THE DEBATE
The debate over the war behavior of democratic states, and particularly the democratic peace, centers on whether a normative or an institutional explanation best accounts for the known facts (Thompson and Tucker 1997). Normative accounts focus on several different presumptions about democracies. One such supposition is that they share a common value system, including respect for individual liberties and competi- tion. As stated by Dixon (1994, 17):
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An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace December 1999
international disputes of democratic states are in the hands of individuals who have experienced the politics of com- peting values and interests and who have consistently responded within the normative guidelines of bounded competition. In situations where both parties to a dispute are democracies, not only do both sides subscribe to these norms, but the leaders of both are also fully cognizant that bounded competition is the norm, both for themselves and their opponents.
A closely related argument is that citizens in democ- racies abhor violence and so constrain their leaders from pursuing violent foreign policies. As succinctly explained by Morgan and Campbell (1991, 189), “the key feature of democracy is government by the people and … the people, who must bear the costs of war, are usually unwilling to fight.” Adherents of these perspec- tives also argue, however, that democracies are willing to set aside their abhorrence of violence or their respect for other points of view when they confront authoritarian states, because the latter do not share these common values. As stated by Maoz and Russett (1993, 625), “when a democratic state confronts a nondemocratic one, it may be forced to adapt to the norms of international conflict of the latter lest it be exploited or eliminated by the nondemocratic state that takes advantage of the inherent moderation of democracies.”
We believe that any explanation of the democratic peace must satisfy two criteria. First, it must account for the known regularities that are often grouped together to define the democratic peace. An explana- tion that accounts for all the regularities obviously is more comprehensive than those that account for only some. Furthermore, because the extant explanations are generally constructed in response to the observed regularities, the more patterns that are explained, the more credible the explanation, provided that it does not come at the expense of parsimony. Second, we believe that a credible explanation also should suggest novel hypotheses that do not form part of the corpus of the democratic peace. Further credibility to the overall explanation is added if these novel hypotheses are borne out by the evidence.
The existing norms-based and institutional-con- straints arguments fail both tests. The model we pro- pose provides a direct explanation of six regularities and an account consistent with the two nondyadic regularities mentioned earlier and suggests numerous novel hypotheses that are supported by evidence. Later, for instance, we show that our theory implies that democracies devote more resources to their war efforts than do nondemocracies. We cite independently derived evidence. In addition, we have shown else- where that the institutional model we propose also accounts for variation in economic growth across re- gimes and explains why leaders with failed public policies tend to last in office longer than leaders with successful policies (Bueno de Mesquita et al. n.d.).
There are two difficulties with the norms-based arguments in the literature. First, the arguments ap- pear to be ad hoc. The presence and substance of norms are established solely by reference to the out-
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comes of conflict between democratic states. The in- ternational and domestic norms are induced from the observed patterns of behavior in international conflicts that these arguments seek to explain. That democracies are willing to abandon their normative commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes in the face of a threat to their survival by another state that does not adhere to those norms is entirely plausible. In order to qualify as an explanation of the observation, however, that assertion must be derived independently of the observation, either from prior axioms or from unre- lated empirical evidence. Otherwise, we cannot know what the argument predicts about seemingly contradic- tory patterns of evidence. For instance, analyses by James and Mitchell (1995) and Forsythe (1992) of covert operations suggest that, providing democratic leaders can escape public scrutiny, they often under- take violent acts against other democracies. Does such evidence contradict a norms-based arguments, or do the norms apply only to interstate conflict at the level of crises and war?
Second, a related difficulty is empirical. The histori- cal record is replete with democratic states that fol- lowed policies at variance with the norms argument. Many democratic states pursued imperialistic policies and, in building empires, engaged in wars that were about subjugation rather than self-protection. It may be correct to argue that democratic states resort to realist strategies in the face of a powerful nondemo- cratic opponent who threatens their existence, but too many democratic wars have been against significantly weaker states for this argument to be sustained as an explanation for the democratic peace. It is difficult to reconcile such a pattern with democratic political cul- ture. The explanation we propose, by contrast, explains the willingness of democracies to undertake imperial- istic or colonial conquest. This observation is the sort of novel fact for which an explanation of the demo- cratic peace should account, and we return later to our explanation of imperial wars by democracies.
The institutional-constraints argument holds that democracies are more deliberate in their decision making than autocracies because their procedures pre- clude unilateral action by leaders. This is thought to raise the costs of violence. Maoz and Russett (1993, 626) state: “Due to the complexity of the democratic process and the requirement of securing a broad base of support for risky policies, democratic leaders are reluctant to wage wars, except in cases wherein war seems a necessity or when the war aims are seen as justifying the mobilization costs.”2 This suggests, how- ever, that democracies should be unlikely to wage war generally, not just against other democracies.
The empirical record does not support such a con- clusion.3 Rather, it shows that democracies do not fight one another but do indeed engage in wars with author-
2 Without some specification of war aims and mobilization costs, the last phrase of this statement allows anything with respect to demo- cratic war behavior. 3 Benoit (1996) suggests that on average democracies are slightly less war prone than other systems.
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American Political Science Review Vol. 93, No. 4
itarian regimes.4 The argument based on the cheapness of expressing opposition seems stronger than the other putative institutional explanations, but it also has short- comings, one of which is its failure to account for the well-known rally-round-the-flag effect observed in de- mocracies at the outset of crises and wars (Mueller 1973; Norpoth 1987). This effect suggests that there is not an inherent abhorrence of violence in democracies. Most important from a theoretical position, none of the institutional-constraints arguments has a suffi- ciently well-developed theory of how and why demo- cratic institutions constrain leaders in the particular way that produces the eight regularities observed, whereas other institutional arrangements do not. Rather, these arguments generally just assert that democratic leaders are more constrained.
Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman’s (1992) signaling explanation accounts for three of the eight observed regularities, but it does not, for instance, explain why democracies win a disproportionate share of their wars or why their costs are lower. Bueno. de Mesquita and Siverson’s (1995) model accounts for these regularities but not for the democratic peace. Both those models have in common the assumption that democracies are more constrained than autocracies. For reasons of theoretical parsimony, however, we prefer that this be a deductive result of a general model rather than an assumption. That is, we wish to account for the several empirical regularities without assuming that one type of political system is more constrained than another. Instead, we will demonstrate how institutional arrange- ments produce different levels of constraint in different political systems and what effect those institutional arrangements have on behavioral incentives and the empirical generalizations of interest.
Our explanation shows that the behavioral incen- tives-these could be called norms-are endogenous to certain political institutions and the interests that sustain them.5 We make no claims about the citizens’ abhorrence of violence or the ease with which they might protest government policies. In fact, we assume that political leaders in all systems are motivated by the same universal interest: They desire to remain in office. We make no normative assumptions about differences in the values or goals of democratic leaders or their followers as compared to authoritarian leaders or their followers.
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