Journal ArticleDOI
Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific?
TLDR
In this paper, the authors developed a model based on the domestic structures of the leader and challenger that predicts which strategy will be employed by a declining dominant power and tested the propositions against historical survey data and several in-depth case studies.Abstract:
Realists have long viewed uneven rates of growth among states as a major cause of wars. According to strict logic of realpolitik, a declining dominant power should launch a preventive war against a rising challenger as a prudent long-term security strategy. But historically, power shifts have only sometimes resulted in war. Although preventive war has been the preferred response of declining authoritarian leaders, no democracy has ever initiated such a war. Instead, depending on the regime type of the rising challenger, democratic states have chosen accommodation, defensive alliances, or internal balancing to solve the problem of impending decline. In addition to establishing the correlation between preventive war and authoritarian regimes and explaining why democratic states forgo this option, this essay (1) develops a model based on the domestic structures of the leader and challenger that predicts which strategy will be employed by a declining dominant power and (2) tests the propositions against historical survey data and several in-depth case studies.read more
Citations
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Domestic political audiences and the escalation of international disputes
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors modeled international crises as a political "war of attrition" in which state leaders choose at each moment whether to attack, back down, or escalate, and found that the side with a stronger domestic audience is always less likely to back down than the side less able to generate audience costs.
Journal ArticleDOI
Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy
TL;DR: The authors surveys three prominent theories of foreign policy and shows how the works under review set out a compelling alternative, one that updates and systematizes insights drawn from classical realist thought.
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Democratization and the Danger of War
TL;DR: Mansfield and Snyder as mentioned in this paper argue that the acceleration of democratic transformations is more likely to mitigate international conflicts, and instead of using their influence for pushing authoritarian states towards liberalization, Western governments should focus on devising strategies for managing democratic transitions in ways that minimize the risk of war involvement.
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Soft Balancing against the United States
TL;DR: The George W. Bush administration's national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken.
References
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Book
An Economic Theory of Democracy
TL;DR: Downs presents a rational calculus of voting that has inspired much of the later work on voting and turnout as discussed by the authors, particularly significant was his conclusion that a rational voter should almost never bother to vote.
Book
Politics among nations;: The struggle for power and peace
TL;DR: In this paper, a theory of international politics, describes the struggle for political power, and discusses balance of power, international law, disarmament, and diplomacy. But this theory does not consider the role of women in international politics.
Book
War and change in world politics
TL;DR: The nature of international political change is discussed in this paper, where the authors present a change and continuity index for the contemporary world Bibliography Index of political change and change in world politics.
Book ChapterDOI
Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that bipolarity, an equal military balance, and nuclear weapons have fostered the post-World War II order in Europe, and that domestic political factors, not calculations about military power or international economic system, are the principal determinants of peace.