitment is modeled in terms of the costs of the intervention and public support for the venture, and the model is based on an economic metaphor. The hypothesis is that the public responds to costs in the manner of consumers, making its support an inverse function of costs. By contrast, Government responds to costs in the fashion of an investor, viewing costs as an investment to be redeemed: up to a point, the higher the cost, the greater the commitment. The parameters of the model are statistically estimated for the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the point at which public and governmental support coincide is discussed.

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