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Are you as old as you feel? A quantitative and qualitative analysis of leader age and foreign policy decision-making

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Are You as Old as You Feel? A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Leader Age and
Foreign Policy Decision-Making

by

Spiros Jason Giannaros

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Spiros Jason Giannaros
ii

Dedication

This Dissertation is dedicated to my family, friends, and my Advisor, Patrick James, for
all their help, support, and advice over the years.
iii

Table of Contents

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………ii

List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………………..iv

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………….……….v

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………...…vi

Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 2: Donald Trump: A Study of Leader Age, Verbal Complexity, and Cognitive Decline..4
Aging, Speech, and Cognitive Decline……………………………………………5
Theoretical Foundations, Data, and Methodology……………………………….10
Results and Discussion…………………………………………………………..15
Appendix…………………………………………………………………………24

Chapter 3: Fidel Castro: Calming with Age or Eternal Firebrand?...............................................25
Castro’s Ascendancy and Early Regime…………………………………………26
An Openly Socialist Castro Regime……………………………………………..33
Castro’s Later Years and Rapprochement……………………………………….40
Chapter 4: Francisco Franco: Forever Risk-Neutral?....................................................................48
Francisco Franco’s Youth……………………………………………………….50
Franco’s Rise to Total Power and Role in Guernica…………………………….52
Franco’s Later Years and Appointment of a Successor…………………………60

Chapter 5: A Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of Leader Age and Regime Type on
International Crises……………….…………………………………………………63
Age and the Political Behavior of Leadership...…………………………………65
Theory and Methods……………………………………………………………..68
Results……………………………………………………………………………71
Discussion………………………………………………………………………..78
Appendix…………………………………………………………………………91

Chapter 6: Conclusion and Implications for Future Research…………………….……………..97

References…………………………..…………………………………………………………100

iv

List of Tables

Table 2.1: Donald Trump’s Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Age -Logistic Models..…………17
Table 2.2: Donald Trump’s Age and Flesch-Kincaid Scores: OLS Models…………………….20
Table 2.3: Trump’s Age and LIWC Analytic Scores……………………………………………22
Table 5.1: Descriptive Statistics of Main Predictor and Outcome Variables……………………81
Table 5.2: Results of Logistic Regression on Triggering Entity……………………………...…87
Table 5.3: Results of Ordinal Logistic Regression on Gravity………………………….……….89
Table 5.4: Variable Descriptions……………………………………………………….………..91
Table 5.5: Factor Levels of Categorical Predictors After Re-grouping………………………….95

v

List of Figures
Figure 2.1: Trump Age and Flesch-Kincaid Score………………………………………………21
Figure 2.2: Residuals…………………………………………………………………………….24
Figure 4.1 – Guernica……………………………………………………………………………57
Figure 5.1: Forest Plot Showing Results of Logistic Regression Model Where Trigger Crisis
Entity was the Response Variable and External was the Reference Level………………………96
Figure 5.2: Forest Plot Showing Results of the Ordinal Logistic Regression Model Where
Gravity or Perceived Gravity of Threat Indicator was the Response Variable………………….97

vi

Abstract
Does age affect the way that political leaders make foreign policy decisions, particularly
when so much risk and uncertainty is involved? Past research (Horowitz, McDermott, and Stam,
2005) suggests that a political leader’s age is a significant factor in the onset and escalation of
militarized international disputes. In this Dissertation, I extend the analysis of age’s role in
foreign policy-making to international crises, rather than just full-fledged militarized disputes, to
gain a more nuanced understanding of the role age plays, while controlling for variables like
regime type and tenure. I also conduct qualitative analyses on three different national leaders
who served past the age of seventy – Donald Trump, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco. Using
the International Crisis Behavior dataset, which includes 476 international crises involving 1052
crisis actors between 1918 and 2015, I analyze the effect that age has on one’s propensity to
trigger or escalate an international crisis, as well as its effect on the gravity of threat perceived by
the leader (measured in the ICB data on an ordinal scale, from purely economic to an existential
threat). I find significant evidence that as leaders age, they are more likely to engage in or
escalate international crises, and that they will be more likely to perceive a higher gravity of
threat in a given crisis situation.

1

Chapter 1: Introduction
To what extent does a leader’s age really matter when it comes to the way they interpret
information and make foreign policy decisions? In the United States and other countries, both
democratic and authoritarian, we have seen many leaders over the age of 70 take the helm of a
nation. The US’ two most recent presidents have in fact been above this age threshold (whose
significance will become clearer in our quantitative analyses). Voters often use age as a heuristic
that projects their own interpretations of age onto a politician (e.g. Biden or Trump being in a
state of cognitive decline). We thus see two competing perspectives begin to emerge – one
views elderly leaders as more of a potential problem due to the natural cognitive decline that
comes with age and/or other forms of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease; the other viewpoint tends
to put into practice the adage that “with age comes wisdom,” therefore seeing older leaders as
potentially more level-headed and with greater knowledge of the world and the institutions under
which they operate.
This dissertation will address the dearth of literature on the role that age may play in
affecting how a leader approaches policy-making. While acknowledging a large number of
individually confounding factors (e.g. personal history and genetics), we use a mixed methods
approach – both qualitative and quantitative – to point toward an answer to the question of
whether age really does bring “wisdom” in the context of policy-making, and especially in the
arena of foreign policy, where urgent and difficult decisions based on risk assessments must
often be made.
Though we had originally posited that the cognitive decline that inherently follows old
age may lead to an increase in risk-acceptant behavior (such as initiating or escalating an
international crisis), we ultimately find that, despite some individual cases where elderly leaders
2

do increase their risk-acceptant behavior quite a bit in office, the “age brings wisdom” adage
appears to have some truth to it in dealing with political crises.
Our case studies show a wide variety of trajectories: Donald Trump did exhibit some
significant increases in his risk-acceptance as he got older; Fidel Castro appears to have followed
the trajectory our quantitative data points to, in which a younger leader is more brash and
becomes less risk-acceptant as he or she ages; and Francisco Franco appears to have changed
very little in his risk orientation over the decades of his rule (though this comes with the caveat
that our data on Franco was limited by our inability to access the Spanish National Archives
during the COVID-19 pandemic).
Nevertheless, when we aggregate our data to include hundreds of observations over many
decades in the international arena, it becomes much more apparent that leaders become less
likely to initiate or escalate international crises as they get older. In fact, we find, using data
from the REIGN database and the International Crisis Behavior Project database, that a given
leader becomes 5.8 percentage points less likely to initiate or escalate an international crisis for
each year they age, ceteris paribus. Even in a democratic system with terms limited to a few
years, this cumulative effect is quite significant.
The dissertation will proceed as follows: first, we will analyze the case of Donald Trump,
which also provides us with the theoretical foundations for our original, ultimately rejected
hypothesis (that older leaders would be more likely to initiate or escalate an international crisis);
then we will look at how Fidel Castro aged into a more even-tempered leader in both his
decisions and rhetoric; next, we will look at the seemingly unique case of Francisco Franco,
whose risk-orientation showed little change over the decades he spent in office; then, we will
conduct and discuss a broader quantitative analysis of leader age and foreign policy decision-
3

making in the context of international crises, where we also discuss theory behind age and
political behavior of leaders; and finally, we will conclude with some final thoughts and
implications for future research.

4

Chapter 2: Donald Trump: A Study of Leader Age, Verbal Complexity, and
Cognitive Decline

One of the most consistently-discussed aspects of our current political class is its
relatively high age, compared with previous generations – though this can partly be explained by
the fact that politicians now live longer lives. It is worth noting that 2020’s presidential election
was dominated by septuagenarians; three of the top contenders, including the incumbent himself,
were over 70 years old at the time of the 2020 primaries: Donald Trump (74) on the GOP side, as
well as Democrats Bernie Sanders (78) and Joe Biden (77).
Lau and Redlawsk (2006), in a series of experiments on voters and what undergirds their
decisions, found that only a candidate’s age has significant effects across their statistical
analyses, and is associated with less internal information searching, less use of memory, and less
accurate memory regarding the candidates. Given what is now commonly understood to be fact –
that age brings with it a host of neurologically degenerative conditions that directly affect one’s
cognition and thought processes – it is worth asking ourselves whether as voters we should be
using the age of a presidential candidate as a heuristic for their potential performance in the
office. Indeed, political scientists like Robert Gilbert have previously proposed implementing a
Working Group on Presidential Disability, as a “less draconian” alternative to actually using the
25
th
amendment, which critics note requires vice presidents and cabinet members to move
against their president – something not very likely to happen given their patronage from the
president himself.

To do so, we must first determine whether political elites experience these cognitive
declines at the same rate, and to the same magnitude, as does the average citizen. Only then will
5

we be able to adequately analyze the effects of age on policy decision-making at the level of the
political elite, using both qualitative and experimental methods.
To analyze Trump’s speech as a function of his age, I used transcripts from every
interview Trump gave between 1980 and 2017, using both logistic and ordinal least squares
(OLS) models to determine age’s effect on two different measures of speech complexity. I find
that, as predicted in the relevant neurology and gerontology literatures, Trump’s speech increases
in complexity until just before age 60, at which point an exponential decline in the complexity of
his speech patterns begins, continuing through the end of 2017.
This chapter will proceed as follows. First, I will briefly analyze some of the relevant
literature. Then, I will describe the theoretical foundations for our hypotheses, data, and
methodology behind the research design. Finally, I will present my results and discuss their
potential implications, pointing to future research that will build upon the empirical evidence
provided in this chapter.

Aging, Speech, and Cognitive Decline
This literature review will be brief, which itself reflects an almost total dearth of
scholarly writing on the effects of age on political elites. To date, there exists – as far as I have
been able to find – just one academic paper (Alesina, Troiano, and Cassidy, 2015) that directly
analyzes the differences between younger and older politicians, using data from local Italian
elections. Employing regression discontinuity methods, they “find that younger politicians are
more likely to engage in political budget cycles of the following type: they spend more in
preelection years and finance this extra spending with increased transfers from higher levels of
government.” They attribute this differential in behavior between the young and old to different
6

career incentives. Though we have to be careful in ascribing external validity to what could
feasibly be a phenomenon of Italian politics, this paper points at least indirectly to the notion that
politicians at different ages may be willing to face different levels of risk.
There are much broader implications to this point, if true, such as whether the risk-based
implications of prospect theory are more, or less, extreme for younger politicians as compared
with older ones (see McDermott, 1998; Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). Age may have broader
effects on politicians’ perceptions of risk (Jervis, 1976), but we cannot assess these effects
without establishing quantitatively to what extent our political class – if not the world’s political
class – is directly and cognitively affected by aging, and how this compares with the average
citizen.
The only book exclusively analyzing aging politicians (McIntyre, 1988), is taken entirely
from a psycho-analytic perspective. Unfortunately, its analysis highly impressionistic, offering
extremely bold assertions with little in the way of evidence, aside from arguing from the general
notion that if we assume neo-Freudianism accurately reflects our reality and social relationships,
then their conclusions are self-evident. For example, McIntyre makes the somewhat baffling and
weakly-supported argument that Menachem Begin’s relationship with his ardent supporters in
Israel took a wholly maternal shape and character. This type of analysis, though interesting to
consider, is not going to bring us empirically closer to the truths we seek. Such studies, at best,
might be accessed for generation of hypotheses.
McDermott wrote perhaps the only political science book exclusively dedicated to illness
and politicians, entitled Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision-Making (2007). This
book goes into significant detail, using archival evidence, about the ways that serious illnesses
affected leaders such as JFK, FDR, and Woodrow Wilson not just as people, but as policy-
7

makers. While this book is useful, and one could argue that at least for FDR and Wilson, their
health issues late in life were likely age-related, the book does not delve into the neurological
decline that people experience and how it affects their words and (ultimately) behavior, which is
the subject of my dissertation.
Horowitz, McDermott, and Stam (2005) study the relationship between a leader’s age and
willingness to initiate or escalate violent conflict, using the Militarized Interstate Disputes, and
controlling for regime type. They find that, as the age of leaders increase, they are more likely to
both initiate and escalate conflicts – with the important caveat that in personalist regimes, the
effect seems to be the reverse. They consider both biological (decreasing testosterone with age)
and institutional (older leaders are more likely to have consolidated political influence) factors,
finding little evidence for the former and robust evidence for the latter. However, two factors
they did not consider in their analysis are neurobiological changes associated with age, and
changes in one’s orientation to risk that may be associated with age or length of tenure.
Perhaps most relevant, Berisha et al. (2015) analyzed President Reagan and President
Bush Sr.’s press conferences, tracking key word counts specifically associated with the cognitive
declines Alzheimer’s disease brings. They find that, as he aged, President Reagan had a
significant increase in the number of “conversation fillers” (e.g. um, well, so, etc.) as well as the
use of non-specific nouns (e.g. something, anything, etc.), combined with a simultaneous decline
in the number of unique words he used over time. They did not find any statistically significant
trends in these dimensions for President Bush, indicating that, unsurprisingly, we will find some
variation in the effect age has on leaders’ cognition, due to variation in both genetic and
environmental or contextual factors. One limitation of this study is that it only focuses on press
conferences, whose content is for the most part planned out in advance – though the presence of
8

unexpected questions allows a president to speak extemporaneously, these effects may be
overshadowed by noise from the scripted portions of the conferences. My analysis avoids this
methodological problem to a degree, though not completely, by exclusively analyzing Trump’s
unscripted interviews.
Traditionally, speech patterns in adulthood have been conducted by testing elderly
peoples’ abilities to do specific actions such define words (Wechsler, 1981), ascribe synonyms
(Shipley, 1940) or retrieve words rapidly from memory (Borkowski, Benton, and Spreen, 1967).
As Kemper and Sumner (2001) note, “across a wide range of longitudinal and cross-sectional
tests, vocabulary has been shown to increase throughout the middle adult years but to decline in
late adulthood.” Fisher, Franklin and Post (2014) note that “Executive function shows a
significant decline beginning at age 60, and this is associated with age-related atrophy of
prefrontal cortex, cerebral white matter disease, and cerebral microbleeds.’ Thus, we would
expect to see a decrease in cognitive, and therefore speech-making, abilities begin roughly at the
age of 60. Hasher et al. (1991) proposed the Inhibitory Deficit theory, in which they use
experimental evidence to argue that age-related deficits in cognition are directly related to
deficits in inhibitory cognitive processes. Inhibitory cognition occurs when the brain filters out
irrelevant stimuli to the task at hand. This chapter provides evidence that peoples’ age-related
decline in inhibitory cognitive abilities is a likely cause of age-related declines in overall
cognition.
In a more comprehensive form of testing, Kemper and her colleagues have conducted
several experiments on older adults’ use of “complex syntactic constructions in oral and written
writing samples.” Thus, instead of looking at their ability to complete one specific language-
9

related task, they analyze their ability to complete a more realistic, comprehensive writing (or
reading comprehension) test. Brébion (2003) conducted a series of experiments to understand the
deficit in working memory and language comprehension among the elderly, finding that age-
related differences in working memory are both structural and functional. Kemper (1987) used
experiments to analyze the frequency of different types of embedded clauses in a longitudinal
sample of adults’ writings that were taken from their diaries over seven decades, finding that 70-
and 80-year olds produced few sentences with embedded clauses, reflecting a decline in the
cognitive complexity of their writing. Others (Britton and Tesser, 1982) find that because
reading requires resource-intensive computations in the mind, reading comprehension both in
terms of process and results varies by the availability of knowledge, or working memory.
Finally, it is worth nothing that there is evidence that elderly people have some compensatory
capacity to deal with the age-linked deficits in cognition, such as shifting their reading goals as
they age or allocating relatively more comprehension time for longer or less frequently-used
words.
We can therefore see that the underlying processes behind the cognitive decline may
differ from person to person, but the empirical evidence points very strongly to age-related
cognitive deficits, beginning around age 60 and accelerating through one’s 70s and 80s.
These deficits can be related to a number of physiological and neurological changes that occur in
the human body as it ages, making phenomena like working memory or the ability to process
cognitively complex language in a given period of time much more difficult. In foreign policy
decision-making, where decisions more often must be made with high degrees of risk and
uncertainty, the effects of age may be most visible. It is easy to see, therefore, why we would be
interested in how these changes affect the risk-orientation and policy outcomes of those in
10

charge, particularly when they skew at or above the age that these cognitive changes are shown
to take place. For example, in the 113
th
Congress, the average age of House members was 57,
and the average age of Senators was 62. The broader question is whether these changes occur in
exactly the same way for political elites as they do for the average citizen.

