Covert action and democratic peace: Why democracies fight secret wars

Covert action, the attempt by a government to influence events in another state or territory without revealing its involvement, has been an important instrument of statecraft adopted by not only the totalitarian states of the former Soviet Union ilk, but also the so-called Western democracies. This dissertation explores the motives of the decision makers in democracies for choosing covert action---as a particular means of resolving conflicts with legitimate governments in other sovereign states---and assesses what they tell us about the competing explanations of the Democratic Peace proposition. A theoretical framework based on the rational choice model and hypotheses with testable implications were presented to examine the rationale for the use of covert action as a foreign policy tool. In order to commit their nations militarily abroad, leaders in democratic states face the unique task of mobilizing contemporaneous consent from the governed. When the creation of popular consent for openly belligerent policies appears unattainable, they may resort to covert action to preempt ex ante due approval procedures or to prevent ex post electoral retribution. The comparative case analysis of the U.S. covert action in Chile in the early 1970s and the Philippines-American War of 1898 and four other case studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. The results of the studies confirm the following propositions: (a) core belief/value system and distinct mood of the time initially set the tone for the popular preference concerning war and peace decisions, (b) the Joint Democracy effect---identification of the opposing state or government as a fellow democracy---undercuts the generation of popular consent for overt interventionist policies, and (c) institutional constraint, in the form of domestic political consideration, was one of the critical factors compelling the decision makers in democratic states to resort to covert action. The results do not fully support the proposition that elites' decisions to use covert action have been motivated to evade the "external constraints" coming from abroad. In addition, they undermine the normative explanation of Democratic Peace, which stipulates that the peaceful conflict resolution norm embraced by democratic elites prevents conflicts among democracies from escalating into the threat or actual use of violence. This dissertation concludes that war and peace decisions in democracies can be best understood by examining the interaction between the constraining mechanism of democratic political institutions and the dynamic process of popular consent generation.