Research

I. Does Affective Empathy Capacity Condition Individual Variation in Support for Military Escalation? Evidence from a Survey Vignette.

Published in Research & Politics.

Abstract: 

Does individual variation in affective empathetic capacity systemically condition a person’s willingness to support pre-emptive military action? In this note I theorize that individuals who are more prone to feeling affective or emotional empathy are less likely to support conflict escalation. To evidence this theory, I conduct a survey asking individuals about their willingness to support a military attack against a non-specific rogue state that is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. The results demonstrate that the probability of an individual supporting such a strike is strongly conditioned on their affective empathetic capacity. This finding holds regardless of model specification and controlling for rational beliefs about material outcomes. Affective empathy may, therefore, have a powerful palliating effect upon the processes that contribute to conflict escalation.

II. Power Production Theory: A Political Economy Theory of Warfare

Article-length Book Summary; 2025 Job Market paper.

Abstract: 

International relations (IR) offers numerous mid-level accounts of how states build militaries and engage in conflict. It also offers many political economy approaches to understanding war and national power. What it lacks is a high-level framework that systematically connects these debates. To address this gap, I develop Power Production Theory (PPT), a political economy framework that reconceptualizes warfighting as a process of production. Just as goods and services depend on inputs of land, labor, and capital, warfighting strategies and military capability are produced from combinations of soldiers and equipment. States develop their militaries based on their relative economic endowments and wage war according to the distribution of these endowments vis-à-vis their adversaries. Extending this production logic to model interactive conflict yields three propositions: (1) wars occur only in “compromise domains” where two sides can both reasonably expect victory; (2) states prosecute wars by using their abundant factor of production to shield their scarce one, while targeting their opponent’s scarce factor; and (3) in protracted wars, civilian targeting is economically rational and sometimes optimal. I test these claims using the first large-N dataset of U.S. war planning objectives, derived from 6,202 archival documents (1914–42). Quantitative analysis and a case study of War Plan Green confirm PPT’s predictions. These findings show how economic structures shape operational strategy, advancing a structural framework that bridges IR, economics, and war studies to illuminate the black box of warfighting.

III. When Wealth Undermines War: The Battlefield Consequences of Oil and Gas Rent Dependence

Presented at the American Political Science Association's 2025 annual conference.

Abstract: 

Since 1970, approximately half of interstate wars have involved at least one oil- or gas-dependent state on either side of the conflict. Despite this, scholars have little understanding of how, or even if, oil ad gas rent dependence influences a state's ability to generate military power effectively. This manuscript addresses this gap in the literature by analyzing an original dataset of 203 casualty ratios from post-1970 battles. The analysis reveals three key findings: (1) Oil and gas rent dependence positively, monotonically, and significantly correlates with modern military ineffectiveness. (2) Seemingly established non-economic explanations for military ineffectiveness, such as ethnosectarian division, civil war, authoritarianism, and coup-proofing, do not account for this effect. (3) The effects of oil and gas rents on industry and manufacturing explain a significant amount of military ineffectiveness globally since 1970. In fact, the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector by oil and gas rents is so significant that it singlehandedly accounts for more than 70% of the relationship between rents and military ineffectiveness in battles involving at least one rent-dependent state. These findings provide valuable cross-disciplinary insights into the resource curse, historical battlefield outcomes, contemporary military forces, and the economic foundations of military power.

IV. Building Trust in a Burning Theater: The Ability of Diplomatic Images to Defuse Public Opinion in a Crisis.

Revise & Resubmit at Political Psychology.

Abstract: 

This paper contributes to the special issue’s call for research on empathy and perspective-taking in security contexts by examining how joint diplomatic photographs enhance affective empathy and perspective-taking, thereby reducing public pressure for escalation during international crises. I specifically ask whether routine joint summit photographs can serve as micro-diplomatic cues that enable elected leaders and their foreign counterparts to reshape democratic publics’ perceptions of adversaries. I theorize that, by positioning presidents as affective empathetic mediators and fostering perspective-taking through a form of theatrical rationality, joint diplomatic photographs help mitigate the “crisis escalation thinking” that underlies the spiral model of conflict. Drawing on data from two original survey experiments—one focused on the U.S.-North Korea nuclear crisis and the other on the 2022 crisis over Ukraine—I find that images of U.S. presidents with foreign leaders increase trust, periodically reduce fear, and diminish crisis escalation thinking (a composite index of security dilemma thinking and support for escalatory military deployments) among the American public. These findings carry significant implications for understanding how images, affective empathy, perspective-taking, and micro diplomatic behaviors interact to shape security dynamics.

