Domestic political institutions and the evolution of international conflict

This dissertation examines the relationship between domestic political structures and the propensity to use military force to resolve international conflicts. The dominant explanation in the literature, conventionally labeled the democratic peace, claims that democratic polities are only less conflict prone when dealing with other democracies. The robustness of this dyadic explanation is examined using a new research design which focuses on the initiation of violence rather than conflict involvement and employs a new data set of international disputes. The more precise design allows a direct test of whether democracies are less conflictual in general, or only when in disputes with other democracies.;An alternative explanation hypothesizes that constrained states are less likely to initiate violence. Unlike the democratic peace model, this explanation explicitly recognizes that the existence of opposition groups within many types of autocracies can also constrain decision makers from initiating force. Specifically, the analysis tests whether opposition within the executive, the legislature, or the ruling party influences foreign policy decisions.;The hypotheses are tested on two data sets: 303 international crises from 1918 to 1988 and 233 international disputes from 1960 to 1988. These quantitative analyses are supplemented by twenty-one case studies in which democratic states initiated high levels of violence. Three major findings emerge from the analyses. First, in the broader set of international disputes, the more democratic a state the less likely it is to initiate violence. Previous studies failed to identify this monadic effect of democratic institutions because they focused solely on crises and wars. The fact that democratic polities are systematically less likely to enter into crises led researchers to erroneously conclude that no monadic effect existed. Second, the results demonstrate that democracies are much less conflictual with other democracies even after accounting for the monadic effect. Finally, constrained autocracies are also less likely to initiate violence. For example military juntas and regimes with factionalized ruling parties are less likely to use military force first. Overall, the findings indicated that while democratic institutions can reduce conflict, the presence of opposition within certain autocratic polities also can dampen the propensity to escalate conflicts.