Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention: Reassessing Regime Type and the Diversionary Hypothesis

This article concentrates on two limitations in the literature on diversionary force. First is the common assumption that major powers are the only actors capable of diversion. Second is the narrow conceptualization of regime type prevalent in the literature. Instead of dichotomizing regimes, we distinguish mature democracies and autocracies from consolidating variants of these regimes. We draw hypotheses from the institutional approach and test them with time series cross-section negative binomial first-order autoregressive process estimates of 140 countries from 1950 to 1996. We find that not all democracies and not all autocracies divert. Mature democracies, consolidating autocracies, and transitional polities are the only regime types prone to this type of force. Our results suggest that the diversionary literature would benefit from more discriminating operationalizations of regime type and by looking beyond major powers to the actions of less powerful states.     

Time for a haircut: political regimes and sovereign debt restructurings

ABSTRACT

Conventional wisdom claims that reputation leads sovereign states to full debt repayment. However, defaults are recurrent, some debtor countries take a lot of time to end them, and some extract costly concessions from investors. This article argues that these differences are largely explained by the political regimes in the borrowing countries. While previous research examines whether democracies make more credible commitments, we analyze how democracies affect bargaining with foreign investors after a default occurs. Democracies, with their institutional checks, electoral uncertainty, greater transparency, and public deliberation, make swift decision-making harder, create incentives to pander and posture, and give leverage to minimize the win set of viable agreements. We test our theory on a comprehensive dataset of debt restructurings with private creditors in the period 1975–2017. The event history analysis indicates that democracies experience longer restructurings and the double-hurdle regression analysis shows that democracies obtain larger creditor losses. Further, there is interesting variation among democracies and autocracies. Our findings suggest that political regimes are crucial to explaining why cooperation fails in international debt markets.     

Autocracies,democracies, and the violation of civil liberties

Research on autocracies and their consequences has been a growth industry in the latest decade. Nonetheless, the relationship between the type of autocracy and the violation of civil liberties has largely been ignored. In this article, we employ a new dataset, which includes cross-temporal data on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly/association, freedom of religion, and freedom of movement, to shed light on this issue. Analysing 182 countries in the period 1979–2008, we show that democracies repress civil liberties less than autocracies do, whereas we find little evidence to the effect that different kinds of autocracies violate civil liberties to different degrees. However, we also show that the differences between democracies and autocracies have declined starkly since the Cold War. Finally, our results demonstrate that the difference in the extent to which democracies and autocracies repress civil liberties is larger for the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly/association than for the freedom of religion and freedom of movement. We take the general difference between the two categories of liberties as evidence that autocracies repress political liberties more than private liberties because the former presents levers for oppositional activity. We argue that the cross-temporal differences are a consequence of the spread of more minimalist democracies since the end of the Cold War.     

Determinants of Third Parties' Intervention and Alignment Choices in Ongoing Conflicts, 1946–2001

The decision to intervene in ongoing conflicts is one of the most difficult foreign policy choices states often face. Yet, studies of third parties' joining behavior have been rare and limited in several respects. First, they have explored only a subset of all interventions—military interventions. Second, they have concentrated on security-based determinants of intervention—power and alliance considerations—while underplaying other possible motivations behind the decision to intervene. Third, they have explored intervention and alignment choices as separate issues. This paper proposes a model of joining behavior that includes both security considerations and homophilous network ties as determinants of third parties' intervention and alignment choices. The model is tested on military and nonmilitary interventions data from Corbetta and Dixon (2005) for the 1946–2001 period. The results from a boolean logit estimation indicate that (1) the intervention decision is the result of both security-driven, pragmatic considerations and homophily between joiners and disputants; and (2) opposition to a party in a conflict is as important as a third party's social proximity to the side being supported.     

An Experimental Test of Selectorate Theory

This article uses a laboratory experiment to test one of the main predictions of selectorate theory, that is, that democratic leaders invest more resources in public goods than autocratic leaders. The results of the experiment confirm this prediction and further show citizens are better off on average under democratic institutions than autocratic institutions. Meanwhile, autocratic leaders receive higher payoffs than democratic leaders. Additionally, this article attempts to bring domestic politics into international relations experimentation with a focus on how communication may allow democracies to organize more efficiently for war than autocracies. A game theoretical model shows democracies have the potential to organize optimally and use their citizens’ skills to their full advantage while autocracies do not. The results of the experiment reveal some evidence that democracies organize more efficiently than autocracies, but that this increased efficiency did not produce a higher percentage of conflict wins.     

The Durability of Imposed Democracy

Why do imposed democracies endure and how do policy choices by imposing states affect durability? To study these questions, we formulate expectations linking durability to structural domestic conditions, the level of domestic security in the state into which a polity is imposed, the policies of imposing states, and the regional environment within which an imposed democracy is nested. We use event history to test our expectations on a sample of democracies imposed during the twentieth century. We find that relatively immutable, structural conditions, such as ethnic cleavages, economic development, and prior democratic experience strongly influence the durability of imposed democracies. While some policy choices made by imposing states can impact the survival of imposed democracy, they do so only modestly relative to the environment in which a democracy is imposed.     

