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A Crisis-Based Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Jean-Sébastien Rioux
Jean-Sébastien Rioux
Affiliation:
Université de Montréal and McGill University
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Abstract

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.

Résumé

L'affirmation qui ressemble le plus à une loi empirique dans le champ des relations internationales est probablement l'observation selon laquelle les démocraties ne se font pas mutuellement la guerre. Cet article s'inscrit dans la réflexion sur la paix démocratique puisqu'il se penche sur le comportement des démocraties et des Etats non démocratiques face aux crises internationales. Une analyse quantitative sur le niveau d'activité des Etats durant de telles crises au cours de la période de 1918 à 1988, menée à partir des données du International Crisis Behavior Project, confirme les trois hypothèses évaluées. Cette étude démontre que les États démocratiques sont moins souvent à l'origine des crises que les États non démocratiques. Par contre, les démocraties tendent à exacerber les crises et, éventuellement, à en sortir victorieuses. On peut conclure que, en raison des contraintes de politique intérieure, les dirigeants d'États démocratiques sont porés à «choisir», parmi les crises avec les États non démocratiques, celles qui semblent les plus susceptibles de tourner à leur avantage. Par contre, lorsque l'autre partie est également une démocratie, les pressions internes incident les dirigeants à chercher une solution pacifique.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 263 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1998

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References

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21 The glaring exceptions that may prove the rule are George Bush failing to win re-election after the US victory in the 1991 Gulf War, and Winston Churchill losing power after the Second World War. These so-called “rally” effects have indeed been shown to be ephemeral (see Lian, Bradley and Oneal, John R., “Presidents, the Use of Military Force, and Public Opinion,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 37 [1993], 277–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Patrick James and Jean-Sébastien Rioux, “International Crises and Linkage Politics: The Experiences of the United States, 1953–1994,” Political Research Quarterly [forthcoming 1998]), but, on the whole, researchers have shown that leaders are punished or rewarded for their performance in the foreign policy sphere (see Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, Siverson, Randolph M. and Woller, Gary, “War and the Fate of Regimes: A Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 86 [1992], 638–646CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson, “War and the Survival of Political Leaders”).

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35 The author can provide the entire data set or a list of the excluded states on request; in all, these small states represent less than 10 per cent of the total possible cases of country-years, and account for only 13 of the 390 international crises (about 3%).

36 Brecher, Wilkenfeld and Moser, Crises in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 1, 3 (emphasis in original).

37 Ibid, (emphasis in original).

38 Ray, “Wars between Democracies”; and Ray, Democracy and International Conflict.

39 Ibid., 102.

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54 The widely used definition of war can be found in Singer, J. David, Bremer, Stuart A. and Stuckey, John, “Capability Distribution, Uncertainty, and Major Power War, 1820–1965,” in Russett, Bruce, ed., Peace, War, and Numbers (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1972), 25Google Scholar; the definition of crisis in Brecher, Michael and Wilkenfeld, Jonathan, A Study of Crisis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 3–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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