Regime Type, the Fate of Leaders, and War

Debs, Alexandre; Goemans, H. E.

doi:10.1017/s0003055410000195

Cited by 247 publications

(212 citation statements)

References 41 publications

(67 reference statements)

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“…The descriptive statistics presented in Table 1 and discussed in this section are intended for illustration, not as definitive evidence of our theoretical claims. 10 our conceptualization of tenure sensitivity is similar to Debs and goemans 2010;and escribafolch and Wright 2010. years with negative economic growth. our main interest lies in column 4, which provides the difference between leaders' turnover rates in "bad" times (column 3) and their turnover rates in "good" times (column 2).…”

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confidence: 72%

“…The second column of Table 1 reports leaders' turnover rates, that is, the proportion of observations in which a leader exits from power, conditional on positive economic growth. column 3 of the table reports how often leaders lose power in 7 Variation in leaders' fates after losing office is a third potentially important dimension (Debs and goemans 2010), though this is a topic we leave for future research. 8 Bueno de mesquita et al 2003, 42.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Effect of Authorita rian Regime Type on Exchange Rate Policy

Steinberg¹,

Malhotra²

2014

World Pol.

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Conventional wisdom holds that autocracies are more likely than democracies to adopt interventionist and protectionist economic policies, including fixed and undervalued exchange rates. This article suggests that this view is only partially correct: nondemocracies are a heterogeneous grouping, and only some types of authoritarian regimes adopt different foreign economic policies from those of their democratic counterparts. Using the example of exchange rate policy, the authors show that foreign economic policy varies across monarchic, military, and civilian dictatorships. More specifically, they hypothesize that monarchies and military regimes are more likely than democracies and civilian dictatorships to maintain fixed exchange rate regimes because the former regimes have smaller “selectorates” than the latter. The authors also expect that monarchies and civilian dictatorships maintain more undervalued exchange rates than democracies and military regimes because the former regimes provide their leaders with greater tenure security than the latter regimes. These hypotheses are evaluated using a time-series–cross-sectional data set of a large sample of developing countries from 1973 to 2006. The statistical results accord with these predictions. These findings indicate that the ways in which democracies engage with the global economy may be less unique than many believe.

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confidence: 72%

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confidence: 99%

The Effect of Authorita rian Regime Type on Exchange Rate Policy

Steinberg¹,

Malhotra²

2014

World Pol.

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“…Researchers could address this question by randomizing information about the normative and structural attributes of regimes. One could also test whether the perceived credibility of threats and promises varies by regime type (Fearon 1994;Schultz 2001;Slantchev 2005;, whether people think democracies would be more willing to make peaceful bargains (Debs and Goemans 2010), and whether democracy leads to perceptions of shared preferences (Oneal and Russett 1999).…”

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confidence: 99%

Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace

2013

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ew findings in political science have received as much attention as the "democratic peace," the discovery that democracies almost never fight other democracies (Doyle 1986;Russett 1993). To some, the absence of military conflict among democracies is so consistent that it approaches the status of an "empirical law" (Levy 1988).Some authors have attempted to explain the democratic peace by highlighting the role of public opinion. They observe that democratic leaders are beholden to voters and claim that voters oppose war because of its human and financial costs. This argument, which dates to Immanuel Kant, predicts that democracies will behave peacefully in general-avoiding war not only against democracies but also against autocracies. History shows, however, that democracies frequently fight autocracies.A different possibility is that democratic publics are primarily averse to war against other democracies. If leaders are responsive to voters and voters are more reluctant to fight democracies than otherwise equivalent autocracies, then public opinion could play an important role in the dyadic democratic peace. To date, however, surprisingly few studies have investi- gated whether democratic publics are more reluctant to attack democracies than autocracies.1 Moreover, the small body of existing work has not accounted for variables that could confound the relationship between shared democracy and public support for war, nor has it investigated the mechanisms by which the regime type of the adversary affects the public mood. Despite decades of research on the democratic peace, we still lack convincing evidence about whether and how public opinion contributes to the absence of war among democracies.We used experiments to shed new light on these important questions.2 Our experiments, embedded in public opinion polls that were administered to nationally representative samples of British and American citizens, involved a situation in which a country was developing nuclear weapons. When describing the situation, we randomly and independently varied four potential sources of peace: the political regime, alliance status, economic ties, and military power of the adversary. We then asked individuals whether they would support or oppose a preventive military strike against the country's nuclear facilities.Participants in our experiments were substantially less supportive of military strikes against democracies than against otherwise identical autocracies. Moreover, because we randomly and independently manipulated the regime type of the adversary, the observed preference for peace with other democracies was almost certainly causal, rather than spurious. Our findings therefore provide empirical microfoundations for the 1 For exceptions, see Geva, DeRouen, and Mintz (1993); Johns and Davies (2012);Rousseau (2005). See also Lacina and Lee (2012), who examine how regime type affects perceptions of threat, and Geva and Hanson (1999), who focus on sociocultural similarity. 2 For other recent examples of experiments about internatio...

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“…Hafner-Burton et al 2014. For examples beyond the special issue, see Byman and Pollack 2001;Colgan 2013;Croco 2011;Debs and Goemans 2010;Hall and Yarhi-Milo 2012;Horowitz, McDermott, and Stam 2005;Saunders 2009;Weeks 2012. level heterogeneity also opens up opportunities to connect with a wider body of behavioral research in political science, including studies of public opinion. A number of contributions to this issue pursue this approach.…”

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confidence: 99%