Democratization in Conflict Studies: How Conceptualization Affects Operationalization and Testing Outcomes

Abstract

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.

An interactive model of democratic peace

“…This approach allows us to go one step further and build new theoretical arguments about this relationship, which is a crucial test because, as democracy has been mainly operationalized using a single indicator, the observed 'democratic peace' might be an artifact of a flawed measure rather than an actual relationship among democracies. Indeed, the literature is well aware of the fact that the way democracy or war are operationalized 'can play a decisive role in the testing of falsifiable hypotheses' (Bernhard, Ö rsün & Bayer, 2017). 4 Therefore, by measuring the independent variable differently, we should be able to reject this alternative hypothesis.…”