The Democratic Peace Revisited It is Veto Players

The Democratic Peace Revisited: It is Veto Players George Tsebelis Anatol Rapoport Collegiate Professor of Political Science University of Michigan 6759 Haven Hall 505 S State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045 Phone: 734-647-7974 Fax: 734-764-3522 Email: tsebelis@umich.edu Seung-Whan Choi Assistant Professor of Political Science University of Illinois at Chicago 1007 West Harrison Street (M/C 276) Chicago, IL 60607-7137 Phone: 312-413-3280 Fax: 312-413-0440 Email: whanchoi@uic.edu February 2008 Abstract This study introduces a variable reflecting veto players into international conflict models As our title suggests, the inclusion of this variable dissolves the standard measure of democracy which currently dominate the literature on the democratic peace Through the development of a new conceptual approach, and an empirical study strengthened by two methodological improvements, we provide an alternative explanation of peace than those which currently exist in the international relations literature A cross-sectional, time-series dyadic data analysis during the period 1885 to 2001 shows that, while controlling for several standard conflict-related variables, the veto players variable outweighs the democracy variable in explaining the absence of interstate disputes One of the major themes of the international relations literature has been the logic of the “democratic peace” theory This logic was first formulated by Kant (1795/1957) in Perpetual Peace Kant presented the three well-known definitive articles about republic constitutions, commercial relations, and international organizations and argued that international peace could be achieved through the establishment of these three elements During the past three decades, many studies of international conflict have paid attention to the effect of regime type by arguing that two democratic states rarely fight each other In fact, students of the democratic peace theory initially discovered a strong empirical relationship between democracy and peace and then began to formulate conceptual explanations by referring to Kant’s treatise on perpetual peace as their intellectual foundation or introducing formal modeling (e.g., Fearon 1994) While there were a series of criticisms about particular data points, variables in datasets, methodological issues in statistical analysis or particular assumptions in formal models, the evidence has been considered overwhelming: democracies are understood to be less likely to go to war against each other (whether as an empirical regularity or a validated theory) Levy (1988, 662) argues that the state of the democratic peace studies is “as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.” Similarly Gleditsch (1992, 372) contends that “the perfect correlation between democracy and nonwar in dyads implies that most behavioral research on conditions for war and peace in the modern world can now be thrown on the scrap-heap of history, and researchers can start all over again on a new basis.” Finally, Ray (1998, 27) summarizes that the evidence and the results “that support the democratic peace proposition warrant confidence in its validity.” Moreover, the multiple streams of arguments and evidence supporting the democratic peace proposition are highly diverse in character: epistemological (Rummel 1975), philosophical (Doyle 1986), formal (Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman 1992; Fearon 1994; Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson 1995), historical (Weart 1994; Ray 1995;Owen 1994), experimental (Mintz and Geva 1993), anthropological (Ember, Ember, and Russett 1992; Crawford 1994), psychological (Kegley and Hermann 1995), economic (Brawley 1993; Weede 1996), political (Gaubatz 1991), and statistical (Ray and Russett 1996) Perhaps, then, the more defensible of the two possible definitive answers to the question, does democracy cause peace? is In this study we offer an alternative line of reasoning; we contend that deviations from the peaceful status quo are more difficult when countries have multiple veto players In doing this, we step outside the current conceptual framework which takes the characteristics of the whole political system and particularly the electoral connection between elites and masses as the main focus of study.1 In contrast, we contend that a more accurate theoretical reasoning should direct to the function of the “veto players” which are determined by the institutions regulating the political game in each country For empirical testing, we first replicate a most standard democratic peace model and then introduce a veto players variable into the empirical equation In addition, by implementing two significant methodological improvements, we re-estimate both the democratic peace model and the improved model with veto players First, we control for repetition of the same potential dyads over time, which have (inaccurately) been considered independent observations in previous studies Second, we introduce a second prediction into the model: we argue that the variance of the predictions is a variable itself (the model is and should be estimated as heteroskedastic) We argue that with these modifications in place, the reliability of the empirical model should increase significantly Our findings suggest that the variable accounting for the type of regime (more or less democratic) loses any statistical significance in Many empirical studies introduce various statistical models in which the effect of democracy is measured by Polity datasets (on Polity, see Gurr, Jaggers, and Moore 1989 and 1991) competition with veto players, while the significance of the control variables remains the same In addition, due to the two methodological improvements, the estimated coefficients become more consistent This does not merely confirm the expectations of Choi (2007) who has argued that more veto players will reduce international conflict whether one considers democratic dyads, autocratic dyads, or mixed dyads Our empirical analysis goes one step further, suggesting that in competition with the veto players variable in the same model, the effect of