Joshua Kertzer - Democratic Leaders, Crises and War Paired Experiments on the Israeli Knesset and Public
IR theorists have focused recently on the implications of regime type for crisis behavior, but any answer to the question of whether democracies are seen as more resolved or effective must account for the fact that, while our theories hinge on the beliefs of leaders, evidence has necessarily come from second-order implications concerning state behavior. We put leaders’ beliefs directly under the microscope, fielding a survey experiment on a unique elite sample of members of the Israeli Knesset. We find that Israeli leaders perceive democracies as more likely to back down in a crisis but more likely to emerge victorious in wars. Paired surveys of the Israeli public allow us to evaluate how similar leaders are to the public they represent, and the mechanisms through which democracy shapes beliefs about conflict, finding support for the notion that experiments on “the average citizen” (at least in some cases) generalize nicely to elites.
Joshua Kertzer is an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he specializes in the intersection of international security, foreign policy, political psychology, and quantitative and experimental methods.
His book, Resolve in International Politics, was published in 2016 by Princeton University Press. His research is also published or forthcoming in a number of journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and World Politics.
His research has also received a variety of awards, including the 2014 CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Council of Graduate Schools for the best dissertation in the past two years in the social sciences, the American Political Science Association's 2014 Helen Dwight Reid Award for the best dissertation in international relations, law and politics, the 2014 Kenneth N. Waltz award for the best dissertation in the field of international security and arms control, and the Peace Science Society's 2014 Walter Isard Award for the best dissertation in peace science.
He graduated with a PhD in Political Science from The Ohio State University in August 2013. Before coming to Harvard, he was a Dartmouth Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. In 2016-17, he will be a Visiting Associate Research Scholar at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University