Tau-b or Not Tau-b: Measuring the Similarity of Foreign Policy Positions

The pattern of alliances among states is commonly assumed to reflect theextent to which states have common or conflicting security interests. For the past twenty years, Kendall's τ b has been used to measure the similarity of nations' "portfolios" of alliance commitments. Widely employed indicators of systemic polarity, state utility, and state risk propensity all rely on τ b . We demonstrate that τ b is inappropriate for measuring the similarity of states' alliance policies. We develop an alternative measure of policy portfolio similarity, S , which avoids many of the problems associated with τ b , and we use data on alliances among European states to compare S to τ b . Finally, we identify several problems with inferring state interests from alliances alone, and we provide a method to overcome those problems using S in combination with data on alliances, trade, UN votes, diplomatic missions, and other types of state interaction. We demonstrate this by comparing the calculated similarity of foreign policy positions based solely on alliance data to that based on alliance data supplemented with UN voting data.     

Trade and investment: Introduction to the special issue

This special issue focuses on a variety of political-economy questions on trade and investment and is guided by a shared understanding that trade and investment processes can no longer be studied in isolation from each other. Three articles provide new insights into the study of the design of preferential trade agreements and effects thereof, two of which focus on the politically salient issues of non-trade concerns. A third one investigates which export sectors win from improved market access opportunities, in order words, how gains from trade are distributed. Two articles study the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system. One contribution is unpacking the role of the most important and influential firms and investors in affecting US behavior in WTO disputes, a second contribution studies how leadership changes in democracies and autocracies have different effects on dispute behavior. Finally, the special issue includes a new study on how the shadow economies in developing states are affected by the integration into the world economy (trade and investment) and by policy programs of the International Monetary Fund.     

How International Reputation Matters: Revisiting Alliance Violations in Context

We investigate the role of international reputation in alliance politics by developing a signaling theory linking past alliance violations with the formation of future alliance commitments. In our theory, past violations Are useful signals of future alliance reliability conditional on whether they effectively separate reliable from unreliable alliance partners. It follows that states evaluating potential alliance partners will interpret past violations in their context when deciding to enter a new alliance, attaching less weight to violations in “harder times,” when many states are defaulting on their alliance commitments together, and more weight to violations in “easier times,” when fewer states are defaulting on their alliances. We test our theory and find that states are empirically more likely to form new alliances with states that violated in harder times compared to states that violated in easier times. The results have important implications for how scholars understand and estimate the impact of international reputation.     

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.     

Do multiparty elections improve human development in autocracies?

Improvements in human development under democratic institutions are often attributed to electoral contestation. We evaluate the effect of multiparty contestation on infant mortality in the authoritarian context. Contrary to what extant scholarship argues, we find no evidence that multiparty elections in authoritarian regimes reduce infant mortality. Specifically, we show that electoral autocracies do not produce better infant mortality outcomes compared to closed autocracies holding no multiparty elections. We also demonstrate a non-monotonic effect of electoral competition on infant mortality: Infant mortality increases in levels of electoral contestation common in electoral authoritarian regimes and decreases only at levels of contestation that are nearly exclusive to democracies. Finally, we show that increases in infant mortality in electoral authoritarian regimes operate partially through increased political violence and reduced state capacity.     

Beyond Territorial Contiguity: Issues at Stake in Democratic Militarized Interstate Disputes

Scholars of international politics have been slow to address the fundamental issues that ground interstate conflict. Territory has frequently been cited as a primary source of contention among states, but it remains only one issue and not even the one most prevalent in the post–World War II time period. We take the first step toward understanding the broader theoretical link between regime type, issues, and militarized conflict by collecting new data on the issues in dispute between democracies from 1946 to 1992. We findthat (1) a large proportion of the militarized disputes between democracies in the post-WWII period involve fisheries, maritime boundaries, and resources of the sea, (2) well-established democracies are able to remove territory as a contentious issue among them, (3) disputes between democracies have become less severe and shorter in duration over time, and (4) a majority of the post-WWII militarized disputes between democracies are not resolved. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these empirical findings for the democraticpeace literature.     

Political Investment Cycles in Democracies and Autocracies

Extant research has shown considerable interest in whether host countries’ political uncertainty impedes foreign direct investment (FDI). Building upon the scholarly consensus on the adverse impact of political uncertainty on FDI, this article demonstrates that the extent to which investment climates are unpredictable varies cyclically, on the basis of election timing in democracies and leadership turnover in autocracies. The empirical results show that in presidential democracies, FDI tends to slowly increase after an executive election and then decline as the next executive election nears. However, I find that an electoral investment cycle is not found in parliamentary democracies where election timing is irregular, less predictable, and endogenous to domestic economic conditions. I also find that a similar political investment cycle exists in autocracies not through electoral cycle but through leadership tenure cycle. The level of FDI inflows tends to be relatively low early in autocrats’ tenure when political uncertainty is high and rise as autocratic leadership tenure increases over time but eventually wane again as autocratic leadership is destabilized in the late period of power transition. The findings indicate the existence of heterogeneous political investment cycles, depending on regime type.     

