Bargaining and Fighting: The Impact of Regime Type on War Onset, Duration, and Outcomes

Abstract

Recent research suggests that democracies have advantages and disadvantages in wars. Democracies are more likely to win the wars they initiate and the ones in which they are targeted. Wars initiated by democracies are also uniformly shorter and less costly than wars initiated by nondemocracies. However, democracies are also less likely to continue fighting and less likely to win as war drags on. Democracies are also particularly likely to be targeted. We present a bargaining model that reconciles these divergent findings. The model explains why democracies are more likely to win but are also more likely to settle and more likely to be targeted than other types of regimes. The model's explanation of these facts differs in important ways from existing explanations. The model also suggests several new hypotheses relating regime type to the terms of settlement and the onset of war.

Denial vs. Punishment: Strategies Shape War, But War Itself Affects Strategies

“…With this extension, the two equilibria can be replaced by a single equilibrium, where the exchange of denials is followed by the prevailing side's prolonged punishment. 31 To draw implications for air strategies, one of our major …ndings consorts with Pape's (1996) assertion that denial constitutes a primary determinant of war's outcome, while punishment has little impact on it. When the prevailing side initiates punishment, the tide of war has already been determined.…”

“…Assuming that each belligerent chooses a single military strategy at a war's onset as the targeted enemy loses its forces in battles, it can become harder for an attacker to achieve additional tactical success; (iii) reciprocity and its breakup-belligerents may refrain from countervalue campaigns as far as their enemies also refrain (for WWI, Axelrod 1984: 77-87; for WWII, Legro 1995), but this reciprocal relationship can collapse once either side loses its capabilities of "punishment." 31 Out of the two equilibria, the stronger side ( in battle (2; 1)) prefers limited war, while the weaker side prefers all-out war. Introduction of the risk strategy favors the stronger side-the risk strategy can pull o¤ the victory by punishment as in limited war.…”

The Consequences of Failed Mediation in Civil Wars: Assessing the Sri Lankan Case

“…If we take a rational GIGA Working Papers WP 202/2012 choice approach to wars and peace processes -considered to be bargaining processes based on an exchange of information between the conflict parties (Fearon 1995;Reiter 2009;Filson and Werner 2004) -mediation itself has to be conceived of as a bargaining process in which the conflict parties exchange information (Beardsley 2008;Savun 2009 tiable strategic objectives will contribute to a broader bargaining space, while less negotiable ones will make the available bargaining space shrink. Correspondingly, we hypothesize that a shift towards non-negotiability leads to an increased readiness to use violence on the part of the conflict actors.…”

“…Moreover, while regime type has long been a crucial variable that has been assumed to determine bargaining behaviour (Filson and Werner 2004), some studies argue that what matters more is the internal structure of the actors involved (Werner 1998;Stanley 2009 (Stanley 2009: 50). At the same time, even within the most authoritarian systems some kind of continual dispute between different actors in the leading elite is always taking place.…”

“Turning Points” in the Iraq Conflict

“…As an international conflict that increasingly resembles a civil war, the current situation in Iraq provides both a testing ground for theories on the duration and termination of different types of conflicts (e.g. Filson and Werner, 2004;Stam and Bennett, 2006), as well as a rich source of data for empirical work. This is quite separate from its obvious importance as a political, military and economic event in progress.…”