No diversionary war — rhetoric solves.

There is a large literature on diversionary conflict in international relations, but it focuses on material conflicts like militarized interstate disputes rather than foreign policy rhetoric. It is based in social identity theory, which suggests that leaders can increase ingroup affinity by making intergroup distinctions more salient (Closer, 1950; Simmel, 1955; Tajfel and Turner, 1979). A recent review concludes that though the internal logic of diversionary conflict is “compelling and theoretically well supported,” the empirical evidence is “decidedly mixed” (Baum and Potte r, 2008, 48). Several studies find evidence of diversionary aggression in US foreign policy (Clark, 2003; DeRouen, 2000; DeRouen and Peake, 2002; Fordham, 1998a, 6; Hess and Orphanides, 1995; Howell and Pevehouse, 2005; James and Hristoulas, 1994; James and Oneal, 1991; Levy, 1989«,fc; Morgan and Bickers, 1992; Ostrom and Job, 1986) and elsewhere (Bennett, 2000; Dassel and Reinhardt, 1000; Davies, 2002; Enterline and Gleditsch, 2000; Gelpi, 1997; Heldt, 1999; Lebow, 1981; Mansfield and Snyder, 1995; Oneal and Tir, 2006; Russett, 1990; Sobek, 2007; Tir, 2010). Yet skeptics have amassed opposing evidence (Chiozza and Gormans, 2003, 2004; Foster and Palmer, 2006; Gowa, 1998; Johnston, 1998; Leeds and Davis, 1997; Lian and Oneal, 1993; Meernik, 2000, 2004; Meeraik and Waterman, 1996; Moore and Lanoue, 2003; Potter, 2007). Some cases are hard to reconcile with the theory: in Britain, there were rallies in the Falklands War and the Gulf War but not in other cases in which rallies would be expected, such as the Korean, Suez, and Kosovo wars (Lai and Reiter, 2005). Some go so far as to call diversionary aggression a “myth” (Meernik and Waterman, 1996).

Others have developed scope conditions for diversionary aggression. It is more likely between states with pre-standing rivalries (McLaughlin and Prins, 2004), when leaders are accountable (Carter, 2018; Kisangani and Pickering, 2011), and in mature democracies, consolidating autocracies, and transitional polities (Pickering and Kisangani, 2005). It is less likely when states avoid provoking troubled adversaries (Clark, 2003; Fordham, 2005; Leeds and Davis, 1997; Miller, 1999). Diversion appears more likely to produce a rally when supported by Security Council authorization (Chapman, 2011; Chapman and Reiter, 2004), when the White House draws attention to a dispute (Baker and Oneal, 2001), and in conditions of media attention, popular leadership, divided government, non election years, and first terms (Colaresi, 2007). Most recently, scholars have asked whether diversion occurs outside democracies. They find some autocracies, especially single party regimes, divert as well (Carter, 2018; Pickering and Kisangani, 2011).

This study extends the logic of diversionary conflict to foreign policy rhetoric. There is surprisingly little research on rhetoric in international relations. The international relations literature deems talk “cheap” (Fearon, 1995; Kydd, 2005). The audience cost literature considers rhetoric meaningful, but only if it invokes audience costs through explicit, public threats (Fearon, 1994; Schultz, 2001; Smith, 1998; Tomz, 2007). However, if foreign policy rhetoric can activate ingroup identity, then it may be appealing for leaders who wish to improve their ratings without incurring the substantial risks of militarized interstate disputes. While it might be “outlandish” for presidents to engage in the impeachable exercise of diversionary war (Meernik and Waterman, 1996), hostile foreign policy rhetoric is far less outlandish a risk.

To develop a theory of diversionary cheap talk, this paper draws upon research in political psychology and political communication. These literatures find persuasive evidence that elite statements influence citizen beliefs (Behr and Iyengar, 19s."); Bennett. Lawrence and Livingston, 2006; Brody, 1991; Cohen, 1995; Jentleson, 1992; Zaller and Chiu, 2000). I draw on social identity theory to argue that diversionary cheap talk highlights intergroup differences between nations and leads citizens to evaluate their leader favorably. When a leader criticizes foreigners, she cues ingroup identity, which increases citizens’ social attachment to the nation and to herself as its leader. This is a “solidarity mechanism,” through which “[c]ollective group goals and common group identity are highlighted, norms of group-based altruism are strengthened, punishment and rejection of defectors are increased, and perceptions of the in-group and out-group are manipulated” (Halevy, Bernstein and Sagiv, 2008, 405).