Theoretical Foundations, Data, and Methodology

The above-mentioned literature on aging and cognitive decline, the dynamics of decision-
making in leaders under “normal” parameters, and their relationship to speech patterns together
provide the theoretical foundation for my empirical study. As I have established, at the most
basic level, there is a (varying) amount of cognitive decline that occurs in all humans as they age,
which accelerates in the senior citizen stage of life. This decline in cognitive function may be
related to any one or combination of a host of factors: decreasing available cognitive resources,
motivation, working memory, changes in self-regulated language processing, or decreased
complexity in thought itself. It is important to note here that these factors are not necessarily
evidence of a form of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. This chapter is not designed or intended
to “diagnose” the president, but rather to provide an empirical data point relating to aging and the
cognitive capacities of our leaders.
All of that, of course, brings up its own public policy questions: Should political elites
have limitations on the maximum age at which they can engage in public service? In other
words, should there be a forced retirement age for politicians, in the name of the common good?
For example, while both the US and Canada have stipulated lifetime tenure for their Supreme
Court Justices, the Canadian Supreme Court has had a mandatory retirement age of 75 since
1927.
11

Being a politician, of course, is not the only profession for which these results could
prove relevant. A number of fields requiring either high degrees of focus and cognitive
complexity, or long periods of cognitive focus could be affected, which do not have mandatory
retirement ages. Some, like the FBI, do have maximum entry ages, however (in their case, 37).
Other potential professions of concern include air traffic controllers, police, and truck drivers or
heavy machine operators. It is interesting that in the case of air traffic controllers, they are in
fact offered the ability to retire with an immediate annuity and no reductions for age, as young as
55 years old. Clearly, the FAA is trying to incentivize early retirement for people in such a vital
profession, where mistakes could cause hundreds or even thousands of deaths.
Given what we know about speech patterns and the decline of neuro-linguistic
complexity that age brings to them, I will have a few specific expectations, based on the textual
analysis of Trump’s interviews over the course of his adulthood (beginning in 1980, when he
was already in his late 30s). First, I would expect that over time, and with age, I will find a
reduction in the amount of cognitively complex language used by the speaker.
As Taucszik and Pennebaker (2010, p. 35) argue, “Prepositions (e.g., to, with, above),
cognitive mechanisms (e.g., cause, know, ought), and words greater than six letters are all also
indicative of more complex language. Prepositions, for example, signal that the speaker is
providing more complex and, often, concrete information about a topic.” Thus, I expect that all
three of these categories would be positively correlated with cognitive complexity, and
negatively correlated with age. These cognitive mechanisms that are positively associated with
linguistic complexity include the following metrics, as defined by the Linguistic Inquiry and
Word Count (LIWC) software: preposition use, article use, cognitive speech (e.g. cause, ought),
and words that are six letters or longer. Notably, the polysyllabic word count is not included
12

here, but will be a prominent feature of another measure I will use to test the robustness of my
model.
Conversely, many types of words have negative correlations with the sort of analytic
thinking a political leader must exhibit in order to adequately carry out their job function. These
include: personal and impersonal pronouns, auxiliary verbs (e.g. do, has, have), conjunctions,
adverbs, and negations (e.g. not).
Thus, assuming the relationships between the variety of word categories described above
and linguistic complexity are valid, and that these measures of linguistic complexity correlate
with cognitive function (or conversely, its decline) I can use the LIWC’s “Analytical Thinking”
composite variable as a primary dependent variable in my empirical analysis. It is a factor-
analytically derived variable. Disassembled, the variable’s algorithm is equal to: 30 + article +
preposition - personal pronoun - impersonal pronoun – auxiliary verb – conjunction – adverb –
negation. The unit weighting at the beginning allows for the resulting number to be typically
positive, ranging from 0 to 100 (in percentiles, based on a normal distribution). Pennebaker et al.
(2014) provide empirical justification for this additive model’s validity: “The factor analytically
derived component score from the single factor was highly correlated with the simpler additive
model, r (25,973) = .98, allowing us to simply add the percentage of articles and prepositions and
subtract the remaining six function word categories. The unstandardized Cronbach's alpha of the
8-item index was .71.” Thus, we can be confident that the components of this variable combine
to make a valid measure of linguistic complexity.
Hypothesis 1: Analytic Thinking values will be negatively associated with age.
Though I have confidence in the LIWC’s Analytic Thinking variable as an accurate
measure, the main model for this analysis uses a different and more commonly-utilized measure:
13

the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease score (FRES) test. In using the FRES test to measure linguistic
complexity in speech, I will employ an ordered logit model, where the dependent variable is
equivalent to the grade level required to comprehend the statement. I will also use OLS to
analyze the continuous form of the FRES variable, to see whether the cut points given by their
defined “grade levels” are appropriate for this data. The weighted formula (Flesch, 2016) for the
FRES test score is:
206.835 – 1.015 × (total words / total sentences) – 84.6 × (total words / total syllables).

As we can see, this metric is significantly different than the Analytic Thinking variable,
in that polysyllabic word use and sentence length are the measured parameters. While the former
variable is intuitively more robust in its analysis of word types used, FRES is a very commonly
used measure in the social sciences (particularly in education) and can better analyze sentence
structure rather than its lexical components.
The following are the categories represented by this test and the scores associated with
them (again, scaled from 0 to 100):
 5
th
Grade: 100 – 90.0
 6
th
Grade: 90.0 – 80.0
 7
th
Grade: 80.0 – 70.0
 8
th
to 9
th
Grade: 70.0 – 60.0
 10
th
to 12
th
Grade: 60.0 – 50.0
 College level: 50.0 – 30.0
 College graduate level: 30.0 – 0.0

The scores encompassed by each grade level are not evenly distributed, particularly at the higher
levels of education. This makes intuitive sense, as college implicitly encompasses four years of
ostensible progress in education, while the college graduate level accounts for any level of
reading ease above college. Thus, our FRES category is ordinal and will have seven categories.
14

Hypothesis 2: Higher grade levels of reading ease, as measured by FRES, will be negatively
associated with age.
Since we are just dealing with one man’s words, there is little by way of independent
variables for which to control. Of course, the age variable is the most relevant to my empirical
analysis, as its coefficients (in both the OLS and logistic models) will provide evidence – or the
lack thereof – for a statistically significant relationship between age and either of my dependent
variables measuring linguistic complexity.
I am adding a fixed effects (FE) binary variable to control for any changes in Trump’s
speech that directly resulted from his ascendancy to the Presidency – whether intentional, as in
attempts to act “presidential”, or un-intentional, because of the stress of the job itself. I would
expect to find evidence of the former above the latter, as there is little empirical evidence that
stress has lasting (rather than short-term) effects on one’s speech patterns, with the exception of
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) cases – and there is nothing in Trump’s biography to
indicate that he might have gone through PTSD at any point in his life. The variable will be
equal to 1 for any date including and after Trump’s inauguration on January 20
th
, 2017, and will
equal 0 for all dates before that. In order to test for potential exponentiality of the relationship
between the dependent variables and age, I also include iterations of the model with age-squared
as an independent variable.
Thus, we end up with two nearly identical models, one OLS version and one logistic
version for each speech complexity metric:
LIWC Analytic Thinking Score = α + Β1*Age + Β2*Age-Squared + Β 3*FE(post-
Inauguration) + ε
15

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level = α + Β 1*Age + Β2*Age-Squared + Β3*FE(post-Inauguration) +
ε
The data, obtained from the website factba.se, includes every interview Donald Trump
gave between 1980 and the end of 2017 – a total of 440 complete interview transcripts, spanning
38 years and 1.6 million words. Furthermore, the data are not limited to print or newspaper
articles – they include transcripts of audio and video from radio and television interviews,
respectively. This removes any doubts we might have if we were limited to interviews in print,
for example, as it captures potential variation that might exist (intentionally or not) in Trump’s
speech patterns that is related to having cameras on him, knowing that he’s being broadcast on
the radio, or conversely, from knowing he isn’t on camera or being recorded live.
Though it is important to remember that this president represents just one data point, this
data point appears to support the general hypothesis about aging and cognitive decline, and
allows us to answer specific questions in the case of our current president and potentially his
current cognitive state, as we attempt to both understand and predict his political decisions.

Results and Discussion
My results point to several interesting findings. First, I ran the ordered logit model, as
described in the methodology section, using the above given cut points for Flesch-Kincaid grade
levels.
It is worth noting that, of all four ordered logit models tested, even when we control for
exponential effects of age and any possible post-Inauguration fixed effects on Trump’s speech
patterns, only one single independent variable was statistically significant at the p < 0.05 level.
16

This was the age variable in the first model, which includes nothing more than age among its
independent variables. If we were to interpret this statistically significant variable in model 1, we
would say that each additional year of life is associated with a 0.03-unit decrease in the log-odds
of Trump speaking in a sentence in a higher grade level, according to the Flesch-Kincaid
algorithm.
Standard errors are in parentheses, and when the age squared variable is added to the
model, it retrieves standard errors that are “not a number” (or negative in value, thus yielding
imaginary numbers when one takes the square root). This is a function of the way the algorithm
is designed – it is made to retrieve a positive result in the vast majority of cases, but not in all
cases. For example, in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, the first chapter contains one particularly
long and complex 599-word sentence (which I will not quote here in the interest of saving
space), that has a Flesch-Kincaid score of -515.1.
31

31
Proust, M. (1913). "Swann's Way." In Search of Lost Time. Translated by Lydia Davis. Viking Adult, 2003.
17

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4
Age -0.030
*
0.021 -0.028 0.005

(0.014)

(0.015)

Age Squared

-0.000

-0.000
Post-Inauguration
FE
-0.231 -0.213

(0.480)

AIC 994.060 995.979 995.814 997.782
BIC 1027.225 1037.435 1037.271 1047.530
Log Likelihood -493.030 -492.989 -492.907 -492.891
Deviance 986.060 985.979 985.814 985.782
Num. obs. 29476 29476 29476 29476
***
p < 0.001,
**
p < 0.01,
*
p < 0.05
Table 2.1: Donald Trump’s Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Age
-Logistic Models

The mere fact that only one of the variables has any sort of statistical significance in the
four ordered logit models, and none of them have jointly significant variables, on first glance
implies that there is simply no real statistical association between Trump’s age and complexity of
speech (again, treated here as a proxy for complexity of thought), which would imply further that
aging folks – or at least aging elites – either experience declines in cognitive function much
18

slower or later in life than the average person. Alternatively, they may be able to make up for
cognitive deficits in certain areas through efforts like focusing more intensively on what they are
saying. Thus, we would have little reason to worry about having a 79-year old President Sanders,
for example. But is this the whole story?
The alternative story, if true, could be that collapsing the 100-point Flesch-Kincaid scale
itself to 7 categories (or in this case, “grades”) is itself inappropriate for this model. What if cut
points are not appropriate for this model at all, and the dependent variable should be treated as
continuous? This might be the case, for example, if the data were largely clustered within one
grade level, thus keeping the models from having enough variation to observe statistical
significance. To test this supposition, I decided to run the Flesch-Kincaid model as a continuous
dependent variable, which will help us to see whether the “grade level” model is in fact
appropriate for the analysis we are trying to conduct.
On running this model as an OLS regression, a completely different picture of the data
emerges. Converting the model from ordered logistic regression to ordinary least squares
regression gives us a more comprehensive view of the changes in Donald Trump’s speech
patterns that are taking place over the course of two-plus decades. The first and most obvious
difference we see is that we have gone from just one independent variable in one of our models
being statistically significant at the p < 0.05 level, to every single independent variable being
statistically significant at the p < 0.001 level, with the exception of the post-Inauguration fixed
effects binary variable in model 4. Comparing models 3 and 4 implies that the change in speech
pattern and complexity that occurred during Trump’s first year in the presidency can be
explained by the exponential effects of aging itself. It is also worth noting that between models 3
and 4, the Adjusted R-squared value increases almost 5-fold. Since model 2 and model 4 are
19

identical, with the exception of the statistically insignificant fixed effects binary in model 4, and
happen to hold identical Adjusted R-Squared values, this implies that model 2 is likely the most
properly specified of the four.
Unsurprisingly, the size of the intercept is entirely dependent in each model on whether
age squared is included. When age squared is added to model 1’s bivariate linear regression
model, the Adjusted R-squared value increases 11-fold. Thus, if we were to interpret the
coefficient estimates of model 2, we would see that an additional year of life for Donald Trump
is associated with a 0.7-point decrease in his expected score on the Flesch-Kincaid scale, while
this decrease interestingly has a positive exponential coefficient of 0.006. Given that exponential
relationships in data are more difficult to interpret over almost forty years of time (particularly
when there are opposing signs for the linear and exponential coefficients), it will be much more
useful to graphically visualize model 2’s predicted Flesch-Kincaid Score for each year of
Trump’s life.
Examining this graph, we can easily see why the ordered logit models were
inappropriate; the vast majority of Trump’s public speech during his adult life has been clustered
within the college graduate “grade level” (scores between 30.0 and 0.0). This is interesting first
because Donald Trump – by most accounts prone to run-on sentences and rambling – actually
speaks with a high level of complexity, as measured by Flesch-Kincaid. This points to one
possible weakness of Flesch-Kincaid as a measure of speech complexity; its strong emphasis on
the length of sentences may retrieve a measured level of complexity that is higher than it
intuitively “should” be, particularly in the case of someone like Trump, who is known for using
long sentences.

20

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4
(Intercept) 2.743
***
23.932
***
2.917
***
24.054
***

(0.213) (1.291) (0.219) (1.317)
Age 0.021
***
-0.714
***
0.017
***
-0.718
***

(0.003) (0.044) (0.003) (0.045)
Age Squared

0.006
***

0.006
***

(0.000)

(0.000)
Post-Inauguration
FE
0.275
***
-0.038

(0.079) (0.081)
R
2
0.001 0.011 0.002 0.011
Adj. R
2
0.001 0.011 0.002 0.011
Num. obs. 29476 29476 29476 29476
RMSE 4.089 4.070 4.088 4.070
***
p < 0.001,
**
p < 0.01,
*
p < 0.05
Table 2.2: Donald Trump’s Age and Flesch-Kincaid
Scores: OLS Models
21

This shows evidence of self-regulated language processing, and it is entirely possible that Trump
uses excessively long sentences as his own form of compensatory allocation for his cognitive
deficits.

Figure 2.1: Trump Age and Flesch-Kincaid Score

However, I would still make the argument that, even if the emphasis on sentence length
(in addition to polysyllabic words) of the Flesch-Kincaid metric leads to scores that indicate a
22

higher level of speech complexity than we think is actually the case in the real world, the shape
of the pattern of change itself is striking in the way that it matches the neurology and
gerontology literatures’ predictions almost perfectly. If we were to tell a story here, it would
essentially be that our complexity of speech and thought continues to increase right up until
about age 60, as predicted, and from then on begins to decrease in an exponential fashion. In
Trump’s case, the apex of his speech complexity was at about age 58, and from there on we see
an exponentially-increasing decline in predicted Flesch-Kincaid values from the model.
The secondary model, using the LIWC’s Analytic Thinking variable as the dependent
variable, did not yield any statistically significant results.
(1)
Analytic Thinking
Age 0.189
(0.56)

Age Squared -0.00142
(-0.50)

Intercept 21.94
*

(2.22)
N
R-Sq.
29476
0.000
t statistics in parentheses
*
p < 0.05,
**
p < 0.01,
***
p < 0.001

Table 2.3: Trump’s Age and LIWC Analytic Scores
This likely indicates that the type of language used as one ages may not change as much as the
structure and polysyllabic nature of the sentences one uses over time. Since Flesch-Kincaid is
much more widely-used in the literature, and the two metrics are measuring different things, I do
not believe that the statistically insignificant LIWC model takes anything away from the
explanatory value of the Flesch-Kincaid OLS models.

23

Conclusion
Using a comprehensive, longitudinal sample of Donald J. Trump’s public interviews
between 1980 and 2017, I find significant evidence of relatively small but sustained and
exponential cognitive decline, as reflected in his speech patterns, beginning right before age 60,
which the gerontology literature predicts (Hypothesis 2). Though the results for Hypothesis 1,
using the LIWC Analytic Thinking metric, were statistically insignificant, the high statistical
significance of age and age squared in determining the Flesch-Kincaid scores of his sentences
indicates that sentence complexity and polysyllabic word use are likely strongly associated with
a political leader’s age.

24

Appendix
Figure 2.2: Residuals

25

Chapter 3: Fidel Castro: Calming with Age or Eternal Firebrand?

Fidel Castro presents us with another interesting case study to analyze, as he is one of the
few national leaders in recent history who helped bring his country to the brink of nuclear war
(with the aid of his political benefactor, Nikita Khrushchev). In this chapter, we will analyze the
evolution of Castro’s decision-making as he aged, using both his speeches and behind-the-scenes
discussions and maneuvering from his political advisors and subordinates. While there are
thousands of hours of Castro’s famously turgid public speeches, they are unfortunately not
digitized and therefore cannot be subjected to the same textual analysis as with Donald Trump.
By digging into the machinations and thought processes undergirding some of Castro’s most
historic decision points, we begin to see a much different picture from that of Trump.
While Castro did not appear to portray the same decline in speech complexity that we
saw with Trump as he aged, we do find that Castro began his decades in power with a much
brasher and more belligerent attitude toward foreign policy, and, though he kept some of this
brashness for all of his life, we do find evidence that his last two or so decades of rule were much
less intentionally provocative than the first two.
In the following chapter, we will provide a broad outline of Castro’s time in power, while
aiming to use specific events, speeches, decisions, and first-hand commentary from his friends
and advisors to establish a continued trajectory of risk-orientation over the course of his regime.
Through tracing his life in this way we will provide significant evidence that Castro followed a
trajectory from a higher risk-acceptance in his youth to a somewhat lower risk-acceptance in the
later years of the regime.