the democracy variable fades away Veto players are a contributing factor in peaceful coexistence between two states This study is organized in four sections First, we review the democratic peace literature with an eye towards the theoretical, empirical, and methodological questions which remain open Second, we present our alternative argument for the eruption of war between two countries in a dyad Third, we present our research design and empirical results We conclude by arguing that our findings are only one of many arguments which converge toward an alternative view of war and peace The Democratic Peace Literature Many empirical studies have grouped democratic peace arguments into two streams: normative (cultural) and institutional (structural) Proponents of the normative argument (e.g., Sobek, Abouharb, Ingram 2006) see the primary causal mechanism engendered by democracy being a notion of “externalization.” In this view, democratic states externalize the civic and peaceful norms associated with internal democratic practice to settle claims; democracies are behooved by their internal commitments to approach external problems in a comparably peaceful manner We want to reiterate an important criticism that Rosato (2003) makes to this line of argument The democratic peace argument concerns interstate disputes, that is interactions between two states in dyad Consequently the empirical tests exclude a number of different violent interactions— colonial wars where one of the parties is not a state, military coups organized by a democracy (US in Chile), and assassinations of leaders (Partic Lumumba)—which are not “interstate disputes” strictly speaking These incidents are significant, however, as they cast serious doubt on the normative argument Violent, but non-warring, interactions involving democracies either show that democracies not actually externalize their democratic norms, or it shows that an externalization of norms does not preclude state violence The fact of violence on the part of democracies indicates a serious flaw in the reasoning of the normative argument In a way the normative argument falls victim to the “one hundred foot woman problem.” Suppose that there is a theory predicting that no woman would be more than one hundred foot tall This theory would be corroborated by empirical evidence all over the world Suppose now that in a remote corner somewhere in the planet a ninety nine foot tall woman is discovered The proponents of the theory could claim that this is one more case corroborating the theory However, for most observers, the one hundred foot limit for female height would become a doubtable proposition, because in the next village from the new discovery one could imagine that another female would exceed the limit In this sense, the fact of democratic violence is like the ninety-nine foot tall woman; we must question whether the theory barring the occurrence of democratic war is truly sound No matter how compelling the normative arguments may seem, they are like the advice that Machiavelli gave to the Prince: they are not self enforcing and can be ignored Normative arguments might aim to sway future foreign policy, and they might render moral judgments on past or current practices However, normative theory cannot, by definition, provide an explanation for what tends and has tended to happen In contrast to the normative arguments, there have been a variety of institutional explanations The primary causal mechanism underlying the various institutional arguments is “accountability.” This mechanism “derives from the fact that political elites want to remain in office, that there are opposition parties ready to capitalize on unpopular policies, and that there are regular opportunities for democratic publics to remove elites who have not acted in their best interests” (Rosato 2003, 587) The institutional strain of democratic peace theory then primarily sees democracy as creating a certain class of constraints which, by keeping elected leaders in check, restrains the war-making ability of democratic states The institutional argument of the democratic peace theory has been further refined by formal theorists According to Fearon (1994) and Schultz (1998), democratic leaders face tremendous audience costs from concerned citizens or opposition parties compared to those faced by autocratic leaders; hence democratic leaders are likely to be cautious about waging war If two democracies are in a crisis, the level of uncertainty between them is lower because of the ability to demonstrate resolve efficiently, making it easier to negotiate peaceful solutions It is worth noting that the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al (2003) contends that regardless of regime type, political survival is the primary motivation and concern for all political leaders, and that the primary objective of every leader is to maintain their position of power and to be reselected as a leader when reselection takes place All political leaders in any regime are beholden to the same situation—the responsibility of pleasing the specific group of individuals (the winning coalition) who helped the leader attain his or her post in the first place and whose support is necessary for the leader to maintain their position Further, it has been argued that the normative and institutional arguments of the democratic peace not necessarily stand up to historical scrutiny The Spanish-American war of 1895–1898, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the India-Pakistan conflict of 1999, and the Russia-Georgia war of 2008, for example, can be viewed as wars between two democratic countries (see Spiro 1994; Owen 1997) In addition, it appears that democratic leaders often disregard dissenting voices and escalate the level of conflict According to Senese’s (1997) study, once democratic dyads have engaged in disputes, they frequently resort to uses of military force rather than seek diplomatic solutions Ironically, despite the fact that democratic oversight is put into practice to ensure proper foreign policy choices, covert military operations by a democracy are often carried out against another democracy, producing “hidden victims of