Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Debs, Alexandre
Abstract
This dissertation examines conflict, violence, and security data to provide systematic knowledge about three cutting-edge topics in international security. The first chapter of this dissertation analyzes cross-national battle-level observational data and American battlefield performance in Vietnam to investigate the effects of different military recruitment strategies on battlefield effectiveness. The analysis finds that conscript armies outperform their volunteer counterparts in standard casualty-based battlefield effectiveness metrics; this effect is further bolstered by democratic regime type and longer enlistment terms. The second chapter employs an original survey experiment fielded in mainland China to challenge the purported normative constraints on nuclear use in China suggested by classical area scholarship and recent public opinion surveys. Results from the experiment show that many Chinese citizens who do not prefer using nuclear weapons are nonetheless willing to rally behind their leaders’ decision to use nuclear weapons in a plausible conflict scenario. The third chapter conducts a comprehensive meta-reanalysis of quantitative studies on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), methodologically addressing excessive proportions of “zero” observations in their data that conflate a true absence of CRSV with its unknown presence. The meta-reanalysis refines existing results in the literature and provides substantial inductive theoretical contributions. Overall, this dissertation harnesses observational, experimental, and meta-analytic frameworks to systematically advance international security research, with important implications for military recruitment policy, public nuclear attitudes, and CRSV data and estimation.
Recommended Citation
Ju, Changwook, "Quantitative Studies on International Security: Military Recruitment and Effectiveness, Chinese Public Nuclear Attitudes, and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1356.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1356
