Leadership Style, Regime Type, and Foreign Policy Crisis Behavior: A Contingent Monadic Peace?

While a substantial body of theory suggests that democracies should behave peacefully toward all states (monadically), most empirical evidence indicates they are only pacific in their relations with fellow democracies (dyadically). A new theoretical synthesis suggests that the missing link between democratic constraints and pacific monadic behavior is leaders' perceptions of, and responses to, these constraints. Research on political leadership indicates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, leaders respond in systematically different ways to domestic constraints: "constraint respecters" internalize constraints in their environments, while "constraint challengers" view such constraints as obstacles to be surmounted. An analysis of 154 foreign policy crises provides strong support for this contingent monadic thesis: democracies led by constraint respecters stand out as extraordinarily pacific in their crisis responses, while democracies led by constraint challengers and autocracies led by both types of leaders are demonstrably more aggressive.     

The Liberal Peace Revisited: The Role of Democracy,Dependence, and Development in Militarized Interstate Dispute Initiation, 1950–1999

We test a model of the liberal peace by examining the initiation of militarized interstate disputes at the monadic level of analysis from 1950–1999. Liberal peace theory contends that both economic dependence and democratic political systems reduce conflict propensities. Extant empirical analyses of the monadic liberal peace, however, are under-specified. First, the concept of economic dependence not only includes trade, but also foreign investment. Second, existing models do not control for the influence of economic development. Previous research on the monadic liberal peace has also failed to distinguish between the initiation of conflict and participation in conflict. We find evidence for a liberal peace: trade dependence, foreign investment, and democracy reduce a state’s propensity to initiate militarized disputes.     

Which Afghanistan? Military,Humanitarian, and State-Building Identities in the Afghan Theater

Proponents and critics of the democratic peace have debated the extent to which covert attempts by democracies to overthrow other elected governments are consistent with or contradict democratic peace theory. The existing debate, however, fails to acknowledge that there are multiple democratic peace theories and that inter-democratic covert intervention might have different implications for different arguments. In this article, we first distill hypotheses regarding covert foreign regime change from three theories of democratic peace. Relying primarily on declassified government documents, we then investigate these hypotheses in the context of U.S. covert intervention in Chile (1970–73). The evidence suggests that covert intervention is highly inconsistent with norms and checks-and-balances theories of democratic peace. The evidence is more consistent with selectorate theory, but questions remain because democratic leaders undertook interventions with a low likelihood of success and a high likelihood that failure would be publicized, which would constitute exactly the type of policy failure that democratic executives supposedly avoid.     

Toward a Multiprocess Model of Rivalry and the Democratic Peace

In this paper we examine recent efforts to combine quantitative research on the democratic peace with research on interstate rivalry. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we highlight problems with separately analyzing the processes associated with rivalry and the democratic peace. Specifically, we specify a multiprocess model and demonstrate that previous research on this topic may overestimate the pacifying effect of democracy on enduring rivalries. Since pairs of democracies are unlikely to experience interstate rivalry in the first place, the true effect of joint democracy is difficult to ascertain in a censored sample of interstate rivals. Our simulation results are consistent with historical data analysis that suggests that the pacifying effect of democracy is most pronounced in the enhanced probability of jointly democratic dyads averting the onset of rivalry. More generally, this article fits into a larger body of research that examines the confounding effect of selection bias on world politics research.     

The Nexus of Market Society, Liberal Preferences, and Democratic Peace: Interdisciplinary Theory and Evidence

Drawing on literature from Anthropology, Economics, Political Science and Sociology, an interdisciplinary theory is presented that links the rise of contractual forms of exchange with in a society with the proliferation of liberal values, democratic legitimacy, and peace among democratic nations. The theory accommodates old facts and yields a large number of new and testable ones, including the fact that the peace among democracies is limited to market-oriented states, and that market democracies—but not the other democracies—perceive common interests. Previous research confirms the first hypothesis; examination herein of UN roll call votes confirms the latter: the market democracies agree on global issues. The theory and evidence demonstrate that (a) the peace among democratic states may be a function of common interests derived from common economic structure; (b) all of the empirical research into the democratic peace is underspecified, as no study has considered an interaction of democracy with economic structure; (c) interests can be treated endogenously in social research; and (d) several of the premier puzzles in global politics are causally related—including the peace among democracies and the association of democratic stability and liberal political culture with market-oriented economic development.     

