business cycle (Rogoff and Sibert 1988) to bargaining between national leaders allows the researcher
to (1) model leaders’ resolve as private information that changes with leadership turnover and (2)
relax the assumption of interchangeability between leaders and states as units of analysis. These
two innovations, which combine for the first time leader-specific uncertainty and the unique dy-
namics of leadership turnover, account for a number of findings and apparently anomalous results
in the leader-based literature, generate novel hypotheses, and point to promising new directions for
extension and further research in international relations.
The argument proceeds, first, with an assessment of the current literature that uncovers some
theoretical gaps in its handling of leaders as units of analysis. The review is followed by a discussion
of the motivation for disaggregating state- and leader-specific sources of resolve and for treating
leader’ resolve as private information. The next section specifies and characterizes equilibrium
behavior in a sequential bargaining game that incorporates these assumptions, and the following
section relates the predictions of the model to the extant literature and provides novel implications.
A final section concludes with suggestions for further research.
2
National Leaders and International Conflict
Empirical findings in the leader-based literature are often contradictory or loosely connected, largely
due to the lack of an underlying theory that both (1) captures the strategic dynamics of international
politics and (2) identifies the distinct role of leaders, their preferences and their incentives, in
the conflict process. Current research differentiates leaders along one or both of two dimensions:
constraints on the pursuit of political survival (Chiozza and Goemans 2003, 2004b; Gelpi and
Grieco 2001; Huth and Allee 2002) and personal characteristics like military experience, age, and
reputation (Chiozza and Choi 2003; Clark et al. 2005; Horowitz et al. 2005), each of which is
2
Convention