26

Castro’s Ascendancy and Early Regime
Born in 1926 in the Oriente or “Eastern” province (the opposite side of Cuba from
Havana) to two relatively wealthy parents, he had a relatively happy childhood (Quirk, 1993)
despite being a constant target of bullies for not having been confirmed in the Catholic church,
and for having two unwed parents – both considered big social taboos in Cuba at the time. In
fact, the Castros named their son after a rich political figure, Fidel Pino Santos, in the hopes that
he might become a politician himself one day (Quirk, 1993). While he did often face disciplinary
action at the Jesuit school he attended, he became an avid and well-known debater as he reached
his teenage years – usually taking the viewpoints of the priests in the school, and being openly
anticommunist (Szulc, 1986). These views would obviously change over time, and in response to
events after the revolution, but it is interesting to note Castro’s early admiration for authority.
Castro’s first foray into left-wing rebellion came in 1947, when he joined a student group
that aimed to help overthrow the dictatorial government of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic. By this point his speeches had taken an overtly left-wing and anti-American tone
(Coltman, 2003). His political activism continued through the early 50s, when Castro co-founded
a law firm that primarily aimed to assist the poor. Castro actually met the dictator he would one
day overthrow, Fulgencio de Batista, during a failed campaign for the House of Representatives
in 1952. Batista allegedly offered the young Castro a place in his administration if Castro’s run
were successful (Bourne, 1986). This would be moot, however, as Batista overthrew the
democratic government just months after this meeting took place.
32

32
The Batista regime began with a coup in 1933, which ended Cuba’s brief period of democratic governance and
ushered in a period of puppet dictators that Batista was controlling, until his first presidential term in 1940. He
decided to run again in 1952 but instituted a military coup before the elections. He held power from 1952-1959,
27

By early 1959, the scenario was inverted, and Castro, along with a small group of
revolutionaries including Che Guevara, successfully overthrew the Batista dictatorship – to the
shock of much of the world. While the small militia he and Guevara controlled did have support
from the USSR, much of the revolution’s success can be attributed to the geography of the
country, and Castro’s willingness to cross the extremely difficult Sierra Maestra mountain range
and march the entire length of the country from South to North, through stark wilderness, to
eventually reach Havana after a series of attacks on military barracks and other government
facilities along the way. The internal support for the revolution stemmed from the corruption of
the Batista regime, along with its repressive tactics toward dissent and well-known ties with
organized crime.
The US had been attempting to thwart this revolution out of fear that the Castro regime
would be socialist and friendly to the Soviet Union, a fear that would prove valid in the ensuing
years. He delivered his first major speech (Deutschmann and Shnookel, 2007) as Prime Minster
of Cuba, “On the Triumph of the Revolution,” on January 2, 1959, when Castro would declare:
The military forces must unconditionally obey the people’s orders and be subject
to the people, the constitution and the laws of the republic. If there is a bad
government that embezzles and does the wrong thing, the only thing to do is wait
for the next election when that bad government can be turned out of office. That is
why in democratic, constitutional regimes, governments have a fixed mandate.
The function of the military is not to elect governments, but to defend the law and
to guarantee the rights of citizens.

These words (though we must always take Castro’s words with a grain of salt) seem to belie a
revolutionary who has not committed to socialism or communism yet, and certainly appears to
consider himself to be in the tradition of democratic leadership. It is likely that Castro was

with support from US businesses and the government until 1958, when the US recalled its ambassador and
rescinded its support of Batista.
28

internally sympathetic to socialism or Marxism but decided not to openly align with international
communist movement until after reaching power, as this could reduce the broad-based support
from citizens who wanted a return to democracy and an end to dictatorship. Castro’s first move
in foreign policy was an attempt to diplomatically win over the US government in April 1959,
but President Eisenhower refused to meet him, and his meeting with Vice President Richard
Nixon did not go well either, setting up a long-term contentious relationship between the two
(Quirk, 1993).
The events of the ensuing 2-3 years would coincide with a dramatic change in Castro’s
temperament, attitude toward the US, and self-declared ideological disposition. While Castro
spent most of 1959-60 consolidating his leadership, punishing old and new perceived enemies,
and placing his revolutionary comrades in high administrative positions in the new government,
the US was mounting a furious campaign to rid itself, and the world, of this potential Soviet ally
less than 100 miles off America’s shores. The Church Committee, which was set up in the mid-
1970s to investigate alleged abuses by a number of government institutions, including the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and
Internal Revenue Service, substantiated a total of eight assassination attempts on Castro between
1960-65 (US Senate, 1976).
33

However, a retired chief of Cuban intelligence, Fabian Escalante, would later estimate
that over 600 attempts were made on Castro’s life on the part of various US governmental
agencies. This includes an estimated 38 attempts made solely during the end of the Eisenhower

33
After several disturbing revelations (and theories) came out about the US government’s behavior during the Cold
War, the Church Committee conducted a wide-ranging investigation into government misconduct, revealing
attempts to assassinate a slew of world leaders acting against the US’ interests. It also infamously brought Project
MK Ultra, which involved drugging and experimenting upon unwitting citizens, as well as COINTELPRO, which was a
surveillance program primarily directed at civil rights organizations in the US.
29

administration, from 1959-61 (Escalante, 2006). The attempts got increasingly absurd in their
scope and daringness, leading to the infamous idea to have a CIA agent slip Castro an exploding
cigar. There is some uncertainty about how far the CIA actually went with this idea, but
proposing it in itself shows that US intelligence were willing to go to great lengths to rid
themselves of Castro.
Whether the number is eight or 600+, we cannot discount the effect that learning of even
a handful of these operations may have had on Castro’s psyche. The increasingly paranoid and
belligerent rhetoric he would display over the next several years, particularly in the wake of the
failed Bay of Pigs invasion, may have been in part a reaction to these assassination attempts. In
his first public speech after the Bay of Pigs, Castro aimed his fury at the United States, saying
that
Imperialism plans the crime, organizes the crime, arms the criminals, trains the
criminals, pays the criminals and the criminals come here and kill seven working
people and then calmly go back and land in the United States…This is because
what the imperialists can’t forgive is the fact that we are here, and what these
imperialists can’t forgive is the dignity, the firmness, the courage, the ideological
integrity, the spirit of sacrifice and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people.
This is what they can’t forgive, the fact that we are here right under their very
noses, and that we have brought about a socialist revolution right under the nose
of the United States!
And we are defending this socialist revolution with these guns! We are defending
this socialist revolution with the same courage that our anti-aircraft artillery
showed yesterday in riddling the attacking planes with bullets! (Deutschmann and
Shnookel, 2007, p. 192).

Interestingly, the speech he gave in response to the Bay of Pigs, quoted above, was also the first
time he publicly proclaimed that the Cuban revolution was socialist in character.
However, the above events do not in and of themselves change one’s inherent risk
orientation. One can conceivably be risk-averse or risk-acceptant and still make such
proclamations, but it stands to reason that the man who overthrew the Batista regime following a
30

perilous and often deadly campaign through the jungle, which few expected him to win, would
lie more on the risk-acceptant side of that spectrum. As with the above statement, Castro’s early
proclamations were likely more a function of a man attempting to consolidate power and avoid a
counter-coup in the early days of revolutionary Cuba than of a man who truly believed in
constitutional democracy (whether socialist in character or not) above all else.
Still, there were already indications that Castro was moving away from anything that
could be called democratic, as his government began to censor even left-wing papers that did not
accord with Castro’s perception of himself and the revolution. In Castro’s words (Franqui, 1984),
when asked what rights writers and artists had in the new Cuba, stated simply, “Inside the
revolution everything; outside the revolution nothing,” which certainly gives us a hint into the
authoritarian mindset Castro was adopting, or had already adopted (Ripoll, 1985). Nevertheless,
it soon became relatively obvious which direction the regime was heading in, as it nationalized
all US-owned businesses in 1960 – not something you do if you want to foment liberal
democracy, or truly believe that Cuba can have a stable relationship with the US.
By the time that Cuba found itself at the fulcrum between two hegemonic superpowers,
the US and the Soviet Union, Castro had clearly had an eventful couple of years. He worked to
consolidate his power and eliminate political criticism of his regime, while simultaneously
contending with a never-ending operation on the part of the US to either depose or assassinate
him. For the purposes of this work we will not delve too deeply into the dynamics of the Bay of
Pigs invasion, but it becomes clear soon after this event, if it weren’t already, that Castro was
aligning his government squarely with the Soviet Union, and therefore, by definition, against the
US. At this time, the Soviet Union was undergoing a period of de-Stalinization under Nikita
Khrushchev, although this did not prevent the Cold War from escalating during the 60s and 70s.
31

Khrushchev, though certainly less brutal and repressive than his predecessor, was nevertheless
willing to take the risks associated with aiding a country hostile to the United States, just 90
miles from its shores.
This evolution accords both with neorealist and bandwagoning theory (Wright, 1942), as
Castro soon sought to curry favor with the Soviet Union, but it doesn’t necessarily explain the
increasingly flamboyant and aggressive character of Castro’s proclamations during this time. In
fact, it was in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion that Castro officially proclaimed the
revolution a socialist one, famously ending his April 16, 1961 speech with “Long live the
working class! Long live the peasants! Long live the humble! Long live the martyrs of our
country! May the martyrs of our country live forever! Long live the socialist revolution! Long
live a free Cuba. Homeland or death!” (Deutschmann and Shnookel, 2006, p.193).
The Bay of Pigs invasion, originally proposed by members of the Eisenhower
administration, was a planned land invasion of Cuba by armed dissidents and ex-patriots
primarily in Florida. It was launched from boats in Nicaragua and Guatemala on April 27, 1961
and involved over 1,400 armed paramilitaries. However, it was doomed to fail from the start,
both as a broad idea (invading a country with such a small force) and in its implementation,
which lacked proper air support for the paramilitary troops, who were already too small in
number and not well-trained. Janis (1982) argues that the combination of a provocative
situational context and high group cohesiveness within the foreign policy wing of the Kennedy
administration led to groupthink, in which this desire for group cohesiveness and relatively low
tolerance for dissent agreed to a plot in the Bay of Pigs that was doomed to fail from the start.
Thus, unsurprisingly, the Bay of Pigs in combination with numerous assassination
attempts, helped to give Castro a final push into the Soviet Union’s arms, though whether this
32

alliance would have happened anyway is certainly worth debating. Months before the Cuban
Missile Crisis, in June 1962, Fidel’s brother Raúl, the Minister of the Armed Forces at that time,
came to Moscow to talk about nuclear weapons, though this was kept secret until after the
meetings had ended (Quirk, 1986). It remains a mystery which individual first came up with the
idea to put nuclear weapons in Cuba, and whether it was the Cubans or the Soviets who first
suggested the idea. Khrushchev claimed in his memoirs (Khrushchev, Sergei, 2007) that he came
up with the idea during a visit to Bulgaria in 1962. However, on another occasion he also stated
that it was the Cubans who requested the weapons.
Fidel always discussed the imposition of nuclear weapons in Cuba as a defensive
position, fearing another “imperialist” attack by the US in the months after the Bay of Pigs
invasion, and insisting to his new ally that more significant military support was needed.
Decades later, he would tell Tad Szulc, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, that he
preferred the risks that allowing the weapons would bring, “whatever they were,” to what he saw
as the larger and more immediate risk of waiting for an inevitable US invasion of Cuba (Szulc,
1986). In this conversation, he also referred to the situation as the Soviet Union handing him a
“nuclear umbrella” (Quirk, 1986). Carlos Franqui, at the time a close confidant of Castro, later
noted that Castro seemed to be “possessed with a sense of elation, as though he were involved in
earthshaking events” (Franqui, 1984). These statements by Castro provide a direct glimpse into
the brash and highly self-confident leader’s early orientation toward both risk and national
security. Castro viewed himself as being at the center of world events, which at the time he
arguably was, and furthermore that in working with Khrushchev, he could shape them as well –
and he was willing to assume a very high level of risk with an inevitable nuclear standoff
surrounding his country.
33

An Openly Socialist Castro Regime
As may already be evident from his previous decisions and behavior, in the terms of
Leadership Trait Analysis, Castro was high in self-confidence and had a high openness to
contextual information, combined with a high belief in his ability to shape world events
(Hermann, 1999).
In retrospect, one could certainly argue that he was in some ways a pawn of world events
that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were largely orchestrating, but it does not appear
that Castro viewed himself or his decisions in this way. Khrushchev, dealing with both internal
problems and external ones such as the installation of Jupiter missiles in Turkey and increasing
tensions with China, which viewed the USSR as a “paper tiger,” likely underestimated the US’
reaction to placing nuclear weapons on a hostile country’s mainland, just 90 miles away from US
shores. This may have been his “out,” as Quirk (1986) argues – a way to reassure the world
about the inevitable victory of Marxism-Leninism. A similarly confident leader, Khrushchev was
able to persuade senior Soviet officials that the US would back down in the face of the threat of
nuclear annihilation.
On October 14, 1962, U-2 surveillance planes returned to US bases with irrefutable
evidence that the Soviets were constructing ballistic missiles inside Cuba, beginning the standoff
that would lead the world closer to nuclear war and mutually assured destruction than it had ever
been. Kennedy gave a speech on October 22, declaring that the Soviets had denied any offensive
missiles had been moved to Cuba, and warning that any nuclear weapon launched from Cuba
would be seen as an attack by the Soviet Union, engendering a “full retaliatory response” (Quirk,
1986, p.430). Carlos Franqui was working on the next day’s issue of Revolucion, when Fidel
34

burst into his office to dictate a statement he wanted published in the next issue. Most
importantly, Castro denied that there were any “offensive” missiles in Cuba and accused
Kennedy of “trying to justify a criminal attack” (Quirk, 1986, p.431). He seemed, as Quirk
(1986, p.431) argues, to “welcome the confrontation with the United States.” This initial reaction
between Castro and his confidant Franqui provides further evidence for Castro’s youthful risk-
acceptance, if not belligerence.
While Castro was not directly responsible for Khrushchev’s decision-making and
willingness to bring the world to the brink of a nuclear showdown, it is nevertheless the case that
the USSR did not have to prod him into it. It was a development he welcomed, at least early on
in the potential conflict. Clearly, a combination of fears about having his regime overthrown by
agents or allies of the United States played a role as well, especially after the failed Bay of Pigs
invasion, but it is difficult to argue that Castro was purely acting on these fears alone, given
Franqui’s above statement about “welcoming” confrontation with the United States.
Castro spent much of the rest of the 1960s building upon his reputation as a socialist
firebrand, and helping to foment revolutionary activity across Latin America – primarily in Peru,
Bolivia, and Argentina, in what Che Guevara called his “Andean Project” (Coltman, 2003). He
even authorized Che to travel to the Congo to help train revolutionaries to fight the US-backed
dictatorship there. He continued to turn his gaze to the world stage in the early 1970s as well,
possibly in part to distract the Cuban public from the economic stagnation they were
experiencing. In another relatively brash move, Castro decided to attend the Fourth Summit of
the Non-Aligned Movement in Algiers in 1973, despite protests from many other attendees that
Castro was obviously aligned with the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. However, it would be that
35

very economic stagnation (which the US was facing to a lesser degree as well) that would play a
role forcing Castro’s hand in beginning an attempt to rebuild some ties with the United States.
By September of 1977, both Castro and the US were willing to resume some limited
economic ties, representing a slight thawing of the heated actions and rhetoric of the 1960s.
Additionally, the restrictions on US citizens’ travels to Cuba expired in 1977, and President
Carter chose not to renew them.
From this point in time on, it becomes more and more clear that Castro was seeking some
form of rapprochement with the superpower he had spent so much time antagonizing in public.
The resumption of limited economic ties in 1977 occurred when he was still relatively young, at
51, though it is important to recall that by this point he had been at the helm of Cuba for the
better part of three decades. It is also important to note that the US economic embargo against
Cuba, which originated in 1958 to ban the sale of arms to the Batista regime, did have a
significant economic effect on Cuba that could be felt by both the regime and its citizens. The
economic embargo prevented American businesses from conducting any trade whatsoever with
Cuba, which cut off a significant portion of its pre-revolutionary economic activity. It was
further strengthened in 1960 to include everything except food and medicine.
One could certainly argue that the early thawing Cold War played a role in encouraging
such rapprochement, and it likely did, as we see fewer bellicose statements directed explicitly at
the United States over time in Castro’s regular and infamously lengthy speeches to the Cuban
public (Coltman, 2003). Additionally, many of Castro’s former associates and advisors mark the
1967 death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who was vital to both the revolutionary effort and a
stauncher Communist than even Castro became, as a major turning point (or at least the
beginning of one) in the way Castro approached foreign policy. Guevara was killed while trying,
36

unsuccessfully, to foment a revolution in Bolivia. This was his second international trip with the
stated purpose of starting a Marxist revolution, the first being in the Congo, also unsuccessful.
While these actions accord with Guevara’s more ideological and revolutionary stance,
Castro originally wanted Guevara at his side in government, in a series of high-level roles.
Guevara’s first role, interestingly, was as President of the Central Bank of Cuba, from 1959-
1961. While this role was short-lived it briefly overlapped with his succeeding role in the Cuban
government, as Minister of Industries, from 1961-1965. He left his roles in Cuban government,
to the chagrin of Castro, to provide support based on his knowledge and experience to rebels in
the Congo, during the latter part of the Simba Rebellion. This was against Castro’s wishes
(Franklin, 1997), but it is possible that the lack of proximity to such a charismatic ideological
influencer may have mitigated Castro’s own youthful bellicosity, or at least made it less
politically problematic for Castro to later pursue forms of rapprochement with the United States.
The 1977 expiration of the ban on travel to Cuba, along with President Carter’s decision
not to renew the ban, provided Castro with some political space to pursue further bilateral
negotiations with the United States in 1978, an event later referred to as El Diálogo (The
Dialogue). These discussions first occurred in secret between President Carter and members of
the Cuban government (Bourne, 1986), at the behest of some young Cuban-American groups
who desired better diplomatic relations with Cuba. Castro was also becoming more aware of his
regime’s international reputation for engaging in various human rights abuses, as more and more
global intellectuals began to disavow him and his government (Garcia, 1996). This was likely
not for purely political reasons, as intellectuals had no real effect on the domestic situation in
Cuba at the time due to the regime’s censorship and isolationism. Thus, reputational concerns –
not just for those of his regime but for himself as a leader on the global stage, too – likely played
37

a major role in these dialogues. However, it is difficult to imagine the brash Fidel Castro of the
early 60s as being willing to negotiate with the country he viewed as his enemy. As Castro
stated to the Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba on December 20, 1980,
Cuba is not opposed to finding a solution to its historical differences with the
United States, but no one should expect Cuba to change its position or yield in its
principles. Cuba is and will continue to be socialist. Cuba is and will continue to
be a friend of the Soviet Union and of all the socialist states.