Questions of Research Design in Developing New Tests of the Democratic Peace

We argue that the prevailing dyad-year research design employed in quantitative tests of the theoretical literature on the democratic peace suffers from several limitations. We propose an alternative research design that focuses on three different stages or "games" that typically emerge in the evolution of international disputes over time. In this type of research design the units of observation are the policy choices of "challenger" and "target" states in each of these three games. We argue that this alternative research design has several advantages, such as requiring researchers to test a more complete and extensive set of hypotheses as well as helping them to address statistical issues related to strategic behavior and selection effects.     

The Dearth of Jointly Dyadic Democratic Interventions

The Democratic Peace Proposition, which states that no two democracies have ever gone to war with each other, has been questioned by scholars who claim that such pacific behavior among free states does not apply to lower forms of conflict. In particular, Kegley and Hermann contend that democracies intervene in the affairs of other liberal states via overt military acts or covert machinations. In many cases, they argue that dyadic democratic interventions (DDIs) occur more frequently than would be expected given the number of jointly democratic dyads in the international system. I examine their research design and suggest changes to their concepts of states, interventions, and regime type, as well as their sample size and definition of dyads in the international system. I implement these changes and retest such arguments on a sample of interventions from 1945 to 1991. I find 11 cases where a democracy intervenes against another democracy, but these cases are rare in comparison to interventions conducted by democratic and/or autocratic states in undemocratic states, or by autocratic states against democratic states. Furthermore, these DDIs are less likely to occur than the presence of democracy in the international system would suggest.     

Bushwhacking the Democratic Peace

The invasion of Iraq has been justified, ex post , as for the purpose of promoting the democratic peace. It does not, however, appear to have been a principal goal ex ante . Most democratic peace theorists, moreover, do not endorse democratic regime change by great-power external military intervention. Success is difficult to achieve (usually at high cost), and the conditions in Iraq were not promising even had the occupation been carried out more competently. Greater success in democratization has been achieved by UN peacekeeping operations, and by various regional international organizations using a variety of peaceful measures to ensure free elections, constrain authoritarian leaders, and empower democratic forces. International organizations, notably those whose membership is largely composed of democracies, are especially likely to succeed in promoting democracy.     

Media Dependency: Mass Media as Sources of Information in the Democratizing Countries of Central and Eastern Europe

The theory of media dependency states that for societies in states of crisis or instability, citizens are more reliant on mass media for information and as such are more susceptible to their effects. As there is little empirical evidence of how citizens use mass media in democratizing countries, this article demonstrates that individuals' media use is not only heightened during democratic transition but is also a function of a deliberate information-seeking strategy. Using surveys from six Central and Eastern European countries in 1996–1997, the article presents empirical evidence that citizens of new democracies purposively use the media for obtaining political information. This pattern of media use is especially pronounced in new democracies that have not proceeded very far in the process of democratic consolidation. These findings begin to fill the gap in our knowledge about the role of mass media in democratizing countries and chart clear directions for broadening our understanding of the process of political socialization in such countries.     

Democracy and the Preparation for War: Does Regime Type Affect States' Anticipation of Casualties?

Immanuel Kant and more recent expositors of the democratic peace thesis suggest that citizens in a republic sanction leaders for resorting to war because, in part, citizens are loath to shed their own blood. This Kantian thesis in turn implies substitution. Just as consumers confronted with price shocks shift consumption to less affected goods rather than simply curtailing consumption, democratic leaders facing retribution for casualties can limit losses, not just by avoiding military contests, but also by substituting capital (ships, tanks, aircraft) for labor (soldiers, sailors, airmen) in the provision of security. A simple consumer choice model shows that citizens' leverage over leaders implies that democracies should consume disproportionately more capital in preparing for—and conducting—defense. Numerous anecdotes assert that democracies do shelter labor with capital, especially during war, but tests of defense-factor allocations on factor endowments, regime-type, and other variables show that defense-factor usage is explained by basic economic theory and not by democracy.     

