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Fighting for Survival

The Fate of Leaders and the Duration of War

Department of Political Science, Duke University

This article examines how the postdefeat fate of leaders of different regimes affects their incentives to end or continue a losing war and how the outcome of war interacts with regime type to affect the leaders' postwar fate. Three regime types—democracies, dictatorships, and mixed regimes—and three fates—staying in power, losing power, and losing power with additional punishment in the form of exile, imprisonment, or death—are distinguished. Only leaders of mixed regimes are likely to lose power and suffer additional punishment whether they lose a war moderately or disastrously. Therefore, leaders of such losing mixed regimes have a disincentive to settle on moderately losing terms; they prefer to continue war in a gamble for resurrection. As a result, wars with losing mixed regimes last longer and produce higher numbers of battle deaths for both sides than other wars.

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