This sort of rhetoric contrasts quite a bit with earlier speeches (quoted above), in which Castro
takes a slightly more diplomatic tone toward the US and the west in general. It would not mark
the end of his “patria o muerte” proclamations, but the tonal shift is remarkably strong and
would only grow less hostile as the years and decades proceeded.
Highly secretive discussions between representatives of Castro and President Carter,
building on the momentum of the 1977 change in US-Cuba travel policy, ultimately did result in
Cuba agreeing to release thousands of political prisoners in August 1978. While Castro wanted a
more open and public dialogue, Carter refused to publicly acknowledge any role in these
negotiations, out of fear for the domestic political implications they may have had once the
American public found out.
By April 1980, the United States had accepted roughly 10,000 former political prisoners
from Cuba, the majority of which ended up settling in Southern Florida. During this time,
thousands of Cuban exiles also returned to Cuba to visit their loved ones as well. However, there
was one unintended consequence of these negotiations that Castro did not foresee – these return
visits by Cuban exiles allowed them to bring luxury goods into the country that most Cubans had
never seen before (Deutschmann and Schnookel, 2007). This led directly to a wave of public
political discontent arguably to a stronger degree than at any point since very early in the regime.
38

Obviously, Castro and his cadre had failed to take into account the secondary effects of this sort
of contact between Cuban exiles and the people they know in Cuba.
Further complicating the political situation for Castro at the start of the 80s was the
infamous Havana Peruvian Embassy crisis. On April 4, 1980, the Peruvian embassy in Havana
granted diplomatic protection to over 10,000 Cuban citizens who had requested it. At the time,
Peru was being run by a military-controlled government, led by President Francisco Moralez-
Bermúdez. Interestingly, Peru’s own civil war with the Maoist Shining Path movement would
begin just a month after this proclamation on the part of Peru. For Castro, this was a major
international problem to confront. Essentially, should those who are against the regime, and
would likely end up political prisoners anyway, be allowed to leave? Castro ultimately came to
the shrewd conclusion that this was indeed the better option for himself and his regime, as it
accomplished two simultaneous objectives. First, it removed potential sources of political
discontent and counter-revolutionary activity from the island nation, and second, it allowed
Castro to present his regime to the world as one that has no need for political prisoners, cares for
humanitarian concerns, and is willing to dissidents seek a different form of government.
Thus, Castro had both political and psychological reasons for his next major foreign
policy move, announcing that anyone who wished to leave Cuba could do so. This led to the so-
called Mariel boatlift, named after the Port of Mariel from which the exiles departed, and which
occurred between April 15, 1980 and October 31, 1980. During this time, roughly 125,000
Cubans (and 25,000 Haitians) arrived, mostly by boat, to the shores of the United States. These
departures were not without violence or controversy, however. Castro’s regime organized so-
called “acts of repudiation” in which these people who wished to leave the island were beaten,
forced to wear humiliating signs, and faced other forms of degradation (Garcia, 1996). While
39

these actions were not highly publicized outside Cuba until later on, they showed that on the
domestic front, Castro was still willing to be ruthless with his citizens in order to protect his
regime. Another insidious aspect to the internal machinations behind this decision is the fact that
the Cuban government worked to make it as easy as possible for those who were deemed socially
undesirable to leave the country. This primarily applied to homosexuals or those with non-
gender-conforming behavior, who were often given a stark choice between accepting exile from
Cuba and jail time in Cuba. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this also led to a small wave of Cubans who
would present themselves to the police or the government and falsely declare themselves to be
homosexual in order to more easily leave the country.
In the end, this probably made little difference to Castro, given that he wanted both social
and political “undesirables” to leave his country. This was not a particularly politically risky
decision to make, as it again had the effect of reducing the number of dissenters in Cuba.
Additionally, it gave Cuba and Castro more rhetorical room to make the claim that they are
allowing people to exercise their human rights in leaving – though we now know that even the
so-called amnesty Castro offered to those who wanted to leave Cuba often came with acts of
humiliation and violence that would certainly run counter to the narrative of a pro-human rights
regime.
This would prove a short-lived state of affairs, however, as President Reagan re-instituted
the ban on travel to Cuba in April 1982 (Franklin, 1997), with some moderations – it now
allowed exceptions for travel by United States governmental officials, journalists, researchers,
and US citizens who had close relatives in Cuba. The 1980s were a period where tensions
between the USSR and US rose as President Reagan drastically increased military spending
while publicly calling on the Soviet Union to bring down the Iron Curtain separating Eastern and
40

Western Europe. Tensions would similarly rise between Cuba and the US from this point until
the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as Reagan took a hardline stance on Cuba, in contrast to his
predecessor. Proxy battles continued, as Castro helped prop up the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and
Reagan famously became involved in the Iran-Contra affair, through which profits from the sale
of weapons to Iran were funneled to support the right-wing paramilitary “Contras,” who were
battling the Sandinistas for control of Nicaragua. In a July 1983 speech to the nation, Castro
would characterize the Reagan administration’s foreign policy as “openly warmongering and
fascist” (Quirk, 1986, p. 818). While never openly threatening the US during this time, Castro
reverted to a more hostile posture in reaction to the change in policies between Carter and
Reagan.

Castro’s Later Years and Rapprochement
By the time the early 1990s had arrived, the world had gone through some seismic
changes that directly affected Cuba. Namely, its former patron, the Soviet Union, collapsed,
leaving a large part of the world in a strange new situation of both freedom and uncertainty.
While many expected that Castro’s regime would not last into the 21
st
century without the Soviet
Union, its unique geographical and domestic situation positioned Castro to keep his grip on
power in a post-Soviet world. He also shrewdly made the decision to refrain from supporting the
1991 coup attempt in the Soviet Union, which aimed to overthrow the budding democracy and
reestablish the Communist Party in power (Coltman, 2003). Castro also declared, in the wake of
the Soviet empire, that Cuba was entering a “Special Period in the Time of Peace” (Quirk, 1986).
This would prove to be another Orwellian misnomer, however – though it was a peaceful time
41

for Cuba that lacked the overtly belligerent tone of Castro in the 60s and 70s, the “special
period” was in fact quite disastrous for the country and its people.
Because the Soviet Union had essentially propped up Cuba economically and militarily
for decades, and because Castro, along with most of world opinion, was not expecting such a fast
and dramatic collapse of the Soviet empire, Cuba was completely unprepared for the economic
hardships that were to follow. In contrast, the lack of military support had surprisingly little
effect on the country’s security situation, as Castro had stopped publicly threatening the United
States – though his constant criticism of his neighbor of course continued. However, Castro was
smart enough to realize that there was no longer any genuine threat from the United States, as
America simultaneously was aware that without the Soviet Union backing it, it posed little to no
military threat to the mainland.
During a speech he gave shortly before the collapse of the USSR happened in earnest,
Castro clearly saw the writing on the wall and began to pivot his rhetorical stance from one of
defeating the capitalist and imperialist enemy, to a more defiant-yet-defensive posture that he
would hold onto for the rest of his time in office. For example, he argued that (Deutschmann and
Shnookal, 2003, p. 439-41):
I believe that revolution cannot be imported or exported; a socialist state cannot
be founded through artificial insemination or by means of an embryo transplant.
A revolution requires certain conditions within society, and the people in each
individual nation are the only ones who can create it…We Cuban communists and
the millions of our people’s revolutionary soldiers will carry out the role assigned
to us in history, not only as the first socialist state in the Western Hemisphere but
also as staunch front-line defenders of the noble cause of all the destitute,
exploited people in the world.

In the first portion of the quote, we can see a complete reversal of Castro’s previous stance on
engendering revolution in other countries, most likely as the result of the realization that Cuba
42

did not have the strength to create new socialist revolutions on its own. Even the Soviet-
subsidized efforts that Che Guevara made in places like Bolivia and the Congo were unable to
achieve their objectives. Perhaps Castro was speaking from learned experience here in making
the argument that revolution cannot be imported or exported, as his efforts to do so had
decisively failed. Regardless, this statement shows a somewhat sobered Castro outwardly
recognizing the limits of his ability to spread revolution as the Soviet empire collapsed. The
second part of the quote shows evidence of that aforementioned rhetorical pivot – no longer was
Cuba the exporter and supporter of socialism throughout Latin America and beyond, but it was
now merely a “front-line defender” of the ideology. One could even argue that, at least publicly,
Castro was making a turn away from offensive realism of the 1960s and toward a defensive
realist position on global politics and Cuba’s role in it.
Once the USSR’s collapse had happened in earnest, Cuba saw a dramatic decrease in its
economic prospects. In the next several years through 1995, the country saw a drastic 35%
decline in its Gross Domestic Product, reflecting just how dependent the country had been on
Soviet support and subsidies (Franklin, 1997). Just as importantly, Cuba lost access to the huge
oil imports it received from the Soviet Union, which were not renewed when the Russian
Federation reconstituted itself as a political entity. This also led to a 20% decrease in overall
consumption in Cuba, reflecting a major economic downturn. Though the United States was in
fact sending some aid to Cuba during this time, this aid dried up with the implementation of the
1996 Helms-Burton Act, which strengthened the economic embargo against Cuba, along with the
potential penalties for violating it (Coltman, 2003).
Castro responded to the economic crisis by instituting a series of austerity reforms, which
drastically reduced the size of the government from its previous state, closing 15 separate
43

ministries. Most relevant is the fact that Castro cut military spending by 86% during this time
and redirected much of it toward health care and other welfare services (Coltman, 2003). It is
certainly not common for dictators to essentially eliminate their standing military from the
national budget, even, perhaps especially, during periods of seismic change and economic
difficulties. As Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003, p.129) argue, there are “differential
opportunities to realize personal pecuniary gain afforded by autocracy and democracy.” Most
importantly, they find that small-coalition polities like juntas and dictatorships have lower
economic growth rates and more opportunities (and motivations) for kleptocracy than in polities
supported by a large, democratic coalition.
Clearly, Castro would not have made such a large change to the provision of public
services if he genuinely believed that there was a chance the United States would attempt to
invade Cuba or overthrow its government again, even if he knew it would end up causing more
hardship for his own people. Such hardships would be relatively easy for Castro to blame on
external forces that were, he would argue, trying to isolate the first socialist country in the
Western Hemisphere. As Mintz (1993, 2004) argues, the first step that leaders take before
making a policy decision is rationally eliminating those choices which would harm his or her
political status.
That said, it is nevertheless important to note that even with all of this new revenue
available to bolster the social safety net, it was simply not enough to counter the drastic
reductions the country saw in GDP and aggregate consumption. Thus, we saw severe food
rationing in the absence of the former Soviet Union’s consistent food aid. Interestingly,
however, and very much in contrast to what happened in Russia, the average life expectancy of
Cubans actually had a slight increase of about 0.6 years between 1990 and 1999 (Franklin,
44

1997). Some researchers attribute this to the simultaneous declines in cardiovascular disease that
the country saw during this time period, though presumably most Cuban citizens would rather
maintain a higher daily caloric intake and the comfort it provides to them and their families.
If he believed that eliminating most of the Cuban military budget were going to threaten
his personal status, or that of his government’s regime, it would be among the first policy options
he took off the table. Instead, he took the chance and pivoted to a more defensive posture, as
discussed above, in order to further ensure that no other hostile country would try to take
advantage of the situation and institute or foment a coup against him. Though he could have
taken the more brash and belligerent policy of a country like North Korea, which has only
bolstered its military at the expense of the domestic safety and health of its citizens, he chose not
to, and this is further indicative of a leader who is seeking out conflict much less than he did
during the early years of his tenure in office.
During the 1990s, on the international security front, Cuba was relatively quiet and did
not do anything major to change its status in the world. Castro’s foreign policy during this time
embraced environmentalism and the battle against climate change (Gott, 2004), while using this
as a rhetorical hammer against the United States, arguing that it is the world’s largest polluter
and supporter of anti-environmental policies (Whittle and Santos, 2006). He also strongly
supported the campaign against South African apartheid, and personally attended Nelson
Mandela’s historic presidential inauguration in 1994 (Bourne, 1986). What is most notable
during this time period is the relative lack of concern that Castro showed for his country’s
security situation. Economically, he made the somewhat major decision to legalize the US dollar
amidst other economic reforms like allowing the formation private farmers’ markets.
45

He did, however, take the occasion of an October 1995 speech to the United Nations to
lament the fact that the global arms race had not in fact ended with the death of the Soviet Union
(Bourne, 1986). He went on to ask,
How long must we wait for this slaughter to end? The Cold War ended but the
arms race continues, and military and nuclear hegemony is perpetuated. How
long must we wait for a complete ban on all weapons of mass extermination, for
univeral disarmament, for the elimination of the use of force, arrogance, and
pressure in international relations?

We should not necessarily take this as evidence of Castro recognizing an incoming security
dilemma for the simple reason that he did not re-militarize his country after gutting military
spending in the early 90s. And, logically, with the United States having its so-called “unipolar
moment” (Krauthammer, 1990), Castro knew that the US had no reason to be overtly belligerent
to Cuba, even if it did continue some of its intelligence operations in the country.
The 2000s saw a change in the ideological make-up of Latin America, with many
countries moving staunchly leftward, Venezuela and its new leader Hugo Chavez being chief
among them. This does not appear to have been a mere alliance of convenience, though we
cannot ignore the fact that the Venezuelan government signed an agreement to send up to 90,000
barrels of oil per day to Cuba (Azicri, 2009). Since the Soviet Union had been its primary source
of oil, this was indeed a major boon to the still-recovering Cuban economy. Castro formed a
close friendship with Chavez, which took on the characteristics of a mentor-mentee relationship
in many ways (Azicri, 2009). While there certainly was organization and some regional
integration of these newly socialist states like Venezuela and Bolivia with Cuba, Castro was
largely content to allow Chavez to be the firebrand, particularly in response to the Iraq War,
which both countries vehemently opposed. This is not to say he did not continue his open
46

criticism of the United States and its domestic and foreign policies, but rather that they did not
have the same confrontational tone as the words he used as a younger leader.
Castro did show solidarity, along with most of the world, with the United States after the
tragic events of 9/11. Nevertheless, he somewhat prudently predicted that this would lead to a
new period of aggressive foreign policy on the part of the United States in order to combat
terrorist threats around the world (and particularly in the Middle East). During a speech in
Havana on September 22, 2001 (Deutschmann and Shnookel, 2007) Castro would go on to say
that
On Thursday, before the US Congress, the idea of a world military dictatorship
was put forward that would have the exclusive rule of force, irrespective of
international laws or institutions…There would be only one boss, only one judge,
only one law.
All of us have been ordered to ally either with the US government or with
terrorism. Cuba, with the moral right that comes from being the country that has
suffered the most and the longest from terrorist actions, the country whose people
are not afraid of anything, because there is no threat or power in the world that
can intimidate them, proclaims that it is opposed to terrorism, and opposed to
war.

This is an interesting speech, as it rhetorically ties the United States to what he believes were acts
of terrorism perpetrated against his own country, without explicitly calling the US out. It reflects
the changed security situation and outlook Castro was facing; there is little reason to doubt that
he had genuine concerns about the War on Terror and how it would be prosecuted, but there is
also no reason, given the way it was framed and the explicit targets the War on Terror had, that
Castro would be personally afraid for his regime. If anything, he likely knew that this would
serve to distract the United States from its longstanding hostilities with Cuba for the foreseeable
future. Thus, while he still took the time to subtly take a shot at the United States’ foreign
policy, he did so within the context of expressing outrage at the events of 9/11 and opposition to
terrorism in general.
47

Castro’s increasing health problems set the stage for February 24, 2008, on which date
the National Assembly of People’s Power would unanimously vote Raul Castro in as the next
President of Cuba.
34
Many were uncertain about whether the Castro regime could survive the
death of its creator, but with the familial links and history fighting in the revolution that his
brother Raul had, it appears that Fidel’s comfort with transitioning power to him was not
misplaced. The question remains as to whether Raul’s death will lead to more significant unrest
in Cuba.
As we see, over the course of his tenure in office and beyond, Castro moved slowly but
steadily from a brash, belligerent, offensive realist leader to one that was less eager to start or
foster conflict with the United States or its allies. Though his ideological differences and
constant stream of criticism never went away, Castro’s changes in foreign policy orientation
between the 1960s and 1990s does provide support for the results that we will see in chapter 5, in
which leaders have a statistically significant decline in their likelihood to start or escalate an
international crisis the older they get, ceteris paribus. As the quantitative data predicts, Fidel
Castro began his regime as a much more brash leader who was willing to accept a higher level of
risk in the decisions he made, and over time he became more willing to work somewhat
diplomatically with the United States. This thawing of tensions, especially in the decades since
the Cold War ended, culminated in the 2016 agreement between President Raul Castro and
President Obama, in which some travel restrictions and elements of the economic embargo were
mutually lifted for the first time since the 1970s.