Representative Democracy and Fighting Domestic Terrorism

Does more representative government improve states' ability to fight domestic terrorism? In prior work, democracies are seen as more susceptible to terrorism because their respect for human rights prevents them from fully eliminating terrorist groups. However, such extrajudicial aggression could also alienate large portions of the population and create the ideal conditions for an insurgency. I argue that since terrorism is the lowest-capacity form of political violence, it is natural that states that do best at deterring political violence experience the most terrorism. While representative democracies should see terrorist groups initiate spells of attacks at a greater frequency, full political representation should also galvanize major political actors to unite and eliminate terrorist threats. I test this assertion through statistical models that treat the process of terrorist group initiation and its duration and intensity separately. Results not only show that less consolidated democracies and autocracies experience longer and more intense terrorist campaigns, but that, in support of the theory's mechanisms, groups are more likely to shift to terrorism from insurgency when their political base gains more political representation. The results call the division among research programs of various political violence types into question.     

Beyond Dyads: Regional Democratic Strength’s Influence on Dyadic Conflict

Over the history of modern international relations research, we have moved from systemic and regional studies to empirical explorations of dyadic interactions. However, our statistical models have put the details of dyadic interactions under a microscope at the expense of ignoring the relevant regional context that these dyads interact in. This development has been in part due to computational limitations, but do we really believe that decision makers interact with one another while ignoring the regional power balance and the wishes of regional powers? In this article, I take a look at the well-researched relationship between democracy and peace by using a multilevel approach to dyadic interactions and the regions they are embedded in. The findings suggest that when the regional power balance favors democracies, it influences conflict between dyads, especially mixed dyads, by increasing the costs of aggression by autocracies and establishing regional norms of cooperation and compromise.     

Finding peace in a world of hegemony and terrorism

Although acknowledging the importance of power, Immanuel Kantsuggested that republican constitutions, economic interdependence,and international law and organizations can form the basis fora dramatically more peaceful world. Statistical analyses ofthe behavior of pairs of states, 1885–1992, confirm thisliberal vision. Using methods common to medical epidemiology,we find that the Kantian elements substantially reduce the likelihoodthat states will become involved in a fatal militarized dispute.Indeed, two democracies linked by extensive trade and a densenetwork of international organizations are 95% less likely tofight than states that do not share these characteristics. Ouranalyses have important implications for the United States andChina, two countries destined to shape the twenty-first century.Engaging China in trade and integrating it into the major internationalorganizations over the last three decades has, with some liberalizationof its government, substantially reduced the risk of militaryconflict.     

Watchdog or Lapdog? Media Freedom, Regime Type, and Government Respect for Human Rights

A main justification for press freedom is that free media will act as a watchdog over the government. While we would expect democracies to have free media and autocracies to have government-controlled media, some democracies have government-controlled media, and some autocracies have free media. How this mismatch between regime type and media system influences government behavior is a puzzle worth exploring. One of the most widely criticized government behaviors is the violation of physical integrity rights. The question posed here is, how does media freedom affect government respect for these rights? In this article, I theorize that the relationship between media freedom and government respect for human rights differs, depending on the presence of democratic institutions. The findings support my premise. Specifically, the influence of media freedom on government respect for human rights is negative for the most autocratic regimes and positive for only the most democratic regimes .     

An assessment of democratic vulnerability: regime type,economic development,and coups d’état

Prior research has not established a clear relationship between democracy and insulation from coups d’état, with very few studies illustrating robust findings on the subject. I contend that the lack of attention paid to the conditional influences of democracy on coups has resulted in these mixed findings. I posit that insulation from coups occurs at higher levels of economic development in both autocracies and democracies. However, the vulnerability present at low levels of economic development is significantly greater in democracies. Poor democracies lack the coercive capacity associated with authoritarian states, suffer from relatively weaker patronage networks, and have smaller pots for public goods provision, all making them less capable of maintaining elite loyalty. An assessment of 165 states for the years 1950–2011 offers strong support for the argument. Democracies are indeed an important part of the coup story, but only when simultaneously addressing their level of economic development.     

Alliance Proximity and Effectiveness of Extended Deterrence

This article examines whether geographical proximity between defensive allies and a protégé increases the likelihood of successful extended general deterrence. I argue that proximate allies are better at making a credible deterrent threat because proximate allies are more willing and able to help alliance partners in times of crisis than distant ones. This claim is theorized by examining how geographical distance influences the international and domestic costs of alliance commitments. The empirical tests reveal that a potential aggressor is less likely to initiate a militarized dispute against a target with proximate defensive allies. Furthermore, I find that the power of proximate defensive allies is a more significant determinant of successful extended general deterrence than that of distance allies. Interestingly, I also find that the constraining effects of geographical distance on the effectiveness of extended general deterrence have been alleviated by advancements in military technologies throughout history.