Second, these empirical studies have focused primarily on individuals living in liberal democracies ('democratic individuals'), excluding individuals of authoritarian regimes ('autocratic individuals'). Without a comparison with autocratic individuals, the data cannot tell us much if anything about the validity of the democratic peace theory. Unless we measure the actual presence of liberal norms within liberal-democracies and autocracies, and compare the influence these norms have on the support for war within these different regime-types, there is no evidence that liberal norms lead to more peaceful norms. This is precisely what I will do in this article. I extend the analyses of earlier studies by measuring the level of liberal norms of individuals socialized within an autocratic regime (the People's Republic of China) and socialized within a liberal-democracy (The Netherlands) and compare their effect on the support for war. This comparison shows that 1) liberal norms are present among Chinese individuals, 2) liberal norms are not of influence on both populations' support for war but the threat of a conflict is, and 3) Dutch individuals seem to be more war-prone towards autocracies than more peaceful towards other democracies. Democracy, war and liberal normsDemocratic peace theory seeks to explain two empirical phenomena: 1) that democracies hardly ever after go to war with each other (Babst 1964, Rummel 1983, Layne 1994, and 2) that democracies do go to war with non-democracies (Small and Singer 1976, Maoz and Abdolali 1989, Bremer 1992, Mansfield and Snyder 2005. Ergo, the search is for a mechanism that occurs between pairs of democracies, but not between any other dyad of regime-types. Democratic peace theorists 2 agree that the domestic political system of liberaldemocracies differs significantly from other regime-types and argue that some particularity of that political system "causes" peace between democracies. However, these authors cannot

The concept and ideal of statesmanship have been handed down to us from ancient to modern times, but it has a paradoxical relationship with the modern state. While terminology suggests that statesmanship presupposes the state, in fact it appears rather incongruent with modern (i.e., constitutional, democratic, and bureaucratic) statehood. Nonetheless, statesmanship continues to be promoted and new understandings, such as judicial and administrative statesmanship, have been proposed. Some hope, moreover, that statesmanship becomes more feasible again as we transfer from state government to multilevel governance. There are problems, however, with conceiving of statesmanship, either in its original or in its newer meanings, under these new conditions. Despite the enduring appeal of statesmanship, the changing role of the state in presentday governance does not mean that this ideal can be easily regained.

This paper examines the micro-foundations of the relationship between political particularism, support for democracy and support for Shari'a in the Arab World. Our hypotheses suggest that particularism reduces support for democracy whilst it increases support for Shari'a since, at the individuallevel, in-group (family/clan) obligations are more binding than obligations towards the state (universal). We test our hypotheses using data from the Arab Barometer. Results suggest that, even when allowing for the correlation of the error terms, particularism significantly increases support for Shari'a whilst it decreases support for democracy. Our results are robust to alternative specifications of the model and to the use of techniques aimed at addressing the potential endogeneity of particularism.

What is the impact of a crisis on the belief systems of leaders? We know from a substantial body of research that the beliefs of leaders impact their decision making processes. These beliefs are generally assumed to be stable, which makes them a reliable tool for explaining decision making behavior. There is, however, some limited evidence that suggests that when crises are experienced by leaders as a traumatic event, their beliefs can be affected. This article studies the potential impact of crisis‐induced trauma on leaders' belief systems by measuring the operational codes of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte before and after the shooting down of flight MH17 in 2014 in Ukraine. We use quantitative content analysis of written texts such as the speeches by Rutte. Our aim is to contribute to the crisis management literature that focuses on individual leadership and crises by finding out whether Rutte's operational code changed significantly after the downing of flight MH17. We conclude that there were two significant changes in Rutte's belief system, but these cannot be attributed to the effects of the traumatic event only. Therefore we offer an alternative explanation that combines the traumatic event hypothesis with the crisis‐learning hypothesis.

Democratic peace theory is built on the assumption that liberaldemocracy has a pacifying effect on people, a socialization process that is assumed to lack within autocracies. This paper uses an experimental approach to investigate the microfoundations of democratic peace theory among decision-makers of the US, Russia and China. It builds on and extents previous experimental studies by conceptualizing and measuring the presence and influence of liberal norms, by controlling for the perception of threat as induced by the conflict, and by testing the influence of hawkishness. The results show that the microfoundations of democratic peace theories do not find support. Neither regimetype, nor liberal norms are of influence on the willingness to attack the opponent, and also the assumed difference in liberal norms between individuals of different regime types is unsupported. Moreover, hawkish decision-makers are more likely to go to war. The results show that democratic peace theory, which aims to explain why democracies do not fight with each other, cannot be used as has been done till today and should be revised. The paper concludes with suggestions for new research avenues.