34
During the mid-2000s, Castro’s health began to decline precipitously, and he first delegated
power to his brother Raul in order to undergo surgery for intestinal bleeding in 2006. He would
largely remain out of the public eye from this point until he published a letter in February 2008,
in which he announced that he did not feel he could remain in power as President of the Council
of State and Commander in Chief given the totality of his health issues.
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Chapter 4: Francisco Franco: Forever Risk-Neutral?
In choosing our case studies, we wanted to have a somewhat representative sample of
regime types, which, as we will see in our main quantitative chapter, plays a significant role in
determining a global leader’s relative orientation toward risk in the context of international
crises. Thus, with a leader from a developed democracy (Trump) and a leader from a communist
dictatorship (Castro), we also chose to analyze the life and decisions of Francisco Franco, who
oversaw a fascist – or at least fascist-adjacent – dictatorship for decades in Spain.
However, unlike our other two case studies, gathering first-hand data on Franco’s
decision-making to attempt to process trace his political behavior over time has proven to be
difficult-to-impossible, depending on the subject. This is partly an unfortunate outgrowth of the
Spanish government’s continued delays in releasing thousands of Franco-related documents to
the public through the Spanish National Archives. We had planned to visit the Archives anyway
to see what we could find, or if we could find anyone to interview; however, the COVID-19
pandemic made this impossible. This analysis will therefore be truncated by these limiting
factors, and we will not be able to make any strong evidential determinations about Franco in
this version of the research. Our hope is to be able to access these archives in future years, so that
we can conduct a proper in-depth analysis of Franco’s time as leader of Spain.
However, even from the limited impressionistic evidence we’ve been able to use, we
have some evidence that Franco may be a different type of exception to our hypothesis (that
older leaders are more likely to take risks on the international stage due to cognitive changes that
affect their risk orientation) – Franco seems to be a relatively risk-averse person throughout his
life, and we are not able to find evidence of a continued trajectory toward or away from risk-
acceptance as Franco aged. Thus, Franco provides us with a good reminder that, despite the
49

seemingly-definitive quantitative evidence we will provide that younger leaders are actually
more brash and risk-acceptant, every large data set will have anomalies. Similarly, Trump
provides some evidence that he has experienced a cognitive decline that has affected his behavior
and decision-making, he appears to be an outlier in the data as well. Here we will provide a brief
overview of the “evidence of absence” of significant changes in his risk orientation over time,
but we accept that we are inherently limited by a lack of first-hand data to analyze.
As Payne and Palacios (2014) argue of the Franco literature,
Little of this enormous literature is objective, most of it tending toward one
[ideological] extreme or the other. The real Franco is elusive, all the more so
since he left few accessible personal papers…he has left almost nothing that
reveals his more intimate life, and nothing that clarifies the crucial moments of
his career or how he reached his most important decisions” (3).

This dearth severely limits any potential analysis we can conduct on Franco’s decision-making
processes and how they evolved over time. Paul Preston has further argued that, despite a large
volume of writing on Franco, his scholars and authors have generally not taken him seriously
enough as an individual to make sense of him (Preston, 2011). To this, we would only add that it
is difficult to take any academic subject seriously when the evidence is still being safeguarded by
the Spanish state, presumably out of fear of stirring up still-present antipathies between the
ideological (and actual) descendants of the Spanish Civil War. While it may simply be the case
that Franco was a very private person and did not want many personal papers or letters to be seen
by the public after his death, it nevertheless remains the case that what little primary evidence
exists has not been treated as public information by the state.
This chapter will proceed as follows: first, it will outline Franco’s early years to
determine whether any events from his youth might have affected his risk-orientation as an adult,
trace his rise to power, and then focus on two specific events and Franco’s role in them: the
50

bombing attack on Guernica, Spain, and his ultimate decision to relinquish power to a
constitutional monarch, Juan Carlos I.

Francisco Franco’s Youth
While there is little evidence that Franco’s childhood had a significant effect on the way
he approached real or perceived conflict as a leader, there are a couple interesting points to note.
The marriage of Franco’s parents was a union between a free-thinker and Spanish naval
administrator, Nicolas Franco Salgado Araujo, and a much more conservative, “moralistic”
(Preston, 2011) Maria del Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade. It, perhaps unsurprisingly, was
not a successful marriage, despite bearing five children, including Francisco. Unlike our other
two case studies, Franco grew up in a very middle class setting, while surrounded by wealthier
and higher-class naval officers. At the time, the administrative sector of the military and navy
were seen as inferior to those who actually served in the officer corps (Palacios and Payne,
2014). Franco’s father ultimately transitioned to the officer corps, reaching the equivalent rank
of Vice Admiral by the time he retired. Perhaps the most formative experience in Francisco’s
life was his father’s abandonment of the family, which the younger Franco never got over, and
which pushed him toward a strong attachment with and affection for his mother. Of course,
Franco might have turned out to be a very religious Catholic conservative regardless of this
sequence of events, but the correlation between the two is certainly noteworthy.
Despite this antipathy toward his father, Franco intended to continue the centuries-long
tradition of his paternal ancestors and serve in the navy as well. However, the Spanish-American
War and the loss of Spanish colonies it brought with it decimated the Spanish navy and put a halt
51

on Spanish recruitment to the navy roughly until the beginning of World War I (Jensen, 2005).
Instead, and certainly to the consternation of his father, Franco decided to join the army.
In 1913, at age 20, Franco was transferred to the Regulares, which were a combined
infantry of Spanish troops and colonial Moroccan troops. He fought there for almost a decade,
and once received a grievous stomach shot, from which he almost did not recover (Jensen, 2005).
He continued climbing the ranks of the army to Colonel with little of note occurring by way of
major decisions. By 1925, he was entrusted with leading shock troops in France’s invasion of
the Republic of the Rif, spelling its imminent demise, and for this was promoted to Brigadier
General in 1926, making him the youngest General in all of Europe at the time (Payne and
Palacios, 2011).
In 1931, Spain held municipal elections that most saw as a vote on the monarchy itself
(Jackson, 2012), and after the Republican-Socialists took large victories in the cities and
provincial capitals, King Alfonso XIII decided to leave the country in exile, which directly led to
the formation of the Second Spanish Republic. Franco still sincerely believed that most Spanish
citizens still supported the monarchy, and while he regretted seeing the end of Alfonso XIII’s
reign, it is notable that Franco chose not to publicly denounce the Republic, or call it illegitimate
(Payne and Palacios, 2014). The new Republic paved the way for a new Constitution, which
notably instituted a somewhat strong separation of church and state, despite centuries of Catholic
control over the country. The new Constitution was the primary mandate for the Republican-
Socialists, and many expected that after ratifying the country’s most basic rights and laws, they
would hold new elections to determine the political future of Spain (Hayes, 1951). However, the
Republican-Socialists recognized increasing opposition to their program of secularization in the
strongly Catholic country and decided to postpone regular elections for about two more years.
52

There is some evidence that around this time, Franco transitioned from a conservative
monarchist to a more far-right-wing orientation. He joined a monarchist organization, Acción
Española, and became a firm believer in a far-right, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, in which a
supposed cabal of Jews, Freemasons, and various Leftists were working together to destroy
Christian culture in Europe (Preston, 2010).
This gives us a decent sense of what Franco’s early life was like, though again we see
little in the way of indications as to any innate personality or early trauma that might have
affected the way he makes political decisions in his adult life. From here, we will refrain from
simply expounding on Franco’s biography, as there is no enough evidence to make it possible to
process trace his internal deliberations as he made certain major decisions. Instead, we will point
to two major events in Franco’s life, which, if given access to more evidence about what
occurred behind the scenes, would likely give us a better understanding of the trajectory that
Franco’s risk orientation took over the decades.

Franco’s Rise to Total Power and Role in Guernica
The first of these events is infamous, and occurred right near the beginning of the Spanish
Civil War – the bombing of Guernica, famously depicted in Pablo Picasso’s cubist painting.
However, even before we get to this tragic event, a caveat already presents itself. Though
Franco was ultimately chosen as Generalissimo to lead the nationalist forces in the new civil war
against a coalition of republicans, socialists, communists, and anarchists, he was in fact listed as
twenty-third in seniority in Spain’s Anuario military for 1936, despite being the commander of
the colonial army (Payne and Palacios, 2014). As Viñas (2001) argues, Franco had some
reluctance to step up to the role in part due to his relative youth (age 43) compared with other
53

military officers. However, the cadre of officers ultimately decided that Franco had all the
necessary traits to lead Nationalist Spain in a victorious civil war.
There were other commanders as brave as Franco, and others with greater
technical knowledge, as well as many others who looked more impressive or were
more cordial and better liked, but none had his rare combination of discipline,
combat experience, political tact and discretion, foreign contacts, and capacity
for command. His lieutenants had already achieved an understanding with
Moroccan leaders in the protectorate that secured the Nationalists’ rear guard,
making Spanish Morocco [which Franco commanded] a crucial staging
area…The only commander with any equivalent prestige was Mola, but he was
only a brigadier and expressed no personal ambitions (Preston, 2011, p. 141).

The official investiture ceremony, in which Franco became Generalissimo, gave a brief
but strongly worded indication of where Franco wanted to take the country, at least during its
period of civil war. Later that evening, he expanded upon his words in a radio address, stating
that “Spain will be organized under a broadly totalitarian concept,” while also somewhat
contradictorily stating that “regions, municipalities, associations, and individuals will enjoy the
fullest liberty within the supreme interest of the state” (Fernandez, 1984, p. 111-13). Regardless
of the wording, Franco made it clear that he was installing a totalitarian government, and that the
interest of the state would reign “supreme.” At this point, we can also see that Franco had
dropped any hesitancy he previously held about taking over such a position of power (Preston,
2011).
In a manifesto he released to the public on July 17, 1936, Franco would implore his
fellow citizens:
Spaniards! The nation calls to her defense all those of you who hear the holy
name of Spain, those in the ranks of the Army and Navy who have made a
profession of faith in the service of the Motherland, all those who swore to defend
her to the death against her enemies. The situation in Spain grows more critical
every day; anarchy reigns in most of the countryside and towns; government-
appointed authorities encourage revolts, when they do not actually lead them;
murderers use pistols and machine guns to settle their differences and to
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treacherously assassinate innocent people, while the public authorities fail to
impose law and order. Revolutionary strikes of all kinds paralyze the life of the
nation, destroying its sources of wealth and creating hunger, forcing working men
to the point of desperation. The most savage attacks are made upon national
monuments and artistic treasures by revolutionary hordes who obey the orders of
foreign governments, with the complicity and negligence of local authorities. The
most serious crimes are committed in the cities and countryside, while the forces
that should defend public order remain in their barracks, bound by blind
obedience to those governing authorities that are intent on dishonoring them.

Franco clearly viewed the civil war as marking a pivotal point of historical departure for Spain,
and one which required the use of overwhelming force to win. Perhaps just as interesting as the
content of the speech is the fact that Franco chose to release it in written form, as he often did.
This likely reflects a more circumspect leader in general, and not one prone to sudden changes of
heart – or risk-orientation, for that matter.
It would take over a year to happen, but as institutional constraints to his regime showed
themselves to be weak in the face of a brutal civil war, we see Franco began to act more brashly
in the public sphere, which certainly could be a combined effect or his younger age and the slow
but steady realization that the Nationalists had essentially given Franco carte blanche to win the
civil war. Going even further, Preston (2011) argues that, by 1938,
With his personal authority consolidated and the military balance tilting ever
more in his favor, Franco had a tendency to become overweening in a manner
quite different from his earlier political comportment. Victorious on almost every
front and constantly praised by a bombastic propaganda machine, he had become
convinced that his role was providential, far beyond ordinary leadership. As a
national hero in the 1920s, he had taken care to be modest in public statements,
but by 1938 he was convinced that he was an instrument of divine providence,
endowed with special powers. If that were not the case, how could his
extraordinary career and triumphs be explained?...Thus when he presided over
meetings of the council of ministers, he talked more and more, pontificating about
economic and other technical problems of which he knew little, sometimes to the
irritation or amusement of his ministers (p. 168).

This quote does give us some insight into the changes that Franco underwent as he fully assumed
the supreme power he had been awarded, and certainly his increase in confidence could be a
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factor of reduced institutional constraints, or a possible fundamental attribution error on Franco’s
part in terms of assigning credit for the successes of his side in the civil war, in addition to a
youthful orientation more toward risk (including the increasingly totalitarian statements he made
in public). However, it is not possible to say with a high degree of certainty that this is the case,
as we do not have any access to the private thoughts of Franco and his closest advisors. Access
to the Spanish National Archives would likely solve this problem in a future expansion of this
research.
Temperamentally, Franco was unlike most dictators, in that he did not adopt a severe or
bullying stance toward either friends or potential competitors, opting for a polite-yet-firm tone in
most direct political interactions. Interestingly, it was around this point in 1938 that Franco also
began to refer to himself in the third person, as “el caudillo,” or the military leader (Ridruejo,
2017). Though he apparently lacked the charisma of many other dictators of the time, Payne and
Palacios (2011) argue that his administration itself carried a general charisma, in part because of
Franco’s reputation, the strong propaganda machine that the Nationalists were employing on its
behalf, and
The development of Franco’s style of leadership, not brilliant or for many even
especially attractive and not eloquent, but firm, displaying self-assuredness,
rendering him convincing in command and capable of communicating his basic
ideas to his followers (p.170).

This style of leadership, to which we will see an exception shortly, implies that Franco may have
been more consistently risk-neutral (or near to it) when we assess his broader political life.
Again, however, we need access to primary sources to verify these assessments primarily made
by scholars in the years after Franco relinquished power to the monarchy.
Perhaps the most convincing argument that Franco at least started out as more of a risk-
acceptant leader than he became in later years is how he dealt with and spoke of the bombing of
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Guernica, which lies in the eternally-contested Basque Country of Spain. While there were
strongholds of republican support in places like Guernica and Barcelona, the republican
movement was not winning the broader war even at this relatively early stage. Even when
handed a minor defeat by some rebel forces in Gudalajara,
…the rebels still held the initiative since each reverse for Franco saw his Axis
allies increase their support. Nevertheless, anxious to speed up the war effort,
they advocated the use of terror bombing. In a rehearsal for the Blitzkrieg in
Poland and France, Guernica was annihilated on 26 April 1937. That the
operation was designed to cause the greatest possible number of civilian victims
may be deduced from the choice of projectiles – a combination of explosive
bombs and light incendiaries. The first targets were the municipal water tanks
and the fire station, to prevent the fires being put out. Terrified citizens who fled
to the surrounding fields were herded back into the town by the machine-gun
strafing of Heinkel He 50 fighters that circled the town in what the German
commander, Wolfram von Richthofen, called ‘the ring of fire.’ The effect on
Basque morale undermined the defence of the capital, Bilbao, which fell on 19
June.
Victory in the Basque Country was accompanied by a political triumph for
Franco that both eliminated divisions among his supporters and created a mass
movement (p. 320-1).

This quote illuminates not just the fact that Franco was willing to bomb innocent civilians
indiscriminately in order to win the war at this time, but also provides evidence that Franco was
working closely in concert with the Nazis in Germany, who provided much of the firepower used
against the citizens of Guernica. Indeed, it seems that Franco was allowing Hitler to use the
bombing as a test-run for the blitzkrieg bombing campaigns that many other countries would
have to face when World War II began in earnest. Thus, there are multiple ways that we could
reasonably interpret this situation without any access to his private diaries or those of his friends
and advisors.

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Figure 4.1: Guernica

Source: www.pablopicasso.org.