Democracy and civil war: A note on the democratic peace proposition

Democracies may not fight each other, but do they fight themselves? Despite the need to better understand internal wars, empirical investigations of the democratic peace have focused on international war between democracies. We test the effect of regime type on civil wars, a class of events that is widely overlooked in the study of conflict. We find that regime type strongly affects civil war participation.     

“Democracy as Civilisation”

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy has come to embody the very idea of legitimate statehood in international politics. It has done so largely through defining a new standard of civilisation, in which “democraticness” determines the limits of international society and helps to construct relations with non-democracies “beyond the pale”. Like the “classical” standard, this new version again reflects a considerable interest in the socio-political organisation of states. Central in this shift back to a more “anti-pluralist” international society has been the democratic peace thesis, which emphasises how the internal (democratic) characteristics of states influence their external behaviour. Against more optimistic interpretations, it is argued that the democratic peace is a distinctly Janus-faced creature: promoting peace between democracies, while potentially encouraging war against non-democratic others. Within the democratic peace, non-democracies become not just behaviourally threatening but also ontologically threatening. Non-democracies are a danger because of what they are (or are not). In sum, the argument presented is that democracy, positioned as the most legitimate form of domestic governance in international society, has become caught up and used in global structures of domination, hierarchy and violence. Thus, the role of “democracy” in international politics is much more complicated, and, at least in its current guise, less progressive than often portrayed.     

Editors' Note

Examining the relationship between regime type and defense effort provides evidence for reformulating theories of democratic peace. Consistent with liberal theories, regime type has substantively and statistically significant effects. In times of peace, democracies bear lower defense burdens than other states and keep proportionately fewer soldiers under arms. During times of war, however, democracies try harder and exert greater defense effort than non-democracies. Contrary to the results of some recent studies, all other things being equal, the arsenal of democracy appears to out-gun its opponents when it counts. Examining three components of democracy separately indicates that a largely overlooked factor, political competition, tends to drive these outcomes. Executive constraints are also associated with increased defense effort during war. But there is little evidence that wide participation or large winning coalitions have the predicted effects on defense effort. The results point to the flexible quality of defense effort in democracies, which is theoretically and empirically accounted for by the competitive political environment rather than institutional factors favored by existing theories.     

De-idealizing the democratic civil peace: on the political economy of democratic stabilization and pacification in Argentina and Ecuador

In the liberal concept of a ‘democratic civil peace’, an idealistic understanding of democratic stabilization and pacification prevails: democracy is seen to guarantee political stability and social peace by offering comprehensive representation and participation in political decisions while producing outcomes broadly in accordance with the common interest of society. This contrasts with the procedural quality and the material achievements of most, if not all, really existing democracies. South America is paradigmatic. Here, the legitimation of liberal democracy through both procedure and performance is weak and yet ‘third wave democracies’ have managed to survive even harsh economic and political crises. The article presents a conceptual framework to analyse historically specific patterns of democratic stabilization and pacification. Analyses of the processes of socio-political destabilization and re-stabilization in Argentina and Ecuador since the late 1990s show how a ‘de-idealized’ perspective on the democratic civil peace helps explain the viability of democratic regimes that systematically deviate from the ideal-type conditions for democratic survival that have been proposed in the literature.     

Machiavelli's Legacy: Domestic Politics and International Conflict

Research examining the effect of regime type on conflict has focused on the democracy/autocracy continuum expounded in the political philosophies of liberal thinkers such as Kant and Schumpeter. While this concentration has yielded impressive results (democratic peace), it seems plausible that other conceptions of regime type may yield similar success. This paper examines the philosophy of Machiavelli and develops a measure of his "imperial regimes." These states, which can either be democratic or autocratic, should exhibit an increased propensity to initiate international conflict. Testing this contention in Renaissance Italy (1250–1494) and the modern international system (1920–1992), this paper finds strong empirical support. Machiavelli's views illuminate key differences between democracies and autocracies that have been previously overlooked. Thus, it deepens rather than replaces our conception of how domestic institutions affect international conflict.     

