Domestic Political Survival and International Conflict: Is Democracy Good for Peace?

Abstract

If conflict is sufficiently costly to the average citizen, then full democracies are unlikely to be at war with each other. However, they may be become very aggressive in their interactions with other types of regimes, so democracy is not always good for peace. Moreover, limited democracies will be the most aggressive regime types, if the leader thinks he can stay stay in power only by appealing to an aggressive minority. Empirically, we find that a dyad of limited democracies is more likely to be involved in a militarized dispute than any other pair of political regimes (including two dictatorships). A dyad of full democracies is less likely to be involved in a militarized dispute than any other pair. Thus, there seem to be strong non-linearities in the relationship between democracy and peace, with limited democracies inherently more aggressive than other regime types. This effect is not limited to a period of transition from democracy to dictatorship. Finally, we find that as the environment becomes more hostile as a country becomes less democratic, the probability of conflict increases most dramatically when it faces a democracy.

Homicide in black and white

“…Systematically lower incomes and higher rates of unemployment among blacks make the penalties for attempted murder or manslaughter lower for blacks relative to their outside options. 5 Furthermore, the marginal penalties for murder are lower for those who are already engaged in high risk criminal activities such as drug-selling and robbery, and black overrepresentation in such activities is signi…cant. 6 As in the case of victim-contingent costs, this can induce cascading expectations of preemptive violence in interactions involving blacks, relative to the case when a dispute involves only whites, and result not just in higher rates of killing but also in higher rates of murder victimization.…”

“…For children under 18 in the March 2008 Current Population Survey, 22.2 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 60.9 percent of blacks were not living with both parents (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2009c, table C3). 5 Balanced against this is the possibility that o¤enders may be more aggressively pursued and prosecuted if they are black, holding constant the identity of the victim. 6 We have discussed reasons for this overrepresentation elsewhere; see O'Flaherty and Sethi (2008, 2010b) for robbery and street vice respectively.…”

“…Baliga and Sjostrom (2004) formalized this idea as a game of incomplete information and identi…ed precisely the conditions under which mutual violence arises as a unique (but highly ine¢ cient) equilibrium; see also Baliga, Lucca, and Sjostrom (2007). We have extended this work to a setting with di¤erent choices of lethality and applied it to changing murder rates in Newark, New Jersey (O'Flaherty and Sethi, 2010a).…”

How does democratization affect the composition of government expenditure?

“…10 The expenditure on defense can be affected by wars. We also control for a dummy variable for war, which equals one if there are at least 1000 battle-related deaths and zero otherwise.…”

Political Institutions and War Initiation: The Democratic Peace Hypothesis Revisited

“…In a similar vein, Baliga, Lucca and Sjöström (2007) emphasize the importance of accountability in the political survival of elected leaders, supposing that dictators remain in power regardless of the outcome of conflict, whereas leaders of democracies must appease the median voter to remain in power. Full democracies are distinguished from limited democracies in terms of the identity of the critical voter whose support is required for the leader to remain in power.…”