One possibility is that Franco used Guernica to help bolster the alliance he was building
with the Nazis, and more importantly to keep the flow of weapons and munitions coming, as
Stalin’s regime was beginning to view the civil war as a proxy war too (Viñas, 2001). It is also
possible that, as a younger and more brash leader, he wanted to terrorize the opposition into
surrender, and was simply willing to do whatever it took, including killing innocent civilians.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that the Basque Country was in some respects the easiest target
for Franco to pick, as even some republicans did were vehemently opposed to the Basque
separatist movement. Most importantly, however, Franco likely knew that among the
Nationalists, successfully attacking the separatist Basques could only bring him higher esteem
among his supporters. A final possible reason for this decision was simply that the Nationalist
campaign in the north was moving slower than in other parts of the country and Franco decided
that breaking rebel morale was the easiest way to speed things up.
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From 4:40am to 7:45am, a blitzkrieg bombing campaign was wrought on the people of
Guernica, who were generally out and about, since Franco had chosen a “market day” for the
bombing campaign. There were about 10,000 people including residents and refugees staying in
Guernica that day (Preston, 2011). With no anti-aircraft defenses, the town was inevitably
decimated in those three hours. Even those who fled the bombs were given no quarter.
“Terrified civilians who fled into the surrounding fields were strafed by the machine-guns of
Heinkel He 51s” (Preston, 2011, p.244). Though the fog of war makes it difficult to ascertain the
exact number of casualties, the Basque government estimated that 1,645 died and an additional
889 were injured in the attack (Onaindia, 1973).
What Franco apparently failed to account for – given the way he later responded to the
situation – is the international outcry that soon arose when people learned of what happened in
Guernica. George Orwell, who was moved to join a volunteer brigade on the republican side
after arriving in Spain as a journalist to document the civil war, would later remark in Homage to
Catalonia, his famous accounting of his time in the war, that “One of the most horrible features
of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably
from people who are not fighting” (Orwell, 1980, p.86). This statement can certainly apply to
the propaganda campaign that surrounded Guernica both during and after the attacks. While it
was initially a minor world news event, the Franco regime’s efforts to deny and cover up the
Guernica bombings ultimately brought the event into the global spotlight. George Steer was one
of the first few journalists to document the bombings in The Times in the face of the foreign
press service’s total denial of the event’s occurrence, and democracies around the world began to
express concern and dismay about what was happening in Spain (Saña, 1982).
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Franco’s denial soon morphed into a conspiracy theory, arguing that the “reds” had
actually taken advantage of the bombing and burned the town down themselves in a false flag
attack (Preston, 2011, p.246). The fact that Franco went this route and did not attempt to suggest
that the German forces helping them acted independently in any way provides some evidence
that Franco knew he had to rely on German support to win the civil war.
Thus, the all-important case study of Guernica can only give us impressions of what
might have happened behind the scenes or in Franco’s thought process. Taken together, the
evidence can feasibly give us reasons for the bombing of Guernica that range from a terror
bombing and civilian demoralization strategy, a desire or willingness to help the Nazis practice
their blitzkrieg attacks on France and Poland, or a desire to use public animus against Basque
separatists to Franco’s advantage. Unfortunately, without having a better understanding of
which explanation proportionately holds the most weight, it becomes difficult to extrapolate
beyond the policy and hypothesize about his risk-orientation during this time. On the one hand,
being willing to bomb thousands of innocent civilians could indicate a higher risk-acceptance in
his youth, but on the other, Franco’s immediate denial and rhetorical pivot to conspiracy theories
shows that he wanted to mitigate any reputational risk his regime would face. The ultimate
picture will remain muddied until we can access more primary sources that give us a better
understanding of his psyche as he deliberated and implemented the attack.
He never gave a public speech about Guernica, other than to either deny it or attempt to
push a Bolshevik conspiracy theory. However, a December 8, 1942 speech Franco gave to the
Falangist (Fascist) Party Council made his opinions regarding the future of democracy and
fascism quite clear.
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The moment of disillusionment is not far distant. When the war ends and
demobilization begins the moment will arrive to settle accounts and to fulfill
promises.
Then, whatever projects there may exist now, the historic destiny of our era will
be settled, either according to the barbarous formula of bolshevist totalitarianism,
or according to the spiritual, patriotic formula Spain offers us, or according to
any other formula of the fascist nations.
Neither the feelings of the most numerous social classes, nor the exigencies of the
post-war economy, nor the grave problems facing nations, will allow any other
path.
Those are mistaken who dream of the establishment of democratic liberal systems
in Western Europe, bordering on Russian communism. Those err who speculate
on liberal peace agreements or a bourgeois solution.
The world is marching on other roads. And the sentiments by which it is animated
are so strong and just that, be it victory or defeat, they will overrun whatever may
try to stop them.

Franco clearly did not believe in liberal democracy or capitalism and was under the impression
that World War II would resolve the battle between democratic (and socialist) forces and fascists
in the favor of the fascists. Thus, even if he wanted to be officially neutral in World War II, his
lack of institutional constraints allowed him to speak plainly about where he wanted the future of
global politics to go, and where he expected them to go as well.

Franco’s Later Years and Appointment of a Successor
Finally, we will briefly discuss Franco’s much later decision to abdicate power and return
it to the monarchy. If Guernica can properly be interpreted as the result of a more risk-acceptant
leader, then Franco’s later abdication could provide evidence of a decrease in risk-acceptance as
Franco aged during the decades his regime existed. However, with the evidence at hand we still
cannot examine all of Franco’s major political decisions and attempt to discern a decision-
making trajectory over time, the way we did with Fidel Castro.
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After defeating the Republicans, Franco consolidated the state under his totalitarian
regime, and spent the early years of his power attempting to eliminate political opposition in a
“white terror” campaign (Beevor, 2006; Jackson, 2012). After years of repression, the state
slowly became less violent – likely a result of its successes in eliminating or silencing political
opposition.
By the late 1960s, Franco was himself in his 70s and realized that he would have to name
a successor if he wanted his legacy to continue, and more importantly, to prevent leftists from
taking the country back. In 1969, he made the decision to name Prince Juan Carlos I as the heir
to his regime. Thus, he wanted to hand the totalitarian regime back to a Spanish monarchy, the
political system with which his sympathies were strongest. Interestingly, Franco chose to skip
over Juan Carlos I’s father, Juan de Borbón, despite him having the more direct line of
ascendancy to the throne, because he feared the father would be “too liberal” (Preston, 2011,
p.762). Nevertheless, it is also worth noting that Franco did not appoint a far-right Falangist as
his successor, which he certainly could have done in order to maintain a dictatorial right-wing
government after his death.
In the early 1970s, Franco was also suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, which severely
limited the number of public events he could attend (Pozuelo, 1980). There is little evidence that
the disease was affecting him cognitively in a significant way, although we of course know that
during this time it was common for political regimes across the spectrum to cover up severe
illnesses or handicaps and their accompanying effects in leaders (Franklin Delano Roosevelt
being the quintessential example). Of course, in a fascist or totalitarian system, propaganda
makes this pursuit even easier to accomplish. Thus, we again cannot know for sure what, if any,
significant cognitive decline Franco was facing during this time. The final major global event to
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which Franco directly reacted is arguably the Portuguese revolution that began in April 1974. As
Payne and Palacios (2014) argue,
Franco’s policy toward Lisbon generally followed the moderate tack taken by the
United States, but the course of events in Portugal, in which a socialist revolution
was promoted by part of the officer corps, was bewildering to him. He is reported
to have said, ‘What can you expect form an army that is led by its supply corps?’”
(473).
Even when Portugal’s military directly approached Franco for help, Franco refused the
offer, even refusing to grant conservatives asylum in the Spanish embassy in Lisbon (Ibid.). He
declared that if the embassy were attacked by radicals, he would then have to send in troops to
save them and essentially start a war with Portugal (López, 1993). It is more difficult, though
not impossible, to imagine Franco refusing to even grant asylum to Portuguese conservatives
early in his regime, particularly given the socialist nature of the revolution. What we see here,
however, is a leader that is at the very least reluctant to engage in a violent, or even tensely
diplomatic, conflict with his neighbor country in his final years.
The question that remains, then, is whether Franco was always primarily an
institutionalist (if a dictatorial one) or whether this hesitance to enter conflict became more
prominent as he aged. The obvious counterargument to this is the fact that Franco and Spain
were neutral during the Second World War, despite the fact that he knew his own victory in the
Spanish civil war was at least in part due to assistance from the Nazis. Even in the case of the
Guernica bombings, Franco knew that he was attacking what amounted to many Spanish citizens
as a nationalist and separatist scapegoat that had no right to its own political control. Thus, it
appears more likely that Franco for the most part maintained a risk-neutral or risk-averse
orientation throughout his life, making him a possible exception to our hypothesis that age brings
significant changes in risk orientation for leaders. However, we will need to access the all-
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important personal documents housed at the Spanish National Archives in order to answer this
question definitively with regards to Francisco Franco.

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Chapter 5: A Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of Leader Age and Regime Type
on International Crises
To what extent does a leader’s age affect their response to, or propensity to initiate or
escalate, and international crisis? And do leaders’ actual behavioral responses in international
crisis situations comport with what they themselves predict would generally happen? We
specifically focus on international crises here, as they are time-sensitive events that require a
high degree of complex thinking and weighing of risk as a leader decides how to respond to, or
whether to initiate, a crisis.
To answer this question, we have conducted a mixed methods investigation; first, we
conducted over a dozen interviews with world leaders regarding how they view age and political
behavior, and then analyzed how they believed another hypothetical leader would react – to
avoid self-reporting bias. We also conducted several in-depth interviews about how these leaders
view age and leadership more broadly. Then, we decided to see how well the general sentiment
of these leaders comports with the behavior of national leaders on the international stage at the
onset and throughout a given international crisis with another nation-state.
Given what is now commonly accepted as fact – that after a certain threshold, age brings
with it a host of neurologically degenerative changes that directly affect one’s cognition and
thought processes – it is worth asking ourselves whether as voters we should be using the age of
a presidential candidate as a heuristic for their potential performance in the office. Indeed,
political scientists like Robert Gilbert have previously proposed implementing a Working Group
on Presidential Disability, as a “less draconian” alternative to actually using the 25
th
amendment,
which critics note requires vice presidents and cabinet members to move against their president –
something not very likely to happen given their explicit patronage from the president himself.
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The main goal of this study was to evaluate if a political leader’s age is associated with
their propensity to engage in an international crisis (i.e., propensity to be the triggering entity in
an international crisis) and/or the gravity of the threat perceived by the leader themselves
(hereafter crisis actor). This study is loosely based on Horowitz et al. (2005), where authors
found age to be a statistically significant factor in the onset and escalation of militarized
international disputes; however here we control for multiple confounding factors that were
previously unaccounted for, and the scope of our analysis is somewhat broadened to include
multiple ordinal levels of crisis – from a diplomatic issue up to and including militarized conflict.
We believe that this gives our analysis some added external validity, while also replicating the
primary research question of Horowitz et al. (2005) to a major extent.
To address our main questions, we used the Crisis Behavior data set from the online
International Crisis Behavior (ICB) database at the actor level (Brecher and Wilkenfeld 2000;
Brecher et al. 2020) and the online REIGN dataset (Bell et al. 2021). We performed logistic and
ordinal logistic regression models to evaluate if a leader’s age is a statistically significant
predictor of whether the triggering entity was external or internal to the crisis actor and the
gravity of the threat perceived by decision makers of the crisis actor, respectively. As above, we
controlled for multiple confounders including a general geographic location of the crisis event
(e.g., Africa, America, Middle East, Asia, and Europe), regime type, age of state, economic
status of the actor (i.e., leader), if leaders had alliances with super/great powers, time period of
crisis, system polarity type, and duration of relevant regime. Prior to logistic regression analysis,
we performed descriptive statistics to evaluate data distribution and tendencies and collapsed
sparse categorical variables into broader group categories if applicable. Briefly, our main results
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show that after controlling of baseline variables above, for each one-year increase in leader age,
the odds of a leader being the triggering entity of an international crisis significantly decreased
by 2.5% (OR = 0.975, p < 0.001). Our evidence that leader age is linked to perceived threat
gravity is more mixed, but still substantial enough to merit discussion.

Age and the Political Behavior of Leadership
Horowitz et al. (2005), in their groundbreaking study on age, regime types, and violence
in international relations, used data from the Militarized Interstate Disputes database to provide
evidence that older age in leaders would lead to less militarized conflict between nation-state
dyads over time, as a direct result of the decrease in testosterone that naturally occurs in men as
they age. Though testosterone levels may play a role, I remain unconvinced that this is one of the
primary links between these two variables, particularly when not all leaders are men, nor are
their most influential advisors necessarily male. The other variable of significance, interacting
with testosterone in their analysis, is that institutional factors allow a leader to consolidate their
decision-making status over time. This would certainly make sense, and accords with their
findings that the interaction of age and regime type (personalist vs. non-personalist) is
statistically significant as well.
However, their study failed to control for some important variables, such as whether a
crisis actor is aligned with a superpower, relative economic status, and governmental stability,
among others that we will discuss below. The models we will introduce aim to fill this gap and
act as a better test of the hypothesis that leader age and the potential for conflict (or, in my case,
international crisis) are causally linked. Additionally, they do not address other more direct
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neurological and behavioral issues that naturally arise as people age, due to cognitive decline,
and neither does the rest of the literature.
The theoretical foundations for my project lie largely in the overlapping fields of
psychology and neuroscience. Worth noting is the fact that I am explicitly taking a materialist
(non-dualist) stance on the nature of the mind. This is not at all controversial among these
scholarly communities, whose work primarily relies on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(fMRI) tests to find explicit links between the activation of certain parts of the brain and certain
exhibited behaviors or affectations. These tests (and their replications) form the theoretical
foundations for my hypotheses about the way that international leaders make decisions under
risky conditions as a function of their age.
Thus, I am threading a political narrative that begins with the behavioral effects of two
types of progressive, age-related dementias – frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), or a
progressive degradation of the frontal lobe of the brain, and the more well-known Alzheimer’s
disease. Here it is important to first distinguish between the two, in terms of their onset,
mechanisms, and progression. While the cause of the degeneration in FTD is disputed, it may be
the result of a genetic mutation that causes an interference with the production of the so-called
Tau protein in the brain. More importantly, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, the onset
and symptoms of the two diseases can vary quite a bit; most cases of FTD are diagnosed between
the ages of 45 and 65, while most cases of Alzheimer’s begin and are diagnosed in people 65 and
older. Alzheimer’s is much more prevalent, although many cases of FTD – estimated to
constitute about 10-15% of dementia cases – have been misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s. This
phenomenon is slowly becoming less common as understanding of FTD and how it differs from
Alzheimer’s has increased in recent years.
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More importantly, the primary behavioral effects differ between the two dementias.
While Alzheimer’s is primarily associated with memory loss (though this can cause secondary
effects on speech, spatial orientation, etc.) and a much more precipitous decline in health and
cognition, FTD is a much slower progressive disease, and memory is affected much less than
with Alzheimer’s. Instead, the primary avenues through which FTD affects a person’s behavior
are through either language or behavior, depending on the variant of FTD presenting itself. The
two most common types of FTD are behavior-variant FTD (bvFTD) and Primary Progressive
Aphasia (PPA). In the former, patients experience changes in behavior, judgment, personality,
sociability, and risk orientation. In the PPA form of FTD, the patients primarily experience
issues with language, speaking skills, and reading comprehension. It is important to note for our
theory, however, that these symptoms and dementia types are not mutually exclusive. Neither
are FTD and Alzheimer’s, more broadly speaking, despite the frequent misdiagnosis of the
former as the latter.
As is commonly noted, longitudinal neuroimaging studies have repeatedly found strong
evidence for the contention that the frontal lobe itself continues to develop until around the age
of 25 (Johnson et al., 2009). However, since there are historically few cases of non-monarchical
rulers achieving national leadership status before age 25, I do not hypothesize that neurological
functioning plays a role in the risk orientation of young leaders (here, defined as having served
two or more years as a national leader before the age of 50). As I will show in the literature
review section, there is some evidence that young leaders are more likely to be attacked by rival
states, but because of the fact that they have not had as much time to consolidate their internal
power as older leaders generally have, young leaders are generally more hesitant to initiate
militarized conflicts, unless they are to maintain or establish internal order in the state. These
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findings broadly accord with the expectations of prospect theory as well, as a newly elected state
leader is almost always operating from a domain of gains.
Prospect theory, elucidated by Tversky and Kahneman (1979), provided empirical
evidence that the predictions of rational choice theory do not comport with reality, and
furthermore that utility functions are in fact S-shaped, reflecting the human tendency to
undervalue risk when in the domain of losses, and overvalue risk when in the domain of gains.
Tversky and Kahneman (1992) later extended prospect theory by incorporating cumulative rather
than separate weights to their model, so that it could apply to uncertain and risky prospects with
“any number of outcomes.” Ledgerwood and Boydstun (2014) further elaborated the model by
demonstrating that loss frames are stickier and longer-lasting than gain frames.
For these reasons, I expect that, if there is nothing unique about the way leaders’ brains
age, we should see a relatively continuous – though not necessarily linear – increase in risk-
acceptant decision-making among political leaders as they get older.