the democratic peace” (James and Mitchell 1995) The bottom line is that there are sufficient counter-examples of the presumed ubiquitous phenomenon of democratic peace to warrant critical study; democratic leaders have demonstrated their ability to launch foreign military assaults despite domestic political constraints Aside from explanations and theoretical claims, the datasets used in empirical testing have been points of contention Because the datasets in most existing studies only include wars which have occurred since 1800, there are some wars that have been excluded from analysis One immediate example is the omission of the Sicilian Expedition, where Athenians attacked other democratic cities far away from their own and ignored the advice of Nicias who was insisting that the enemy was the oligarchic Sparta (excuse this excursion into the classics; one of the authors is Greek) But this is not the only case of omission of relevant wars among democracies One should include the American Revolution, and the war of the US against France among others, all of which happened before the beginning of the relevant datasets In addition, the empirical models should be screened for their implicit assumptions Most recent models correct for time dependence in analyzing time-series, cross-sectional data with a dichotomous dependent variable by employing logit splines, a technique designed by Beck, Katz, and Tucker (1998), or general estimating equations (GEEs), a method advocated by Zorn (2001) However we want to raise two important problematic features of the empirical models that have not been corrected for in existing studies The first implicit assumption has been that observations are considered to be independent from each other To illustrate the problem of this assumption, consider the fact that one datapoint in 1900 contains the dyad of Australia and Switzerland, and another datapoint contains the same dyad in 1950 We think that these observations involving the same dyad of countries should not be considered as independent, and that this assumption biases the tests in favor of statistical significance, independent from other observations This correction should decrease the reliability of the existing statistical models since every dyad is considered over one hundred observations in terms of time, AND dyads including a country low in the democratic scale are considered identical (for example, Iran vs UK and Iran vs France are identical) The second implicit assumption is that many existing studies measure “democracy” in a numerical term, and focus on the score of the LESS democratic country This is done on the reasonable assumption that the less democratic country would be the weak link of the peace chain, and thus the main determinant of war But that means that all the potential conflicts between, say, Iran and democratic countries will be based on one’s assessment of Iran In doing this, the study ignores countries which may be more or less democratic, more or less belligerent, etc As a result, when the level of democracy increases in the dataset, the set of potential adversaries decreases (all dyads that involve less democratic countries have already been counted as the adversaries of these countries) This observation indicates that the estimated models are inherently heteroskedastic One can argue that if the models demonstrate a high level of reliability despite their heteroskedasticity, then their predictions can be considered more accurate than what we thought However, given that heteroskedasticity is predicted, the models make two different predictions at the same time Thus, if heteroskedasticity is detected in the empirical estimations, it should count in favor of the model, not against it An Alternative Explanation of War We will follow Tsebelis (2002) in his definition of veto players and policy stability, and apply the reasoning to peace and war Tsebelis has argued that every political system can be understood as combining a number of institutional and partisan veto players, that is individual or collective actors whose agreement is required for a change of the status quo As an immediate result of the definition, it follows that as the number of veto players increases, the likelihood of changing the status quo diminishes Tsebelis refers to this difficulty of changing the status quo as “policy stability” Tsebelis further analyses the impact of the ideological distance of veto players, and finds that as the distance between them increases, policy stability increases He then presents an argument which assesses the relative importance of number of veto players and ideological distance He argues that if the preferences of a set of veto players (set B) is contained within another (set A), then change in the first system is easier than in the second, regardless of the number of their respective veto players (see Figure 1) (Figure about here) The existence of multiple distinct veto players is a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for policy stability Tsebelis’ argument is that multiple veto players with ideological distances among them make changes to the status quo very unlikely or incremental, while a small number of veto players make the change possible Whether this possible change will be materialized or not, depends on the position of the status quo with respect to the veto players If they want to change it, they will, but if the status quo is located in the area surrounding them, they may choose not to In short, while the presence of veto players inhibits policy change, the absence of veto players does not mean that change is probable, just that it is possible 10 models Interestingly, none of the control variables is significant in a consistent manner across the table (Table about here) How can we interpret these results? Democratic peace advocates could argue that the veto players variable is highly correlated with democracy, and therefore what it captures is exactly the effects of the democracy variable The reason that it outperforms democracy is purely technical: the variance of the veto payers variable (with 100 modalities from 0.00 to 1.00 ) is figher than the variance of the democracy variable (with