V. Through the Subnational Looking Glass; State-level Framing Effects, Public Opinion, and Trade Policy Preferences

Published in International Interactions.

Abstract: 

In recent years, national-level elite framing has fueled a political backlash against globalization in the United States. Could a framing about the effects of trade at the local level have a similar effect? Moreover, could it do so against the backdrop of a countervailing national-level frame? This manuscript shows that it could via a set of four experimental studies conducted in Texas and Minnesota in 2022. Results indicate that framing trade at the state level affects voters’ faith that trade benefits their locale, even without altering expectations of personal gain. The net result is to condition overall support for trade via a subnational group-based mechanism.

VI. Testing Power Transition Theory Using Time Series Trends in Chinese Diplomatic Event Data. (with Bruce Ming Fuong Tsai.)

Presented at the Western Political Science Association's annual conference (2022), Loyola Marymount University's Faculty Speaker Series (2022), George Mason University's Institute for Humane Studies conference (2023), & UCLA's Internal Speakers Series (2023).

Abstract: 

China’s rapid rise, concurrent with the erosion of the U.S. unipolar moment, has motivated a renaissance in the study of Power Transition Theory (PTT). Yet modern PTT scholars still rely largely on traditional formal and qualitative methods, limiting their ability to perform rigorous statistical tests of their hypotheses. By harnessing 52,189 separate observations of Chinese actions directed towards the U.S. and its allies since 1994, we break from this traditional orthodoxy and construct a novel time series dataset of mean weekly Chinese-initiated interactions with the U.S. Analysis of this dataset identifies trends in Chinese behavior consistent with those of a dissatisfied challenger. In fact, the data demonstrates that Chinese-initiated interactions with the U.S. took on a significant negative trajectory when China reached power “parity,” confirming PTT scholars’ expectations. This finding and the time series methodology harnessed to arrive at it have significant empirical and methodological implications for the study of U.S.-China relations narrowly and PTT broadly.

VII. How Robust Is the Fox News Effect? A Sensitivity-Based Analysis of DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007). (with Soonhong Cho, Bradley Mankoff, & Zhiqian Wu.)

Working Paper (Early Stage).

Abstract: 

DellaVigna and Kaplan’s 2007 piece identifying the “Fox News effect” holds a prominent place among works on elections and media bias. Despite this, its causal identification strategy which relies on an assumption of zero bias naturally elicits skepticism. This manuscript thus employees a sensitivity-based approach to understanding what degree of confounding would be needed to alter the study’s conclusions. It finds that the relatioship between the entry of Fox News into a cable market and the Republican share of the Presidential vote is robust even to the strongest of confounders. Yet it also find that the Fox News effect could be easily trivialized were evidence to emerge that Fox’s expansion was not “as if” random. The manuscript concludes by discussing our findings’ implications and their significance.

VIII. The Effect of Commodity Prices in Global Interstate Disputes. (with Bruce Fuong Ming Tsai.)

Presented at the Western Political Science Association's annual conference (2023).

Abstract: 

Within the existing Comparative Politics literature, commodity prices’s influence over the occurrence of civil conflict has been well established. At the same time, many International Relations scholars believe that domestic instability increases the risk of interstate disputes and diversionary wars. Yet despite the evident relationship between these two theories, outside of the study of oil prices, proportionally little effort has been made to bridge the gap between them. This raises an obvious puzzle: Have fluctuations in commodity prices empirically influenced the prevalence of inter-state disputes? If so, what commodities (other than oil) played a role? And how often did such disputes escalate to full-scale conflicts? To answer these questions, we utilize the Correlate of War’s Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) data, publically available commodity price datasets, existing protest count figures, and a zero-inflated Poisson sequential stage regression model. Our analysis yields two significant findings. First, an increase in the price of inconsumable agricultural products (cash crops), exceptionally among non-petroleum commodities, is associated with the occurrence of MIDs. From this we can infer that cash crops are unique in that they provide both the means and motive for conflict initiation. Essentially, rising cash crop profits can be captured by the state easily, and that rising cash crop prices undermine a society’s domestic stability. Second, commodity price shock-induced unrest does in fact demonstrate a nontrivial association with the occurrence of interstate war. This has significant theoretical implications bridging the gap between the literatures on commodity prices, civil conflict and diversionary war.