Theory and Methods
Our analytic framework is that of analytic eclecticism (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010), a
pragmatic analytic tool that “supports efforts to complement, engage, and selectively utilized
theoretical constructs embedded in contending research traditions to build complex arguments
that bear on substantive problems of interest to both scholars and practitioners” (p.411). Thus,
we are not restricted to using just one theoretical paradigm, through which we analyze all our
information.
First, we conducted one of the first surveys of national leaders (those who, at the
minimum, serve in parliament/Congress, or lead a government agency directly related to
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international security, such as the Department of Defense), in order to see how they believe other
international leaders of advanced age would react to an archetypal international crisis situation
(see Appendix for survey). Our population was among leaders who attended the WHIA’s 2020
annual meeting in Athens, Greece. These leaders represent nation-states in six continents, thus
giving us a geographically diverse sample. The only demographic variable linking these leaders
is that they happen to be at least partially of Hellenic descent. We could see no reason why this
would in itself bias our results, as these people grew up in over a dozen different countries and
bring completely different life experiences with them.
To address our questions about the how leaders respond to or initiate crisis situations in
practice, we used the actor level version 14 ICB online data set (Brecher and Wilkenfeld 2000;
Brecher et al. 2020) and the online REIGN dataset (Bell et al. 2021) (accessed on August 30,
2021). The ICB data set is a longitudinal dataset that has information for each recorded
international crisis at the actor level including our outcome variables ‘External or Internal
Trigger’ and ‘Gravity of Value Threatened’, as well as baseline variables ‘Source of Threat
Power Status’, ‘System Polarity’, ‘State Age’, ‘Regime Type’, ‘Governmental Instability’,
‘Regime Repression’, ‘Economic Status of Actor’, ‘Geographic Location of Crisis’, ‘Duration of
Political Regime’, ‘Superpower Involvement in Crisis’, ‘Nuclear Capability of Crisis Actor’,
‘Perceived Threat to Major Power Influence’, and ‘External or Internal Trigger’.
The REIGN dataset is a longitudinal dataset with additional leader detail, including our
main predictor variable, ‘leader age’ (see Table 1 for detailed description of main variables). The
ICB data set has data from years 1918 through 2017, for a total of 487 international crisis events
across 144 countries, whereas the REIGN dataset has data collected from years 1950 through
2021 for a total of 138,600 observations across 200 countries. For our analysis, we consolidated
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the ICB and REIGN data based on year of observation and a shared three digit country code
indicator, ‘CRACID’. Observations that lacked information for our main outcome variables in
the merged dataset were dropped resulting a total of 274 international crisis events across 97
countries.
The main hypothesis we are testing is:
Hypothesis 1: As leaders get older, we will see a trajectory toward more risk-
acceptant behavior in the form of leaders’ increased willingness to initiate or escalate an
international crisis.
Alternatively,
Hypothesis 2: As leaders get older, we will see a trajectory toward more risk-
avoidant behavior in the form of leaders’ reduced willingness to initiate or escalate an
international crisis.
Using our consolidated dataset above, we performed summary statistics on our main
outcome and baseline variables where we estimated and report the number and frequency of
factor levels for each categorical variable and the mean and standard deviation of each
continuous variable. Further, we evaluated variable balance with respect to our outcome variable
and collapsed sparse variables into smaller groups as deemed necessary (see Table S2 for more
information). For instance, our geographic location variable was collapsed into the following
regions Africa, America, Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Because we found that all internal crisis
triggers had the same factor level for ‘Nuclear Capability of Crisis Actor’, we elected to exclude
this variable from subsequent analysis.
40

40
This is due to the fact that the variable itself has no variation and would not be statistically meaningful for our
purposes.
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After modifying the dataset for balance, we fit a logistic regression where our crisis
trigger entity indicator (external or internal trigger actor) was our response variable, as a function
of all our previously described baseline variables (except for ‘Nuclear Capability of Crisis
Actor’) and leader’s age. Likewise, we fitted an ordinal logistic regression model using ‘Gravity
of Value Threatened’ as our response variable as a function of the aforementioned predictors. All
baseline variables were treated as categorical variables, with the exception of ‘Source of Threat
Power Status’, which was coded as an ordinal factor as follows, Super Power>Great
Power>Middle Power>Small Power. We used a Wald test for the logistic regression and t-test
for the ordinal logistic regression to determine statistical significance of predictor variables.
Forest plots were generated to visualize model results.
41

Results
Most importantly for our analysis, we found that a one-year increase in a leader’s age was
statistically associated with a 5.8% decrease in a leader’s propensity to be the triggering entity
(OR = 0.942, P < 0.001). This provides strong support for Hypothesis 2, implying that leaders in
fact become more risk-avoidant as they age, ceteris paribus, and that the case of Donald Trump
is an exception rather than the rule.
In Table 5.1, we report the descriptive statistics of the main outcome and predictor
variables. A total of 264 and 274 unique leaders and crisis events were analyzed, respectively,
where the average leader age was 56.48 ± 11.74 years. We found that Source of Threat Power
Status types was somewhat evenly distributed, with the greatest proportion of observations being

41
Forest plots give a visual summarization of the data, showing the estimated magnitude of the effects of each
independent variable in the model.
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‘Middle Power’ at 35.5% and the smallest being ‘Superpower’ at 15.72%. Roughly half of all
observations had Polycentrism for System Polarity (49.55%), followed by Unipolarity at 21.75%
and then Bipolarity at 18.59%. Together, other System Polarity groups contributed to 10.11% of
the reaming observations. Most observations came from events where the State Age was before
1957 and after World War II at 27.98%, followed by observations prior to 1648 at 19.26%, 1958-
1966 at 14.78%, and 1815-1918 at 13.53%. All other intervals for State Age contributed between
2.42% and 9.51% of the observations.
Most regimes were Civil authoritarian (42.29%) or Democratic (38.49%), whereas
military based regimes contributed between 5.09-7.12% of regime types. 77.39% of all
observations had ‘normal [government instability] level during relevant period preceding the
crises, about one forth had a ‘significant increase during relevant period preceding the crisis’
(20.29%), and less than 2% had either a significant decrease or newly-independent
state/government in exile during the relevant period preceding the crisis for the Governmental
Instability indicator.
Similar trends were also observed for the Regime Repression indicator, where 70.55% of
cases had ‘normal level [of regime repression] during relevant period preceding the crisis’,
followed by 23.36% for ‘significant increase during the relevant period preceding the crisis’
(23.36%), 4.99% for those with a significant decrease during the relevant period preceding the
crisis, and 1.1% were newly-independent state/government in exile. Most leaders had a normal
economic situation (71.41%), whereas about a quarter had an increase in economic problems
(25.12%). Less than 2% of leaders either had a decrease in economic problems or ‘newly-
independent state’.
74

At a more refined geographic level, we found that the majority of crises observed
occurred in the Middle East at 21.14%. However, after collapsing our geographic location
variable into broader groups, we found that most crisis yielded from Asia at 31.2% (N = 1,488),
followed by Africa at 27.6% (N = 1,318), Middle East at 21.9% (N = 1,044), America at 12.4%
(N = 593), and lastly Europe at 6.97% (N = 333).
About half of the political regimes observed had a duration of 3-25 years (55.57%),
where close to a third lasted more than 25 years (30.52%), and 13.91% lasted 0-2 years. 42.23%
of leaders were not aligned with a super/great power or were neutral, about a third were
informally aligned with a super/great power (32.22%), and about a quarter were formally aligned
with a super/great power (25.29%). Less than one percent of observations had alliance leader
super/great power (0.25%). 71.75% of leaders had no foreseeable nuclear capability, 14.29% had
developed nuclear capability, with second strike capability, and 13.96% had either foreseeable
possession or possession of nuclear capability.
The majority of observations were not coded as threat to influence perceived threat
(76.17%) and 11.64% were coded as threat influence in perceived threat, but not threat to
superpower influence, 1.69% of observations were deemed as ‘Adverse change in global
balance’, while all other observations were some level of decline in influence for the perceived
threat to major power influence indicator. Most cases were identified as external trigger entities
(90.3%), whereas internal triggers made up only 9.97% of the sample. Finally, 24.42%, 23.1%,
17.3%, 14%, and 12.7% of observations were indicated as territorial threat, threat to influence
international/regional subsystem, political threat, threat of great damage, and limited military
threat, for the gravity of value threatened indicator, respectively. Between 1.56% and 3.93% of
observations were coded as either an economic threat, threat to existence, or ‘other’.
75

In Table 5.2 and Figure 5.1 we report the model results of our logistic regression
performed using the trigger entity indicator as our response variable. Our model uncovered a
significant and negative linear term for Source of Power Threat indicator, where an increase in
Source of Power Rank (i.e., Small Power to Middle Power, Middle Power to Great Power etc.)
leads to a 36.9% reduction in the actor’s propensity to be the triggering entity (OR = 0.631, P <
0.003). We found that compared to leaders with Bipolarity as System Polarity, those with a
Polycentricism I were 42.5% statistically more likely to be the triggering entity of an
international crisis (OR = 1.425, P < 0.03). Further, leaders from a state whose age occurred post
1814 were significantly more likely to be a triggering entity relative to those from an earlier
period, with the exception of Age of States that yielded between 1967-1989 (P = 0.562).
Specifically, the odds ratio for a leader to act as the triggering entity of an international crisis
jumped from 2.578 to 16.181, relative to pre-1814 period, for 1815-1918 and 1919-1945,
respectively (P = 0.013 and P < 0.001, respectively). Then it declined slightly in Post-World War
II-1957 (OR = 12.709, P < 0.001) and 1958-1966 (OR = 13.22, P < 0.001), and then more
dramatically in 1967-1989, albeit nonsignificant (OR = 1.31, P = 0.562), and significantly
increased post 1989 (OR = 15.032, P < 0.001).
Compared to those from a Democratic Regime, leaders from a Civil Authoritarian
Regime were 35.9% statistically more likely to be the triggering entity (OR = 1.359, P = 0.035).
In contrast, military based regimes were 76.4%, 50.3%, and 48.7%. statistically less likely to act
as triggering entities as compared to leaders from a Democratic Regime, depending on if the
rule/authority was direct, indirect, or dual respectively (P = 0.035, P < 0.001, and P = 0.005,
respectively).
76

Relative to an increased state of governmental instability, leaders pertaining to
governments that had normal/decreased levels of instability or formed a newly independent
state/government in exile were statistically 48.7% less likely to be a triggering entity for an
international crisis (OR = 0.513, P < 0.001). Likewise, when compared to a state of increased
regime repression, leaders from normal regime repression or newly formed state/decreased
regime repression, were statistically 36.8% and 42.7% less likely to act as triggering entities,
respectively (OR = 0.632, P < 0.001 and OR = 0.573, P = 0.013, respectively). Further,
compared to leaders with an increase in economic problems, leaders with a decrease, normal, or
newly formed state were 52.2% statistically less likely to act as a triggering entity in an
international crisis (OR = 0.478, P < 0.001). We found no difference in the propensity for a
leader to be a triggering entity for an international crisis according to the duration of a political
regime indicator as compared to regimes that lasted between 0-2 years.
Having an informal alliance with a super or great power increased the odds of a leader to
be the triggering entity by 248% relative to leaders that are not aligned to a super/great power or
neutral (OR = 2.484, P <0.001), however, other allegiance types did not differ. Relative to the
region of Africa, leaders associated to crises that occurred in the region of America were 564.4%
more likely to be a triggering entity (OR = 5.644, P < 0.001), whereas those associated to Middle
Eastern crises were 52.2% statistically less likely to be a triggering entity (OR = 0.478, P <
0.001). Leaders associated to the regions of Asian and European crises did not differ
significantly from African crises.
We also ran interactions between the Leader Age variable of interest and Regime Type,
in order to test the interactive effects that Horowitz et al. (2005) found in their analysis. We find
similar evidence that personalist and/or authoritarian regimes do create a positive interaction
77

effect upon a leader’s propensity to trigger an international crisis. Both Civil Authoritarian Rule
(OR = 1.041, P = 0.006) and Military-Direct Rule (OR = 1.131, P = 0.008) indicating that an
increase in Leader Age under an authoritarian government can lead to a 4.1% or 13.1% increase,
respectively, in their likelihood of initiating an international crisis. This implies that in
authoritarian or military dictatorships, the decreased propensity to trigger an international crisis
that a leader’s age provides is mitigated, if not swamped, by the reduced institutional constraints
that come with non-democratic rule.
In Table 5.3 and Figure 5.2, we report the model results of our ordinal logistic regression
performed using the gravity (i.e., perceived threat) indicator as our response variable. Our
analysis uncovered a significant and negative linear term for Source of Power Threat indicator,
where an increase in Source of Power Rank (i.e., Small Power to Middle Power, Middle Power
to Great Power etc.) leads to a 46% increase in the odds of a perceived threat (OR = 1.46, P =
<0.001). We found that compared to leaders with a Bipolarity System Polarity, those that were
Polycentricism I were 54.3% statistically more likely to increase the perceived threat (OR =
1.543, P <0.001). We found that leaders from a state whose age occurred post 1814 were linked
to a significant reduction in the perceived gravity of a threat at the onset of an international crisis,
between 36.9% to 67%, relative to those from an earlier period.
We found that a Civil Authoritarian Regime and Military Direct Rule Regime were
statistically linked to an increase in the gravity of perceived threat by 67% and 70.9%, relative to
a Democratic regime (OR = 1.67, P < 0.001 and OR = 1.709, P = 0.001, respectively), whereas a
Military Indirect Rule and Military Dual Authority Regime were linked to a statistical decrease
of 32% and 25.8% of perceived threat, respectively (OR = 0.68, P = 0.008 and OR = 0.742, P =
0.037, respectively). Relative to a state with a significant increase in regime repression, those
78

with a new state/government in exile or significant decrease in regime repression were 46.3%
statistically less likely to perceive greater gravity of threat (OR = 0.537, P <0.001). No statistical
differences were found when compared to normal regime repression.
Leaders with a static or decreased economic problems or those leading a new state were
14.7% less likely to perceive greater gravity of threat relative to leaders with an increase in
economic problems (OR = 0.853, P <0.001). Compared to a regime that lasted between 0-2
years, those that lasted 3-25 years and more than 25 years were both linked to significant 57.8%
and 67.5% decrease in perceived threat, respectively (OR = 0.44 and OR = 0.325, respectively; P
< 0.001 each), suggesting that leaders of short-lived regimes are linked to an increase in
perceived threat. Relative to no or neutral alliance status, we found no statistical difference
between leaders with informal alliances with super or great powers and the propensity to
increased threat perception, however, those that were themselves super/great powers alliance(s)
or formally allied with super/great powers were associated with a 36.9% decrease in perceived
gravity of threat (OR = 0.631, P < 0.001). Further, compared to leaders that are associated to
crisis in the region of Africa, those from Asia, America, Europe, and the Middle East all
statistically differed in their association with perceived gravity of threat. All regions were
associated with an increase of 47.9% to 136% of perceived gravity, as compared to Africa, with
the exception of America. America was associated with a 35% decrease in perceived gravity (OR
= 0.65, P = 0.18).
Finally, a one-year increase Leader Age is associated with a 1.6% decrease in perceived
gravity of an international crisis (OR = 0.984, P = 0.013), which again contradicts our
hypothesis based on increased risk-acceptant behavior that would be associated with cognitive
decline. Similarly, Leader Age interacts significantly with both Civil Authoritarian and Military-
79

Direct Rule regimes works in opposition to the Leader Age effect on its own as compared with
democratic regimes. In Civil Authoritarian regimes, an increase in Leader Age is associated with
a 3.4% increase in the perceived gravity of threat in a crisis (OR = 1.034, P < 0.001), and in
Military-Direct Rule regimes, an increase in Leader Age is associated with a 6.9% increase in
perceived threat gravity (OR = 1.069, P = 0.001).

Discussion
While there are many interesting and noteworthy results that arise in the models we ran,
we will focus our discussion here on the variable of interest – Leader Age. In both of our models,
Leader Age is associated with a seemingly small reduction in their likelihood of either triggering
an international crisis (5.8%), or a slight reduction in their perception of threat gravity in an
international crisis (1.6%). However, it is important to remember that these effects are per
annum, and therefore accumulate much more significantly over time. Thus, a leader who does
not face term limits, or is not representing a democracy, may become significantly less likely to
start or escalate an international crisis over time.
Regarding the interactions between Leader Age and regime type, it is interesting but not
surprising that authoritarian-style leadership is the only kind that is statistically significant (and
always in the positive direction). It appears that young, authoritarian leaders act the most
belligerently, broadly speaking. While the odds of an individual leader starting a crisis or
perceiving it as more grave than it is diminish as they age, this effect is somewhat mitigated by
the institutions under which they operate – primarily, the extent to which their government is run
democratically. More authoritarian governments, whether personalist or run by a direct military
regime often face reduced institutional constraints once they have consolidated power. Thus, it
80

may be easier, as Horowitz et al. (2005) first posited, for these types of leaders to ignore the
desires of not just the masses, but also their close advisors, with little ramification.
Of course, leaders can take this too far, which can lead to a coup, such as the one that
occurred in February of 2021 in Myanmar, which ended the brief, semi-democratic rule of
elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi. She and members of her National League for Democracy
(NLD) party have also been detained, with little news of their status since then. The military in
Myanmar has declared a one-year state of emergency, though there is little reason, given its past
behavior, to believe it will easily relinquish control of the government.
I find little evidence either for or against the testosterone-based theory of age and
belligerence that Horowitz et al. (2005) present. It certainly could play a role, but as we know,
testosterone is far from the only hormone or chemical in the human body which can affect our
level of aggressiveness. It also does not account for any genetic predisposition toward an
aggressive or paranoid personality type that a leader may hold, neither of which we can measure.
As leaders reach a highly advanced age (say, over 80), they often become figureheads in all but
name, whose policies are mostly conceived of and implemented by their advisors and
subordinates. We see this even more often in non-democratic situations like monarchies, where
rule is ordained for life, and in most situations they cannot be removed from power while living,
even if cognitive decline is clearly evident. Advisors can adopt a caretaker role, often filtering
the information the leader receives but still presenting the leader’s authority as total to the public.
One of the many examples of this in recent history is that of the last King of Thailand, Bhumibol
Adulyadej, who ruled from age 60 to his death at 90 in 2017, and faced a similar dynamic as
described above with his advisors in his final years. As is often the case, the King’s advisors
81

took on more control behind the scenes over his policy-making in the latter years of his regime
(Unaldi, 2012).
Thus, it appears to be some combination of the growing institutional constraints leaders
face over time (particularly in democratic states), and their acquired learning through experience
over time, which gives older leaders the wisdom to take pause before initiating or escalating an
international crisis.
In the end, despite finding significant evidence of cognitive decline occurring in
individual leaders over 60, our data indicate that the effect that this decline has (or does not have)
largely depends on the quality of institutional constraints that leader faces. Essentially, if there
are institutional guardrails and a semblance of democracy to protect the country from the ill-
conceived or, in the worst case scenario, delusional or belligerent, pronouncements of an elderly
leader, the potential negative policy effects specifically stemming from a leader’s advanced age
can often be mitigated.