The theory generates observable implications about when leaders use diversionary cheap talk and who they target. I follow the consensus in the diversionary conflict literature in focusing on poor economic conditions as the most important source of public disapproval for leaders. Low approval ratings limit leaders’ ability to advance their domestic agenda. Therefore, when the economy deteriorates, leaders will criticize foreign nations to improve their approval ratings and restore the political capital necessary for them to govern. Second, a key observation from social identity theory is that the depth of intergroup differences is important for group attachment. Therefore, consonant with recent empirical findings in the diversionary conflict literature (McLaughlin and Prins, 2004), I expect diversionary rhetoric to be most effective when it targets threatening outgroups. In the context of foreign policy, these are best represented by historical adversaries. And finally, because diversionary cheap talk shifts the focus of political competition from the partisan to the international level, it has differential partisan effects. Because national identity cues widen the tent of the political ingroup, diversionary cheap talk is most effective at boosting support among the leader’s nonpartisans: liberal citizens for conservative leaders, and conservative citizens for liberal leaders.

I test these hypotheses with the American Diplomatic Dataset, an original record of over 50,000 US diplomatic events between 1945 and 2010 drawn from New York Times articles on foreign affairs. I used tools from computational social science to classify bilateral interstate interactions into hundreds of specific types and four aggregate categories: verbal cooperation, verbal conflict, material cooperation, and material conflict. This is by far the most historically extensive event dataset. As such, it allows an exploration of US foreign policy behavior across a variety of administrations and economic crises.

I find robust evidence of diversionary cheap talk in US foreign policy. First, I establish that US presidents face incentives to divert verbally rather than materially: while militarized interstate dispute initiation does not affect presidential approval ratings, critical rhetoric about other nations is associated with increased ratings, especially among nonpartisans. Responding to this incentive, presidents between 1945 and 2010 typically diverted in the form of words, not deeds. Simulations indicate that as unemployment varied from its minimum to its maximum observed value, hostile foreign policy rhetoric nearly doubled, depending on the administration. Throughout this study, estimates are conservative: I operationalize conflict as events the United States initiated, although findings are robust to a redefinition of conflict as events the United States participated in. The verbal statements in the dataset are high profile and likely to be noticed by the American public: all appeared in the headlines of the New York Times.

This study contributes to existing scholarship in several ways. First, it demonstrates that US foreign policy rhetoric responds significantly to domestic economic conditions. International relations scholars should therefore continue to focus more seriously on the communicative aspects of foreign policy, and in particular its relationship to domestic politics (Johnston, 2001, 2008; Kurizaki, 2007; Ramsay, 2011; Sartori, 2002, 2005; Trager, 2010, 2011, 201(i). The American Diplomacy Dataset will enable researchers to further explore the communicative aspects of foreign policy, and their relationships to material and economic factors, in more detail than existing datasets permit.

Second, this study contributes to the diversionary conflict literature by showing that in many cases where diversionary theory predicts conflict initiation, leaders instead choose rhetorical hostility. In this sense, leaders may have their cake and eat it too: They benefit from an ingroup rally without inviting an international crisis. The mixed empirical findings in the diversionary conflict literature may be partly due to the fact that existing scholarship considers only the most serious forms of diversion like militarized interstate disputes. It is possible that a wide range of diversionary behavior takes place at less extreme levels, such as the rhetorical hostility documented in this paper.1

***BEGIN FOOTNOTE 1***

In the language of the foreign policy substitutability literature (Bennett and Nordstrom, 2000; Clark, Nordstrom and Reed, 2008; Most and Starr, 1984, 1989; Oakes, 2012), rhetorical hostility, like the development of new economic policies, may be seen as a substitute for diversionary conflict.

***END FOOTNOTE 1***