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Regime type is an important variable in international relations. Numerous scholars have theorized its effects on actors’ crisis behavior and outcomes. Despite regime type's importance, the literature has not focused on the role its uncertainty might play in interstate politics. This is in stark contrast to the scholarly attention given to uncertainty about other similarly important variables like actor capabilities, intentions, or fighting costs. In this paper, we aim to address this gap in the literature by providing a theory of regime uncertainty's effects on conflict and developing a novel measure of uncertainty about regime type in interstate relations to test our hypotheses. We find that regime uncertainty breeds caution rather than conflict: higher uncertainty about the opponent's regime type makes conflict initiation and escalation less likely in disputes, and dyads with more uncertainty are less likely to experience conflict onset.

Using the debate over democratization and conflict, we demonstrate how the connection between conceptualization and operationalization can play a decisive role in the testing of falsifiable hypotheses. We discuss seven different operationalizations of regime change based on three different conceptualizations of democracy. Although we find high correlations between different measures of democracy, when they are used to capture regime change the correlations drop precipitously. In multivariate estimations of the effect of regime change on a range of conflict variables, we generate widely disparate results, providing no consistent support that democratization affects conflict. We thus demonstrate that decisions about conceptualization and subsequent operationalization have decisive impact on the inference we produce. In contrast, our controls for the effect of institutionalized democracy consistently show a negative relationship between joint democracy and conflict. Finally, autocratic regime change seems to be more robustly correlated with a range of conflict behaviors than heretofore recognized in this literature. 1 We operationalize nine different models but the conceptualizations for both Polity III and IV, and the UDS and V-Dem electoral democracy are conceptualized in similar ways. They differ in that they are operationalized with different measures.