LOSS AVERSION AND RISK-SEEKING IN KOREA–JAPAN RELATIONS

Since Korea's transition to democracy in 1987, Korean leaders have become increasingly confrontational toward Japan, with such steps ranging from verbal threats filled with hawkish rhetoric to material threats, such as displays of military force and threats of actually using it. To explain South Korean leaders’ hawkish approach to Japan, we build a theory of “prospective diversion” by combining insights from the diversionary theory of international conflict and prospect theory. We argue that foreign policy leaders have a strong tendency to overvalue political losses relative to comparable gains in their approval ratings. As a result, they are inclined to take risk-seeking diplomatic actions toward foreign adversary to avoid further losses. By conducting statistical analyses and developing case studies of Korean leaders’ confrontational policy decisions regarding Japan, we present empirical findings consistent with our hypothesis that Korean leaders are inclined to engage in prospective diversion toward Japan when they suffer domestic losses. This article provides an enhanced understanding of the domestic political foundation of South Korean leaders’ increasingly contentious attitude toward Japan.

Diversionary Theory of War

What causes war? Among others, domestic unrest has been regarded as one of the factors contributing to interstate war. Many scholars, pundits, and policymakers have emphasized internal troubles to account for the occurrence of international wars, including the Falklands War, World Wars I and II, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Imjin War (Japan’s invasion of Korea in the late 16th century). Especially since the end of the Cold War, following the theoretical and methodological suggestions in Levy 1989 (cited under General Overviews), international relations scholars have paid increasingly more attention to domestic unrest and its interaction with other factors such as regime type and strategic rivalry to explain interstate and intrastate conflict. By taking different methodologies, such as quantitative statistical analysis, in-depth case study, and formal modeling, they build causal processes linking domestic unrest to international conflict, identify various factors at the levels of the individual, state, and dyad affecting the onset of a diversionary conflict, and provide empirical evidence supporting or disproving their theories.

Diversionary Theory of War in Foreign Policy Analysis

Diversionary explanations are a key FPA approach to understanding how domestic politics shape foreign policy and, in particular, the resort to force and risk of war, arguing that increasingly vulnerable leaders manipulate foreign policy in order to enhance their domestic political position. This literature has emerged in major ways since Levy’s early critique in which he noted wide disparity between the lack of theoretical rigor and empirical findings in political science research and the richness of qualitative research by historians offering compelling cases of diversionary wars such as the First World War. Nearly three decades later, however, this situation has significantly changed. A vibrant political science literature has emerged that provides significant empirical evidence based on, first, longitudinal studies of mostly the U.S. case and the presidential use of force since World War II (WWII); and, second, cross-national studies that capture variance in the diversionary resort to force across regime types (and subtypes) and different international contexts. In contrast, historical literature on the origins of World War I (WWI) has come to view the German case as more complex and has placed it into comparative perspective with the other four great powers. Historical research suggests that leaders in all five powers faced rising domestic opposition in the prewar decades; that they subsequently adopted new (yet varied) political strategies for containing opposition; and, at the brink of war, that diversionary and other political motivations played out in indirect and different ways. This article reviews these literatures and suggests that there has been some convergence of themes in the research of political scientists and historians. Consistent with FPA approaches, these literatures point to complex patterns of domestic oppositions across different institutional arenas, contingencies affecting the willingness and ability of leaders to resort to diversionary force, the role of agency stemming from leader beliefs about political stability and the consequences of risking war, and the importance of decision making dynamics in the ultimate resort to war.

The “Rally-'Round-the-Flag” Phenomenon and the Diversionary Use of Force

The observation that groups unify in the face of common threats is long-standing. At the level of the nation-state, this is called the “rally-'round-the-flag” phenomenon. In the case of the United States, the rally phenomenon is measured as a surge of public approval for the president when the nation is involved in an international crisis. Two hypotheses have been offered for why this surge of support occurs: (1) patriotism, as individuals respond to a threat by identifying with an in-group, in this case the nation and its president; and (2) opinion leadership, as the information environment changes because opposition leaders fall silent or support the president during a crisis and a portion of the public follows those elite partisan cues. Through three waves of scholarship, empirical evidence has cumulated about whether, when, why, and how much people rally in response to international crises (although much of the evidence is based on dynamics within the United States). The public’s reaction to a crisis is not automatic; sometimes public approval for the president goes up; other times the president’s approval ratings go down. A positive rally effect is associated with a variety of conditions, such as how prominently the event is reported, whether the White House actively frames the issue, the amount of criticism from opposition elites, and whether the country is at war or has recently concluded a war. The sizes of such rallies are variable, but on average, rallies in response to the deployment of force or international crises are small. Only wars (or other spectacular events like a large-scale terrorist attack) consistently provoke sizable rallies and these big events elicit an emotional reaction from citizens and a self-identification with the nation. Both hypotheses—patriotism and opinion leadership—are helpful in explaining why rallies occur and why they taper off over time. The “diversionary theory of war” or the “diversionary use of force” is, for obvious reasons, a companion literature to the scholarship on rally effects. The logic is simple: if the public rallies around its leader in the face of external threats, then the possibility exists that politicians will intentionally create crises or deploy military forces or start wars to enhance their own political fortunes. Scholars have spent much effort trying to locate patterns of diversionary behavior by American presidents and other world leaders with inconsistent and inconclusive results. But the cumulative findings from the rally-'round-the-flag scholarship show that leaders can’t expect much of a public rally from any but the most spectacular of international crises, such as full-scale war. These findings from the rally literature help to explain the lack of consistent empirical support for diversionary theory.

Diversionary Theory of War and the Case Study Design

This article examines President Clinton’s decisions to launch military actions against Iraq in June 1993 and Kosovo in 1999. This study represents an attempt to test the descriptive accuracy and further developing the diversionary theory of war. Using a qualitative framework for diversionary use of force developed by another researcher, Ryan C. Hendrickson, this research examines and compares the two cases in order to determine whether or not these strikes appear to be diversionary in nature. This article generally suggests that empirical support for the diversionary argument in these cases is “mixed” but has more validity in the actions against Iraq. Two proposals to further develop qualitative tests for diversionary use of force are advanced.

North Korea and diversion: A quantitative analysis (1997–2011)

In this research I propose that the concept of diversionary theory provides at least a partial explanation for North Korea’s conflict activities. I examine and analyze the country’s data on diplomatic and military activities from 1997 to 2011 and argue that North Korea’s domestic conditions influence its willingness to engage in external conflict. I also examine the impact of such external influences as UN sanctions, leadership changes in the region, national capacities of the US, South Korea and Japan, and strategic military exercises on DPRK-initiated conflicts. This study provides insight into the activities of this reclusive state and also demonstrates useful techniques that can be applied to analyze other similarly closed nations. The findings suggest that there are identified links between internal conditions and the Kim regime’s aggressive actions between 1997 and 2011 in support of the diversionary argument. Concurrently, there is less evidence that North Korea’s hostile diplomatic and military activities are based on external pressures.