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Abstract
Do leaders resort to external conflicts when facing domestic troubles? Known as the “diversionary theory of war”, there have been numerous studies arguing that leaders pursue conflict abroad to divert the public’s attention from the domestic problems that can undermine their political survival. However, despite being a topic of extensive research for decades, diversionary war has yielded mixed conclusions when it comes to its empirical and quantitative analysis. Some scholars find a significant correlation between the country’s economic conditions and the initiation of military threats, while others consider domestic factors such as presidential approval ratings and the misery index to be less decisive factors compared to other international factors. I address the contrasting findings by pointing out the methodological flaws of previous research, which are the failure to address the selection bias and the absence of a comprehensive operationalization of the chances of the leader’s political survival. Based on understanding the political survival of the leader as a product of combined factors such as economic conditions, approval ratings, and public opinion polls, I examine the relationship between presidential election prospects and conflict engagement of the United States from 1952 to 2014 through both ordinary regression and two-stage least squares regression analysis. The empirical findings do not find any statistical significance between the electoral prospects of the leader and the US engagement in military conflicts, posing a challenge to the diversionary war theory and calling for a nuanced approach when examining the relationship between the leader’s political survival and the state’s conflict engagement.