Rising Power on the Mind

A prominent explanation of war claims that international conflict can result when shifts in bargaining power induce the declining power to behave aggressively today because the rising power cannot credibly commit to not behave aggressively tomorrow. This paper asks whether individuals respond to shifting power in ways assumed by these models. Rather than use abstract laboratory-based bargaining games as in other work, I use vignettes describing the United States in an international bargaining situation to explore the microfoundations of power transitions models empirically. The vignettes vary whether the individual is a member of a declining or a rising power and whether there are previous public commitments to the status quo division of territory. Subjects propose a response the United States should make and then explain their decision in their own words. I apply new methods for analyzing these open-ended responses. Consistent with predictions from the behavioral literature, I find important asymmetries in behavior across these conditions as well as substantial heterogeneities in individuals' motivations for their decisions. The results of the experiments suggest potential ways that power-transition models should be refined to have a firmer behavioral basis.