82

Table 5.1: Descriptive Statistics of Main Predictor and Outcome
Variables
Variable Label Statistics
Source of
Threat Power
Status Great Power
2041
(21.45%)

Middle Power

3377
(35.5%)

Small Power
2600
(27.33%)

Superpower
1496
(15.72%)

System
Polarity Bipolarity
1769
(18.59%)

Multipolarity
175
(1.84%)

Polycentricism I
4714
(49.55%)

Polycentrism II
707
(7.43%)

Unipolarity
2069
(21.75%)

World War II 80 (0.84%)

State Age 1648-1814
905
(9.51%)

1815-1918
1287
(13.53%)
83

Variable Label Statistics

1919-1945
769
(8.08%)

1958-1966
1401
(14.73%)

1967-1989 428 (4.5%)

Post-1989
230
(2.42%)

Post-World War II-1957
2662
(27.98%)

Pre-1648
1832
(19.26%)

Regime Type Civil authoritarian regime
4023
(42.29%)

Democratic regime
3662
(38.49%)

Military-direct rule
668
(7.02%)

Military-indirect rule
484
(5.09%)

Military dual authority
677
(7.12%)

Governmental
Instability
Newly-independent state, government
in exile
100
(1.08%)

Normal level^
7178
(77.39%)

Significant decrease
ǂ

115
(1.24%)

Significant increase
ǂ

1882
(20.29%)
84

Variable Label Statistics

Regime
Repression
Newly-independent state, government
in exile 101 (1.1%)

Normal level
6491
(70.55%)

Significant decrease
459
(4.99%)

Significant increase
2149
(23.36%)

Economic
Status of
Actor Decrease in economic problems
156
(1.84%)

Increase in economic problems
2131
(25.12%)

Newly-independent state
138
(1.63%)

Normal economic situation
6057
(71.41%)

Geographic
Location of
Crisis Central Africa
955
(10.04%)

Central America
664
(6.98%)

Central Asia 80 (0.84%)

Central Europe 181 (1.9%)

East Africa
727
(7.64%)

East Asia
707
(7.43%)
85

Variable Label Statistics

East Europe
277
(2.91%)

Euro-Asia (Russia) 2 (0.02%)

Middle East
2011
(21.14%)

North Africa
717
(7.54%)

North America 13 (0.14%)

North Europe
122
(1.28%)

South-East Asia
987
(10.37%)

South America
205
(2.15%)

South Asia
729
(7.66%)

South Europe
377
(3.96%)

Southern Africa 84 (0.88%)

West Africa
263
(2.76%)

West Asia 381 (4%)

West Europe 32 (0.34%)

Duration of
Political
Regime 0-2 years
1292
(13.91%)

3-25 years
5161
(55.57%)
86

Variable Label Statistics

Over 25 years
2834
(30.52%)

Great Power
Involvement
Alliance leader-superpower or great
power 12 (0.25%)

Formal alliance with superpower or
great power
1208
(25.29%)

Informal alliance with superpower or
great power
1539
(32.22%)

Non-aligned or neutral
2017
(42.23%)

Nuclear
Capability of
Crisis Actor
Developed nuclear capability, with
second strike capability
1360
(14.29%)

Foreseeable nuclear capability
519
(5.46%)

No (foreseeable) nuclear capability
6826
(71.75%)

Possession of nuclear capability 809 (8.5%)

Perceived
Threat to
Major Power
Influence Adverse change in global balance
161
(1.69%)

Coded as threat influence in
perceived threat, but not threat to
superpower influence
1106
(11.64%)

Decline in influence with adversary
bloc
159
(1.67%)

Decline in influence with non-aligned
group
220
(2.32%)
87

Variable Label Statistics

Decline in influence with non-bloc client states
186
(1.96%)

Decline in superpower influence within its bloc
187
(1.97%)

Not coded as threat to influence perceived
threat
7238
(76.17%)

Pre-1945 case
245
(2.58%)

Leader Age

56.48
(11.74)

External or
Internal
Trigger External entity
8523
(90.03%)

Internal entity
944
(9.97%)

Gravity of
Value
Threatened Economic threat 374 (3.93%)

Limited military threat
1208
(12.7%)

Other 148 (1.56%)

Political threat
1646
(17.3%)

Territorial threat
2323
(24.42%)

Threat of grave damage 1332 (14%)

Threat to existence 285 (3%)
88

Variable Label Statistics

Threat to influence in intl. system or regional
subsystem
2198
(23.1%)
NOTE: Sample size and corresponding relative frequency within parenthesis of categorical
variables and mean and standard deviation within parenthesis of continuous variables are
reported.
ǂ Significant increase during relevant period preceding the crisis
^Level changes relative to the period preceding the crisis.

Table 5.2: Results of Logistic Regression on Triggering Entity
Odds Ratio (OR) with corresponding 95% confidence intervals within parenthesis are shown and P-
values (P) are reported.
Term OR P
System Polarity: Polycentricism I 1.425 [1.049, 1.934] 0.023*
System Polarity: Polycentricism II &
Unipolarity 0.713 [0.481, 1.056] 0.091
Age of State: 1815-1918 2.578 [1.217, 5.461] 0.013*
Age of State: 1919-1945 16.181 [6.592, 39.718] <0.001***
Age of State: Post World War II-1957 1638 12.709 [5.873, 27.501] <0.001***
Age of State: 1958-1966 13.22 [6.138, 28.475] <0.001***
Age of State: 1967-1989 1.31 [0.526, 3.264] 0.562
Age of State: Post-1989 15.032 [5.915, 38.199] <0.001***
Civil Authoritarian Regime 1.359 [1.022, 1.809] 0.035*
Military-Direct Rule Regime 0.236 [0.12, 0.466] <0.001***
89

Military-Indirect Rule Regime 0.497 [0.305, 0.809] 0.005**
Military Dual Authority Regime 0.412 [0.251, 0.678] <0.001***
Government Stability: Normal, Decrease, New
Independent State 0.513 [0.403, 0.654] <0.001***
Normal Regime Repression 0.632 [0.504, 0.794] <0.001***
New State, Govern. in Exile, or Significant
Decrease in Regime Repression 0.573 [0.369, 0.888] 0.013*
Decrease in Economic Problems, New
Independent State, or Normal Economic
Situation 0.478 [0.383, 0.596] <0.001***
Duration 3-25 Years 1.096 [0.812, 1.479] 0.55
Duration >25 Years 1.038 [0.682, 1.579] 0.862
Informal alliance with superpower or great
power 2.484 [1.919, 3.214] <0.001***
Alliance leader-superpower or great
power/Formal alliance with superpower or great
power 1.194 [0.872, 1.634] 0.268
Leader Age 0.942 [0.917, 0.967] <0.001***
America 5.644 [2.753, 11.575] <0.001***
Asia 0.684 [0.465, 1.005] 0.053
Middle East 0.478 [0.307, 0.743] 0.001**
Europe 0.582 [0.273, 1.243] 0.162
Age x Civilian Authoritarian Regime 1.041 [1.012, 1.071] 0.006**
Age x Military-Direct Rule Regime 1.131 [1.032, 1.240] 0.008**
Age x Military-Indirect Rule Regime 1.014 [0.957, 1.075] 0.637
Age x Military Dual Rule Regime 1.040 [0.982, 1.101] 0.181
Note. Dependent Variable: Triggering Entity (reference category = External entity)

90

Table 5.3: Results of Ordinal Logistic Regression on Gravity
Odds ratio (OR) with corresponding 95% confidence intervals within parenthesis are shown and P-values
(P) are reported.
Variable OR P
System Polarity: Polycentricism I 1.543 [1.28, 1.86] <0.001***
System Polarity: Polycentricism II & Unipolarity 1.127 [0.912, 1.392] 0.269
Age of State: 1815-1918 0.631 [0.436, 0.915] 0.015*
Age of State: 1919-1945 0.33 [0.22, 0.493] <0.001***
Age of State: Post World War II-1957 1638 0.543 [0.416, 0.709] <0.001***
Age of State: 1958-1966 0.35 [0.26, 0.472] <0.001***
Age of State: 1967-1989 0.409 [0.28, 0.597] <0.001***
Age of State: Post-1989 0.4 [0.27, 0.592] <0.001***
Informal alliance with superpower or great power 0.952 [0.807, 1.124] 0.562
Alliance leader-superpower or great power/Formal alliance with
superpower or great power 0.631 [0.53, 0.751] <0.001***
America 0.65 [0.455, 0.928] 0.018*
Asia 2.36 [1.871, 2.976] <0.001***
Middle East 2.301 [1.759, 3.011] <0.001***
Europe 1.479 [1.022, 2.138] 0.038*
Normal Regime Repression 0.882 [0.761, 1.023] 0.098
New State, Govern. in Exile, or Significant Decrease in Regime Repression 0.537 [0.414, 0.696] <0.001***
Duration 3-25 Years 0.422 [0.348, 0.512] <0.001***
Duration >25 Years 0.325 [0.252, 0.421] <0.001***
Decrease in Economic Problems, New Independent State, or Normal
Economic Situation 0.853 [0.739, 0.984] 0.03*
91

Source of threat power status 1.46 [1.248, 1.709] <0.001***
Leader Age 0.984 [0.972, 0.997] 0.013**
Civil Authoritarian Regime 1.67 [1.406, 1.984] <0.001***
Military-Direct Rule Regime 1.709 [1.255, 2.327] 0.001**
Military-Indirect Rule Regime 0.68 [0.511, 0.906] 0.008**
Military Dual Authority Regime 0.742 [0.56, 0.982] 0.037*
Age x Civil Authoritarian Regime 1.034 [1.019, 1.049] <0.001***
Age x Military-Direct Rule Regime 1.069 [1.030, 1.111] 0.001**
Age x Military-Indirect Rule Regime
0.994 [0.966,
1.0222] 0.654
Age x Military Dual Authority Regime 0.960 [0.932, 0.988] 0.006**

92

Appendix
Table 5.4: Variable Descriptions
Variable Description
Source of Threat
Power Status
This variable assesses the power status of the state or other entity identified as the source of
threat.
System Polarity
For each crisis actor, this variable identifies the overall power structure of the international
system, that is, its polarity.
Age of State
When the crisis actor first become an autonomous entity in the modern international system
(post-1500), with continuous existence as a sovereign state.
Political Regime
of Crisis Actor
This variable distinguishes between authoritarian and democratic regimes, as well as
between civil and military regimes, at the time of the crisis.
Government
Instability
This variable assesses the level of governmental instability in the crisis actor, as evidenced
by executive structure changes. changes, constitutional changes, legal changes, and
administrative
Regime
Repression
This variable assesses the level of repression exercised by the regime of the crisis actor
preceding the crisis period.
Economic Status
of Actor This variable provides a summary indicator of the economic status of the crisis actor.
Duration of
Political Regime
This variable reports the number of years of continuous existence of a specific political
authority within the crisis actor at the time of the crisis.
Great Power
Involvement
This variable identifies the type of alliance pattern which existed for the crisis actor at the
time of its crisis.
Nuclear Capability
of Crisis Actor
Indicator whether the crisis actor possess nuclear weapons or access to them at the time the
crisis began.
External or
Internal Trigger Indicator whether the triggering entity external to the crisis actor, or internal?
Gravity
This variable identifies the object of gravest threat at any time during the crisis, as
perceived by the principal decision makers of the crisis actor.
Geographic
Location of Crisis Geographic location of the crisis actor based on the UN Stats Division.

93

Table 5.5: Factor Levels of Categorical Predictors After Re-grouping
Variable Factor level Value
Age of State 1 Pre-1648, 1648-1814

2 1815-1918

3 1919-1945

4 Post-World War II-1957

5 1958-1966

6 1967-1989

7 Post-1989

Great Power
Involvement 1 Non-aligned or neutral

2 Informal alliance with superpower or great power

3
Alliance leader-superpower or great power, Formal alliance with
superpower or great power

Duration of Political
Regime 1 0-2 years

2 3-25 years

3 Over 25 years

Economic Status of
Actor 1 Increase in economic problems

2
Decrease in economic problems, Newly-independent state, Normal
economic situation

Government Instability 1 Significant increase

2
Newly-independent state, government in exile, Normal level,
Significant decrease

94

Variable Factor level Value
System Polarity 1 Bipolarity

2 Polycentricism I

3 Polycentrism II, Unipolarity

Political Regime of
Crisis Actor 1 Democratic regime

2 Civil authoritarian regime

3 Military-direct rule

4 Military-indirect rule

5 Military dual authority

Regime Repression 1 Significant increase

2 Normal level

3 Newly-independent state, government in exile, Significant decrease

Source of Threat Power
Status 1 Small Power

2 Middle Power

3 Great Power

4 Superpower

Geographic Location of
Crisis

Central Africa Africa

East Africa Africa

North Africa Africa

Southern
Africa Africa
95

Variable Factor level Value

West Africa Africa

Central
America America

South
America America

East Asia Asia

South-East
Asia Asia

South Asia Asia

West Asia Asia

Middle East East

Central
Europe Europe

East Europe Europe

North Europe Europe

South Europe Europe

96

Figure 5.1: Forest Plot Showing Results of Logistic Regression Model Where Trigger Crisis
Entity was the Response Variable and External was the Reference Level

97

Figure 5.2: Forest Plot Showing Results of the Ordinal Logistic Regression Model Where
Gravity or Perceived Gravity of Threat Indicator was the Response Variable

98

Chapter 6: Conclusion and Implications for Future Research
In this dissertation, we have interrogated the common wisdom surrounding age and
wisdom in political behavior, conducting a mixed methods and analytically eclectic analysis,
using case studies, interviews, and regression methods. Our case studies, perhaps unsurprisingly,
all tell different stories, and in some ways represent the three different archetypes of the
trajectory of risk orientation a leader goes through over the course of their life and regime.
Francisco Franco (with the caveat of our limited available data) seems to have been
relatively unchanged over the course of his life in the way he approached political risk in
decision-making, both during and after Spain’s civil war and in the way he approached
appointing a successor to his own regime in Juan Carlos I, skipping over the man most directly in
line to the Spanish throne out of fear that he would liberalize the country too much. Donald
Trump seems to have become more risk-acceptant over the latter decades of his life, and
especially while holding the presidency. In contrast, Fidel Castro displayed a more traditional
trajectory that accords with our quantitative data – albeit with some halts and missteps – away
from being a more risk-acceptant young leader and toward a somewhat more circumspect leader
in his final years.
In the end, our quantitative analysis shows an undeniable link between a leader’s age and
the way he or she will approach an international crisis. Each additional year of age a leader
attains is associated with a 5.8 percentage point decrease in their likelihood of initiating or
escalating an international crisis, which is on its own significant, but when compounded over a 4,
or 8, or 20 year regime (depending on whether it’s a democracy or not), the cumulative effect
becomes quite dramatic. Thus, we have good reason to believe that the leaders we interviewed
99

were correct, and not projecting, when overwhelmingly making the argument that “with age
comes wisdom,” including in the international political sphere.
We have only begun to understand the dynamics that the age of leaders plays in
policymaking. Future research will have to address the domestic side of policymaking more
directly than this project did, although we did go into some detail analyzing the ways that
domestic politics might have influenced certain decisions the leaders made in our case studies.
Additionally, if voters will continue using age as a heuristic for wisdom – at least to a point – we
will have to interrogate the magnitude of the effect that a leader’s age can have on their political
attitudes, which variables might affect or mitigate the way that heuristic is employed
psychologically, and to what extent a voter’s own age colors their view of the role of a leader’s
age in policymaking.
Finally, we will have to find new ways to analyze the factors that affect young leaders’
decision-making as well. We remain skeptical that their relatively higher willingness to initiate
or escalate international crises is solely a function of higher testosterone levels at the biological
level, as Horowitz et al. (2005) proposed in their groundbreaking study. It is our hope that fMRI
technology will continue to become cheaper and more accessible, as its use in a political science
context could provide us with some of the biological questions we are seeking to answer.

100

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Does age affect the way that political leaders make foreign policy decisions, particularly when so much risk and uncertainty is involved? Past research (Horowitz, McDermott, and Stam, 2005) suggests that a political leader’s age is a significant factor in the onset and escalation of militarized international disputes. In this Dissertation, I extend the analysis of age’s role in foreign policy-making to international crises, rather than just full-fledged militarized disputes, to gain a more nuanced understanding of the role age plays, while controlling for variables like regime type and tenure. I also conduct qualitative analyses on three different national leaders who served past the age of seventy – Donald Trump, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco. Using the International Crisis Behavior dataset, which includes 476 international crises involving 1052 crisis actors between 1918 and 2015, I analyze the effect that age has on one’s propensity to trigger or escalate an international crisis, as well as its effect on the gravity of threat perceived by the leader (measured in the ICB data on an ordinal scale, from purely economic to an existential threat). I find significant evidence that as leaders age, they are more likely to engage in or escalate international crises, and that they will be more likely to perceive a higher gravity of threat in a given crisis situation.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Giannaros, Spiros Jason (author)

Core Title Are you as old as you feel? A quantitative and qualitative analysis of leader age and foreign policy decision-making

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Political Science and International Relations

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 08/01/2022

Defense Date 06/21/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Age,Foreign policy,International relations,international security,OAI-PMH Harvest,political behavior,political psychology

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Advisor James, Patrick (committee chair), Bechara, Antoine (committee member), Lo, James (committee member)

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