An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace

2005

1998

A study was conducted to examine the effects of nation-states' political institutions on state relations. War-fighting and selection-effects explanation were compared to explain why democracies were more likely to win wars. An analysis of all interstate wars between 1816 and 1982 revealed that democracies that initiate wars often win them. Results also suggest that domestic political structure is one factor that should not be omitted from the study of international relations.

Although the empirical pattern of democratic peace – the very low instance of war between democracies – is well-established, its theoretical explanation is unresolved. While theory tends to focus on specific institutional or normative characteristics of regimes, empirical studies often use aggregate measures of regime type. Institutional theories have also been criticized for offering monadic logic for a dyadic phenomenon. We advance an explicitly dyadic theory about political competition leading to expectations that it, rather than political participation or constraining institutions, is the most important source of the observed democratic peace. Specifically, leaders facing a viable opposition are more concerned with forestalling potential criticism of their foreign policies. Initiating conflict with a democracy would leave them vulnerable to opposition criticism on target-regime-specific normative and costs-of-war bases. Our theory and evidence suggest that potential vulnerability to such opposition criticism is more fundamental than mechanisms such as audience costs, informational effects, or public-goods logic proposed by existing theories. We present robust statistical and machine-learning based results for directed dyads in the post-World War II era supporting our argument that high-competition states avoid initiating fights with democracies. (182 words)

Peace Review, 2007

The Review of Economic Studies, 2011

We build a game-theoretic model where aggression can be triggered by domestic political concerns as well as the fear of being attacked. In the model, leaders of full and limited democracies risk losing power if they do not stand up to threats from abroad. In addition, the leader of a fully democratic country loses the support of the median voter if he attacks a non-hostile country. The result is a non-monotonic relationship between democracy and peace. Using Polity data, we classify countries as full democracies, limited democracies, and dictatorships. For the period 1816-2000, Correlates of War data suggest that limited democracies are more aggressive than other regime types, including dictatorships, and not only during periods when the political regime is changing. In particular, a dyad of limited democracies is more likely to be involved in a militarized dispute than any other dyad (including "mixed" dyads, where the two countries have di¤erent regime types). Thus, while full democratization might advance the cause of peace, limited democratization might advance the cause of war. We also …nd that as the environment becomes more hostile, fully democratic countries become more aggressive faster than other regime types.

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2004

Drawing upon two alternative versions of the institutional explanation for the democratic peace, we suggest competing hypotheses about the relationship between democratic political institutions and the length of dispute participation. One set of hypotheses originates in the argument that because of the bargaining arrangements internal to democratic states, disputes between democratic states will necessarily be drawn out, so that in the time that it takes to secure the domestic political base for war, diplomats have time to find nonwar solutions. A second set of hypotheses, derived from the selectorate argument about how institutions shape the behavior of leaders who want to remain in power, leads to the expectation that selection effects over which disputes to participate in make disputes between democracies shorter than disputes between pairs of other types of states. Using a Weibull survival model we analyze data on the length of Militarized Interstate Disputes during the period 1816 to 1992; we find clear support for the selectorate explanation. Two ancillary hypotheses from the selectorate argument are also tested and supported by the data.

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2006

Explanations for the democratic peace that credit democratic regimes with war aversion fail to explain why the democratic peace is dyadic, for the evidence suggests that democracies are averse only to fighting other democracies. This paper adopts a Machiavellian explanation for the peace among democracies, which we call "democratic deterrence," based on the reluctance of democracies to take on the superior mobilizational capacity of democracies like themselves. From Kant, we resuscitate the distinction between direct democracies and republics and his insight that the caution induced from institutional checks may sometimes countervail the greater fighting capacity of politically inclusive regimes. Acknowledgements * We wish to thank Bruce Russett for his generosity in sharing data from his research on Weinstein for helpful comments 6 Russett (1995) has also urged the studying of conflict over the life time of each dyad. See also Diehl and Goertz (2000: 108). 7 Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow (2003: 247) also make this point but we think it is a fundamental methodological point that deserves more attention. 8 This is a standard game theoretic point about conflict in complete information settings. James summarizes this nicely and explains why, nonetheless, rational actors might choose to fight. 9 We are indebted to Keith Darden for this example.

American Political Science Review, 2010

We propose and test a formal model of war and domestic politics, building on recent evidence on the relationship between regime type, the effect of war on the probability of losing office, and the consequences of losing office. The less the outcome of international interaction affects a leader's tenure and the less punitive are the consequences of losing office, the more a leader is willing to make concessions to strike a peaceful bargain. We demonstrate that our theory successfully predicts war involvement among nondemocratic regime types. Moreover, our theory offers an intuitive explanation for the democratic peace. Compared to nondemocratic leaders, the tenure of democratic leaders depends relatively little on the war outcome, and democratic leaders fare relatively well after losing office. Thus, democratic leaders should be more willing and able to avoid war, especially with other democrats.

The Journal of Politics, 2010

How does the domestic political climate within democratic states affect the duration of their foreign military engagements? To answer this question we combine a rationalist model of war termination with a theory about how partisan politics affects the policy preferences of national leaders to predict the duration of democratic military interventions. Specifically, we examine how changes in a chief executive's public approval ratings interact with partisanship to affect decisions about the timing of conflict termination. We test our expectations on a set of 47 British, French, and American cases from a new dataset of military interventions by powerful states. Our results suggest that partisanship mediates the effect of public approval on the duration of military operations initiated by powerful democratic countries. As executive approval declines, governments on the right of the political spectrum are inclined to continue to fight, while left-leaning executives become more likely to bring the troops home. By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections. . .

2012

research indicates that the democratic peace—the observation that democratic nations rarely fight each other—is spurious: that advanced capitalism accounts for both democracy and the democratic peace (Mousseau 2009). This is not a trivial prospect: if economic conditions explain the democratic peace, then a great deal of research on governing institutions and foreign policy is probably obsolete. This study addresses all the recent defenses of the democratic peace and reports new results using a new measure that directly gauges the causal mechanism of contract flows dependent on third-party enforcement. Analyses of most nations from 1961 to 2001 show contract-intensive ―impersonal ‖ economy to be the second most powerful variable in international conflict—following only contiguity—and, once considered, there is no evidence of causation from democracy to peace. It is impersonal economy, not democracy or unfettered markets, which appears to explain the democratic peace. 3 The democrati...

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2008

War outcomes are unlikely to effect elections if the major parties did not disagree over the war. Leaders who enter into wars are more likely to be punished for defeat or rewarded for victory if the opposition did not support the government during the war.

2000

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics

Is democratization good for peace? The question of whether democratization results in violence has led to a spirited and productive debate in empirical conflict studies over the past two decades. The debate, sparked by Mansfield and Snyder's foundational work, raised a challenge to the notion of a universal democratic peace and elicited numerous critical responses within the literature. One set of such responses has emphasized issues of replicability, mismatches between the research design and directionality of the proposed causal mechanism, the role of outliers, and model specification. In addition, two issues have not been discussed sufficiently in the existing literature. First, conceptually, is the issue of concept stretching, specifically the form Sartori labeled the "cat-dog" problem. While past criticisms were mainly about model specification, we debate whether Mansfield and Snyder's findings can be seen as a product of concept misformation. Second, quantitatively, are conceptual and empirical issues that Mansfield and Snyder use to capture state strength in their most recent attempts to provide ongoing evidence for their theory. The most optimistic estimates show that even when democratization has a statistically significant association with war onset at lower levels of institutional strength, the effect is substantively insignificant.

Democracies at War, 2002