Rachel Stein’s Vengeful Citizens, Violent States is a fascinating study of how societal values shape foreign policy. Stein’s argument proceeds in three parts. First, revenge, or “the belief that wrongs deserve to be repaid” (p. 8), can be thought of as a “core value” or a “deeply held and enduring belief(s) about ‘desirable modes of conduct or desirable end states of existence’” (pp. 7–8). As a core value, revenge shapes beliefs about appropriate responses to perceived wrongs and in turn can influence attitudes about using military force.
Second, Stein argues that there exists cross-cultural variation in vengefulness. This claim is intuitively plausible, yet difficult to verify. She draws on cross-disciplinary literature that views vengefulness as a cultural norm that arises where property rights are weakly enforced. In places and times in which individuals could not count on the state to address wrongdoing, actors tended to take it on themselves to enact vigilante justice. In such cultures, a strong moral belief in revenge arises. As one example, Stein draws on well-known research identifying a particular “honor culture” in the American South (pp. 54–55). This point is bolstered by references to cross-country studies finding that cultural traits like vengefulness tend to have deep roots and are remarkably persistent, although large-scale societal change and geographic mobility can disrupt them.
Third, given that vengefulness can influence attitudes about the use of force and that vengefulness varies cross-culturally, the degree of constraint that public opinion poses for the use of force should also vary across countries. Here, Stein brackets democracies apart from autocracies, arguing that the latter are less constrained by mass publics (though they are often constrained by elites). Leaders of vengeful democracies can more effectively use revenge as a framing device for justifying the use of force. These democracies then will be more likely to initiate force.
The theoretical portion of Vengeful States, Violent Citizens is carefully constructed, drawing on evidence from varied scholarship. Potential counterarguments are discussed and addressed. For instance, Stein uses a comparison of presidential rhetoric before the 1999 Kosovo bombing campaign and the 2003 Iraq War to show how leaders might use a revenge framing. President Bush depicted Saddam Hussein as guilty of transgressions against his neighbors and emphasized his personal responsibility. This framing helped generate popular support for the war by activating the core value of revenge. Yet the comparison also demonstrates when and why leaders might not invoke a revenge frame, as when President Clinton repeatedly emphasized joint blame for the Kosovo conflict. It was only after it was abundantly clear that talks had failed that Clinton authorized force. This, Stein argues, reflected a desire to keep open a peaceful solution, which could be precluded by invoking a revenge frame. The key point is that leaders possess a number of strategies about how to “sell” the use of force. Even leaders of relatively vengeful populations will sometimes avoid a revenge frame. Thus, the claim that democracies with more vengeful citizens will be more likely to initiate conflict is a ceteris paribus expectation, not an iron-clad law.
The remainder of the book presents evidence for the book’s argument. Chapter 3 establishes that a belief in revenge varies across individuals and influences their support for policies like corporal punishment, the death penalty, and police enforcement. If there is a shortcoming of this chapter, it is that the analysis relies on two datasets that are both from the United States and represent somewhat arbitrary snapshots in time. The first is the author’s original nationwide survey from 2010, and the other is the 1969 Justifying Violence study by Monica Blumenthal and colleagues (pp. 71–72). The two offer different types of questions, but analysis of both supports the notion of revenge as a core value. Notwithstanding the difficulty of finding good survey data on this topic, it would be helpful to see more cross-cultural variation in this chapter (though the Southern exceptionalism noted earlier is reflected somewhat in the data).
Chapter 4 uses a mixture of observational survey data and an original survey experiment to examine how revenge framing affects public support for war. The results support the claim that framing matters, particularly for vengeful-minded citizens. The chapter further exploits the comparison of the 2003 Iraq War and the 1999 Kosovo campaign by testing whether support for the death penalty predicts support for these uses of force. The findings show that death penalty support predicts support for the Iraq War, but not the Kosovo operation, and Stein’s interpretation is that this difference is accounted for by the different framings used by the Bush and Clinton administrations. This section adds detailed case analysis to the broader evidence, and although there are a number of potential confounding explanations, such as partisan affiliation or other latent attitudes, the analysis is consistent with the broader claim that framing matters.
Chapter 5 sets out to establish patterns of cross-cultural variation in vengefulness and to show that these are related to patterns of international conflict initiation. This chapter makes creative use of available data. Naturally, the available data have limitations, as one might expect when attempting to measure something as complicated as core values across countries. The first measure is from the 2000 Gallup survey, which covered 59 countries. The closest item on the survey to a measure of vengefulness asks respondents what purpose is served by imprisonment. Those who answered “to make those that have done wrong pay for it” (p. 137) were coded as vengeful. Indeed, by this measure, there is considerable cross-cultural variation ranging from 13% of vengeful respondents in Denmark to 54% in South Korea. The United States is right in the middle, with 30% of vengeful respondents, which is the sample mean (pp. 137–138). Although this item has some face validity, one cannot help but wonder whether the intricacies of measuring core values across cultures might require a more developed, multi-item measure. To her credit, Stein employs this measure mainly as a “gut check” to establish variation.
Because the 2000 Gallup measure does not vary over time, Stein uses original data on death penalty laws across countries and time. Here, Stein should be commended for finding a proxy for vengefulness that can be objectively assessed across countries. Yet this remains an indirect measure. It is meant as an indicator of support for vengeance, the behavior that should be predicted by the core value. But the assumption that support is driven by this value is one degree of removal from the central concept. A second degree of distance is that death penalty laws may be driven by many causes, only one of which is the general vengefulness of a population. Stein is aware of these limitations and addresses them as best as possible, but the limitations remain.
The remainder of chapter 5 presents cross-national, over-time, multivariate regressions examining whether this measure—death penalty retention in a given year, as well as change from year to year—is associated with militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation. This evidence is well explained and meticulously presented. It is hard to argue with the findings: countries that have the death penalty are more likely to initiate MIDs, even after controlling for a variety of predictors of initiation. This evidence is intriguing, to say the least, and is suggestive that cultures of vengeance matter for foreign policy.
Vengeful Citizens, Violent States is an ambitious book that will make a strong contribution to the study of domestic politics and interstate conflict. It makes a bold claim: that revenge can be thought of as a core value that influences actors’ political choices and that in turn it can constrain or enable national leaders. The evidence is comprehensive and, putting aside the limitations mentioned earlier, paints an overall picture of how core societal values shape the use of force.
