Browsing by Subject "Diplomacy"

Thousands of public records survive from democratic Athens. Nearly all of them are inscribed on stone (or more rarely metal). A century and more of study has revealed that these inscriptions were the tip of the iceberg. Beyond them was an apparatus of public records, kept on perishable media, that were central to the administration of the city. Call it the paperwork of democracy. What remains to be reconstructed are the processes by which this paperwork was created and the significance of those processes for our understanding of democracy. This dissertation examines the paperwork of making decrees, the basic legislative document in Athens, using literature, court speeches, and inscribed decrees to reconstruct the process by which decrees were written and reused in city politics. It argues that paperwork was done in the central institution of democracy, the assembly; that the orators better known in their capacity as masters of speech were also masters of the rules and discourses of decree-making; that in foreign policy these orators and their audience, the masses, brought the same rigor to documentary texts that they brought to giving and hearing speeches. In sum, where earlier researchers have assumed that paperwork had nothing to do with democracy, this dissertation shows that Athenians were as clever with paperwork as they were with oratory.

This dissertation examines U.S. diplomatic intervention for the purposes of conflict resolution. When are different diplomatic foreign policy tools used effectively? Understanding the effectiveness of U.S. diplomatic foreign policy in conflict resolution requires a multi-pronged approach that takes seriously the role of individual presidents, domestic political constraints and incentives, and the unique efficacy of different types of policy tools.

The dissertation uses an empirical approach, combining original observational data sources with survey results and supplementary illustrative case studies. I present the results of a survey of academic experts on the relationship between U.S. presidents and the foreign policy bureaucracy, demonstrating the variation across different administrations in the relationship and conduct of foreign affairs. I also collect and utilize an original dataset on U.S. diplomatic involvement in peace processes (U.S.D.I.P.P. data) in large-N statistical analyses of the president’s choices . A set of original survey experiments provide insight into how the public views foreign policy choices and outcomes. Finally, a set of cross-case comparisons and a case study of George Mitchell as the U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland provide evidence for the efficacy of special envoys as a diplomatic tool.

I find that U.S. presidents’ relationship with the foreign policy bureaucracy shape their use of diplomacy for conflict resolution, and also find evidence that the president is motivated by the ability to claim credit for successes and avoid blame for failures. Results suggest that the public does differentially assign credit and blame to the president based on context. I also demonstrate the particular mechanism by which special envoys can be an effective tool of conflict diplomacy. Overall, the dissertation provides a clear picture of the relationship between the U.S. president and executive branch and the conduct of peacemaking. U.S. diplomatic intervention for the purposes of conflict resolution is shaped by the relationship between the president and the foreign policy bureaucracy as well as the president's ability to claim personal political credit and avoid blame for policy failures. This incentive structure also maps onto the specific efficacy of diplomatic foreign policy tools, such as the use of special envoys.