I argue that democracy and peace are both symptoms-not causes-of the removal of territorial issues between neighbors, and in this sense the ''empirical law'' of democratic peace may in fact be spurious. As democracies tend to stabilize their border relations prior to becoming democratic, democracy as an independent variable in conflict studies captures the effects of an absence of territorial issues. States without these issues are less prone to disputes prior to regime type, and I show that, after controlling for the presence of stable borders, joint democracy exercises no pacifying effect on conflict behavior from 1946 to 1999.Most democratic peace scholarship takes regime type as given and then estimates its effect on the likelihood of conflict. This paper deviates from that formula by endogenizing regime type to test whether joint democracy is actually an instrumental variable that represents an absence of territorial issues in particular dyads, especially neighbors. If states are most likely to have issues with their neighbors, but some neighbors remove these issues from contention, peaceful relationships should exist among these states outside of regime type. I argue that democracy and peace might both be symptoms-not causes-of the removal of territorial issues between neighbors, and in this sense the ''empirical law'' of democratic peace might be spurious (Levy 1988).In the sections that follow, I examine literature on the steps to war explanation of conflict and the democratic peace, noting potentially useful points of accommodation between their findings. Next, I outline a theory that understands both peace and regime type-in particular, democracy-to be the product of specific patterns of border relationships. I then test this theory against a model of conflict that controls for the effects of border relationships and find that joint democracy does not exercise a pacifying effect on dispute initiation. Territorial Issues and the Steps to WarContiguity enjoys wide empirical support as one of the key factors influencing the likelihood of war in dyads (

This article serves as a companion to the release of Version 3.0 of the Correlates of War Formal Interstate Alliance Dataset, 1816–2000. First released in 1966, the Correlates of War alliance data have greatly influenced quantitative studies of conflict, providing an important variable in the study of international conflict and cooperation. The article begins by describing the historical development and the major characteristics of the alliance dataset. The second section then discusses the procedures used to both identify and code each alliance in this revised and extended version of the data, and this is followed by a description of several important changes made to the original coding rules in order to develop this dataset, with the most notable of these changes being a more determined reliance on treaty texts rather than historical accounts for identification of alliances and alliance types. To show the effects of the revised coding decisions and the enlarged temporal domain, the final section of the article presents summary statistics for the new data and then uses the dataset to revisit two existing studies on democracy and alliance behavior. The findings indicate that jointly democratic dyads are likely to be allied only after 1945; joint democracy is negatively related to alliance formation during the 1816–1944 time period.

No abstract

The Steps-to-War theory of international conflict argues that territorial issues are more salient than other issues domestically. However, the evidence for this conclusion almost always rests with international conflict outcomes, assuming away the domestic political processes leading to greater salience. In the tolerance literature, several studies note that political attitudes, particularly toward unpopular groups, vary systematically across different states but provide few explanations that account for these differences. We believe these two observations are linked and argue that territorial threats serve as one factor conditioning individual political attitudes that privilege national unity over freedom of expression. Using World Values Survey data collected from 33 countries, and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) techniques, our paper confirms this. We find evidence that the type of external threat facing a country matters in moderating individual attitudes, even after controlling for economic and institutional differences across the states sampled. Specifically, we demonstrate how the diffusion from territorial threats to domestic audiences results in a chilling effect on individual willingness to extend democratic freedoms. Thus, we show that territorial issues exhibit greater salience domestically than other types of international issues.

Although centralization is thought to be a common response to external threats to the state, few theories develop the mechanisms by which domestic centralization occurs. Fewer still consistently demonstrate that centralization is indeed a common response to external threats in all states. This article therefore develops a comprehensive theory of domestic change in the shadow of external threat. Salient threats to the state create strong incentives for opposition forces to support the leader in power, even in non-democracies. The leadership then uses these favorable domestic political climates to decrease the number of institutional veto points that can stop future leader-driven policy changes. Collectively, this two-part theory provides a unified model of domestic behavioral change (also known as rally effects) and institutional centralization (defined by a declining number of veto players). In addition, by defining salient threats as challenges to homeland territory, the article provides some of the first domestic-level evidence that territorial disputes are fundamentally different from other types of international conflicts.