Guess Who Did What

The impact of the political characteristics of national leaders on the management of territorial disputes is investigated to learn what kinds of leaders are more likely to resort to strategies of peaceful resolution. The choice to pursue strategies of accommodation and compromise is in part a function of leaders' time in office and the reputation they have established through their international conflict behavior and their military expertise. This is because leaders face different incentives as their tenure in office grows longer and because their reputation can be a form of expendable political capital that enables leaders to initiate a significant foreign policy change. A territorial dispute data set and a leader data set for the period from 1950 to 1990 are used to test this argument. An analysis using ordered probit models gives credence to the conjecture that leaders' characteristics are systematically associated with the choice of pursuing a peaceful resolution of a territorial dispute.