around 20 modalities) This is why the veto players variable appears to outperform democracy In order to test this argument we use a truncated variable of veto players with 10 modalities only (we use the first decimal of the veto players variable) Even this reduced variance veto players variable outperforms democracy Another argument could be that what we have found here is not an alternative explanation of democratic peace, but which characteristic of democracy matters the most: the electoral connection or the institutional structure According to this argument, the veto players variable is capturing essentially the same things as constraints to the executive in the Polity dataset, and therefore the democratic peace argument remains intect, except for its interpretation that in this case, it is not the electoral connection that defines democracy but it is the institutional structure of the government We considered democracies defined by only the electoral connectionelements of the index, and we then introduced the veto players variable In this case also veto players replaces the electoral connection variables This is a similar argument with the one that a series of studies have made in the past: They have found out that democracy can be replaced by freedom of the press or other variables that are conceptually correlated with democracy but for some reason are better correlated with the occurrence of war 19 Up to this point, we have not made a strong case as to which one of the two interpretations is more likely We will address this point in the conclusions Conclusions The democratic peace literature is vast and spans over hundreds of years While it has been challenged in terms of its data (exclusion of older democratic wars), its models, and its statistical coherence, its explanations and conclusions have remained quite compelling We have provided an alternative explanation of international conflict, based on veto players theory In this perspective wars are seen as departures from a peaceful situation (the status quo), and as such, will be less likely to occur when the more veto players are involved in the government of the conflicting countries Furthermore, there can not be said to be any link between the common operationalization of democracy and the number of veto players This constitutes a large departure from the democratic peace literature, so, we want to come back now to the big picture One other major theme in the international relations literature is the negative relationship between economic interdependence and war Our model is finding negative coefficients for economic interdependence: in this respect it replicates the finding of a series of previous models Countries that have economic connections are less likely to go to warMost recently, another research program was developed by Mansfield, Milner, and Pevehouse (2008), who investigate further the conditions of deepening of economic interdependence (and therefore, indirectly conditions that solidify peace) They divide economic agreements from free trade agreements to economic and political unions They find the agreements that represent significant departures from the status quo and deepen significantly economic relations can be signed by countries with few veto players, but are unlikely to be signed by countries with many veto players The empirical results of this research program are schematically presented below (Figure about here) 20 As the number of veto players increases, the probability of signing agreements deepening economic relationships decreases Let us put together the two findings to understand the big picture: Countries are interacting in a peaceful status quo mode Whether they want to deviate from this status quo to one direction (war) or the other (economic interdependence and deepening of peace) the role of veto players is negative They prevent significant departures from the status quo (Figure about here) Figure 4, combines Figures and 3, in order to show how these findings fit together In addition, Mansfield, Milner, and Pevehouse (2008)(unlike us) find a significant independent role of regime type on the signature of deep economic agreements: democracies are more likely to sign such agreements The finding that democracy has an independent effect along with veto players in terms of signing agreements deepening peaceful ties among nations, but not in terms of war engagement can be the subject of further investigations For the time being we will highlight the implication that the variables “democracy” and “veto players” (used by both Mansfield et al and us and with the same variables to capture their impact) are sufficiently independent to produce statistically significant effects for both variables in other studies but not in ours In conclusion, we use the variable veto players which is correlated with democracy and outperforms it in explaining the (non) occurrence of war The correlation is empirically high, but conceptually only weak and only on the average: while authoritarian regimes have less veto players than democratic ones, high number of vps in neither a necessary (Baath regimes) nor a sufficient condition (UK) for democracy While we have not excluded the possibility of using democratic peace arguments with focus on the institutions of a country as opposed to the 21 electoral connection, we have provided a much simpler explanation which has to with the inability of multiple veto players to depart from the status quo whether it is towards war or towards deepening peace 22 FIGURE Veto players A1-A3 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Whether this possible change will be materialized or not, depends on the position of the status quo with respect to the veto players If they want to change it, they will, but if the status quo is. .. the (peaceful) status quo, which has to be approved by the veto players of these countries If we apply Tsebelis’ theory, we can hypothesize that this change is unlikely with the more veto players. .. purposes is extremely limiting The variable for testing the veto players hypothesis assumes the weak link (see Dixon, 1994), which holds that the state with weaker veto constraints is the stronger