Democracy, war effort, and the systemic democratic peace

Abstract

This article uses an agent-based model and Selectorate Theory to explore the micro-foundations of the systemic democratic peace. Leaders engage in an international bargaining game that can escalate to conflict. Upon resolving the dispute, leaders distribute winnings to domestic constituencies and stand for reselection. The model’s assumptions about selectorate size in a democracy versus an autocracy make democratic leaders more accountable than autocrats and endogenously generates the dyadic democratic peace. The model shows no evidence of an autocratic peace, as mixed dyads are less likely to go to war than autocratic dyads. I further show that democratic leaders invest more resources in wars than predicted by the Nash equilibrium and also more than autocrats. This overinvestment by democratic leaders results in democracies winning more wars than autocrats. This model thus reinforces previous findings that democratic leaders respond to domestic reselection incentives by using more resources in conflict to gain a war-fighting advantage and help ensure victory. Finally, consistent with empirical results, I show that increasing the percentage of democracies in the system does not have a linear effect on the amount of conflict in the system. Below a certain threshold, increasing democracy has no effect on conflict, while after this threshold conflict decreases.

Flexible Causal Inference for Political Science

“…Because confounding is a potential threat to inference whenever the causal variable is itself caused by something else, and because virtually everything in social science is caused by something else, endogeneity is ubiquitous. For instance, democracy is said to cause peace (Maoz and Russett, 1993;Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson and Smith, 1999;Bausch, 2015), but democracy itself is thought to be endogenous to such variables as GDP, trade, and (most troublingly) peace (Gates, Knutsen and Moses, 1996;Reuveny and Li, 2003). Similarly, military alliances are widely accepted as a tool that can reduce the risk of conflict (Leeds, 2003;Johnson and Leeds, 2011;Benson, 2011;Fang, Johnson and Leeds, 2014), but both alliance formation and conflicts are driven by the (typically unobserved) interests and security environment of the states involved.…”

“…For instance, democracy is said to cause peace (Maoz and Russett 1993; Bueno et al. 1999; Bausch 2015), but democracy itself is thought to be endogenous to such variables as GDP, trade, and (most troublingly) peace (Gates, Knutsen and Moses 1996; Reuveny and Li 2003). Similarly, military alliances are widely accepted as a tool that can reduce the risk of conflict (Johnson and Leeds 2011; Benson 2011; Fang, Johnson and Leeds 2014), but both alliance formation and conflicts are driven by the (typically unobserved) interests and security environment of the states involved (Levy 1981; Bearce, Flanagan and Floros 2006).…”

From war to peace: Understanding the end of the armed conflict in Colombia

“…In International Relations, game theory has been widely used to underpin the thesis of democratic peace, where greater distrust and less cooperation are given in a system in which some states prove not to act democratically (Doyle, 2000; Gibler, 2007). This, because the democratic condition presupposes, a priori , an exercise of public debate that confers greater access to information to the intentions of a democratic state with respect to those that are not (Bausch, 2015). It has also been used to analyze the multiple responses to a possible escalation of violence between states (Dalmagro and Jiménez, 2015; Zagare, 1990), to diagnose behaviors within scenarios of commercial rivalry (Shakun, 2003), or even to promote the intervention of international organizations within the management of regional crises (Idike and Agu, 2014; Zagare, 1992).…”

Comparative Foreign Policy Analysis

“…Liberal theory argues that because of these differences in government organization, democracies will behave more peacefully than will authoritarian systems (Bausch 2015;Jakobsen et al 2016). The difficulty of building a consensus among a larger set of actors and mobilizing them for conflict constrains the war-making abilities of democratic leaders.…”