Conflict and Leadership: When is There a Hawkish Drift in Politics?

We analyze an agency model of political competition to examine whether con‡ict encourages hawkish behavior, and if such behavior can itself aggravate con‡ict. We consider situations of con‡ict between a state and an insurgent group, such as con‡ict over a piece of land. Negotiations are carried out on behalf of the state by a democratically elected leader whose ability and ideology are imperfectly observed by the electorate. A more capable leader can take a hardline position in the negotiations (i.e. cede less land to the insurgents) at a lower expected cost (modeled as the cost of continued insurgency) than a less capable one. Similarly, an ideologically hawkish leader enjoys greater intrinsic utility from retaining land than a less hawkish leader. Two We would like to thank participants at the …rst Political Economy workshop at the University of Birmingham, seminar participants at the University of Edinburgh, Ralph Bailey, Kalyan Chatterjee, Amrita Dhillon, Jayasri Dutta, Jaideep Roy and Tomas Sjöström for helpful comments on a very early version of this paper.