Democracy and the Management of International Conflict

Abstract

The research reported here extends investigation of the democracy-war hypothesis by focusing on the norms of dispute resolution integral to the democratic process. If we extend these norms to the international arena, then it becomes reasonable to expect democratic states to adopt compromise solutions to international problems. One implication of this logic is that democracies are likely to be more amenable than others to efforts of third parties to resolve or ameliorate interstate disputes. This hypothesis is examined in the present study. A sample of strictly interstate disputes acquired from the Alker-Sherman disaggregated conflict set provide the basis for this inquiry. Democracy is assessed for each disputant party with the composite index from the Polity II data collection. In order to control for extraneous effects on the probability of management, the author develops a baseline model consisting of prior management activity, the costs of conflict, and the power of the disputants. Because the dependent variable in this analysis is a binary indicator, the author employs probit regression to estimate the effects of democracy while partialling out the controls. The empirical results show that democracy does carry the systematic positive influence on the probability of conflict management expected of it.