This study explores the role that Le Monde coverage plays in the allocation of French development aid. It is expected that foreign policy officials will try to match the magnitude of their actions with what they expect is the public's perception of the importance of the aid recipient. News media salience serves as an easily accessible indicator of that domestic political importance and, in the case of foreign aid, this suggests that higher levels of news coverage of a less developed country will lead to higher aid commitments. Statistical analyses of French aid commitments during the period 1986–1998 demonstrate that while the most important predictor of foreign aid is the official adoption of the French language by the aid recipient, the levels of Le Monde coverage are consistently and significantly correlated with levels of French foreign aid.

It has often been said that the closest thing we have to an empirical law in international relations is that democracies do not fight against each other. This study adds to the literature on democratic peace by focusing on the crisis behaviour of democracies and nondemocracies. International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project data are used to conduct a quantitative analysis of states' crisis activity from 1918 to 1988. Strong support emerges for the three hypotheses of the study. First, it is clear that democracies initiate fewer crises than nondemocracies. However, democracies tend to escalate crises to higher levels of severity. Finally, democracies eventually win the crises in which they become involved. The conclusion is that democratic leaders face strong incentives to “select” winnable crises against nondemocratic states because of the audience costs they face, but when the opponent is another democracy, the domestic audience expects leaders to compromise.

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