Why are democracies unusually successful in war? We find that superior human capital, harmonious civil-military relations, and Western cultural background are largely responsible. These traits correlate positively with democracy, and account for democracy’s apparent effectiveness bonus. This is either good news or bad news for democratic effectiveness theorists. Many believe that democracy causes these traits. If so, our findings strengthen democratic effectiveness theory by explicating its causal mechanism. But others see democracy as a consequence rather than a cause of such traits. If so, our findings challenge the thesis by identifying alternative causes of the effectiveness bonus previously attributed to democracy. Either way, the results show a powerful effect for unit level variables in military performance. In the process, these same results sharpen our understanding of military effectiveness in general, and the relationship between military performance and regime type in particular.
This article investigates the role of direct and reputational information in the onset of interstate war. Scholars have recently identified the importance of separating the phenomenon of conflict from the rare event of war. Building on earlier work concerning the role of reputation and history in the onset of militarized interstate disputes, this article argues that states in crises face competing pressures brought on by their history of interactions with their opponents and their opponents' reputations generated through interactions with other states. While historical conflict reveals private information regarding the credibility of state demands, this history also generates constraints upon the ability of governments to seek peaceful resolutions to the current crisis. An empirical analysis supports the hypothesis that both a direct history of conflict within the dyad and reputational histories for conflict increase the likelihood of war onset. These results hold for a sample including all dyads 1817—2000 and a sample including politically relevant dyads in the same period. The results also suggest that contiguous states are more likely to go to war with each other, as are pairs of major powers, while democracies and pairs of minor powers are less likely to go to war with each other. These results support previous findings on the influence of these factors on the likelihood of war onset.
In an earlier article (Crescenzi & Enterline, 2001), we developed a formal, dynamic model of the cooperative and conflictual dimensions central to interstate relationships. However, the empirical data employed as inputs into the original model informed only the model's conflictual dimension. Here, we operationalize the conflictual and cooperative dimensions of the model, with the latter derived by inputting information on joint participation in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) for the period 1965—2000. Doing so enables us to trace the joint cooperative—conflictual temporal trajectories of interstate dyads, in addition to capturing the degree and dynamism of these relationships. We demonstrate the flexibility and practicality of the model-derived empirical indicators of interstate interaction with an analysis of dyadic interstate conflict. Our dynamic approach to studying interstate relationships promises to facilitate fruitful contributions to several research agendas in comparative politics and international relations.
This paper sits at the intersection of the rivalry, war duration, and bargaining literatures, suggesting that histories of armed conflict between states increase war duration through their effects on the selectorate and the wartime bargaining process. I argue that the historical relationship between two states plays an integral role in the duration of future conflict. Specifically, historical conflict between states intensifies the preference of national selectorates for military victory and narrows the range of negotiated settlements that leaders might pursue while still maintaining domestic political support.I employ Bennett and Stam's (1996) ex ante data set and Crescenzi and Enterline's (2001) International Interaction Score to provide an empirical test of the generalizability of appropriately coded historical interaction to the topic of war duration.Contradicting earlier studies, the results of this analysis show that a properly operationalized measure of rivalry has significant and positive effects on war duration.
Outside intervention in civil warfare is important for humanitarian, theoretical, and practical policy reasons-since 2006, much of the debate over the war in Iraq has turned on the danger of external intervention if the United States were to withdraw. Yet, the literature on intervention has been compartmented in ways that have made it theoretically incomplete and unsuitable as a guide to policy. We therefore integrate and expand upon the theoretical and empirical work on intervention and apply the results to the policy debate over the US presence in Iraq using a Monte Carlo simulation to build upon the dyadic results of probit analysis. We find that Iraq is, in fact, a significantly intervention-prone conflict in an empirical context; the prospect of a wider, regional war in the event that violence returns in the aftermath of US withdrawal cannot safely be ignored.
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