The Theory of Democratic Peace and Threat Perception

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's assessment of Hitler as a potential threat to American security in the aftermath of the Munich crisis highlights the role of liberal-democratic norms in shaping the threat perceptions of democratic leaders. A critical factor in Roosevelt's post-Munich expectation of future trouble for the United States was his judgment that Hitler's contempt for democratic processes of accommodation forecasted unlimited aims. Since Roosevelt did not link his perception of threat to regime type, however, this episode also calls into question a central tenet of the theory of democratic peace: the notion that democracies invariably harbor a "presumption of enmity" toward nondemocracies. Nevertheless, the Munich case allows us to see which democratic norms do matter in threat perception and establishes that they are not simply the epiphenomena of state interests. Moreover, Roosevelt's response to the Munich crisis shows that threat can be assessed primarily on the basis of intentions and suggests how democratic predispositions can provide indicators of intent. Finally, in analyzing why some democratic leaders derive diagnostic information about aggressive intentions from such indicators, while others do not, this article explores the connection between different leaders' perceptions and the foreign policy processes of democratic states.     

Generalized Social Trust and International Dispute Settlement

What determines the success of a peaceful settlement attempt of a border dispute? In order to fully understand why decision makers choose to put an end to an ongoing conflict, it is necessary to consider the social trust levels of the general populations in both states. International conflict settlement requires public support at the domestic level. If a state’s general population perceives the potential dangers of a settlement as too severe, the conclusion of a peace agreement will be difficult. We argue that high levels of social trust allow citizens (1) to favor more conciliatory foreign policies and (2) to be more optimistic about the future behavior of other states. In democratic settings, these public attitudes serve as powerful constraints for decision makers. As a result, high aggregate levels of social trust should be directly related to concession-granting behavior by democracies as well as effective dispute settlement among jointly democratic dyads. We test these expectations with a new aggregate-level measure of social trust and find mixed support for our hypotheses: While trust does not influence the behavior of challenger states, it does have strong effects on democratic target states and jointly democratic dyads.     

Beyond the fallacy of coup-ism: conceptualizing civilian control of the military in emerging democracies

It is consensus in the democratization literature that civilian control of the military is a necessary ingredient for democracy and democratic consolidation. However, there is considerable disagreement on what civilian control of the military exactly entails and there is a lack of solid theoretical arguments for how weak or absent civilian control affects democratic governance. Furthermore, a considerable portion of the research literature is captured by the fallacy of coup-ism, ignoring the many other forms in which military officers can constrain the authority of democratically elected political leaders to make political decisions and get them implemented. This article addresses these lacunae by providing a new conceptual framework for the analysis of civil–military relations in emerging democracies. From democracy theory it derives a definition of civilian control as a certain distribution of decision-making power between civilian leaders and military officers. Based on this definition, the authors develop a five-dimensional concept of civilian control, discuss the effects of weakly institutionalized civilian control on the quality of democracy and address the chances for democratic consolidation.     

Democratic Synergy and Victory in War, 1816–1992

This study investigates the question of why democracies are more likely to win wars than non-democracies. I argue that due to the transparency of the polities, and the stability of their preferences, once determined, democracies are better able to cooperate with their partners in the conduct of wars, and thereby are more likely to win wars. In support of my argument, the main findings in this study show that, other things being equal, the larger the number of democratic partners a state has, the more likely it is to win; moreover, democratic states are more likely to have democratic partners during wars. These results are in contrast with those in current literature about the high likelihood of prevailing by democracies in wars, which emphasize, on the one hand, the superior capacity of democratic states to strengthen military capabilities and, on the other hand, to select wars in which they have a high chance of winning.