Leader Survival, Military Mobilization, and Interstate Conflict in Democracies and Dictatorships.

Abstract

I argue variation across regime type in the political cost of increasing military spending during an interstate war underlies differences in the crisis bargaining and conflict behavior of democracies and dictatorships. I develop a model in which a war's outcome is influenced by leaders' mobilization efforts and democratic leaders are more likely to be removed from power for increasing military spending than dictators. The model provides an explanation for known empirical regularities and implies previously unidentified relationships between regime type and interstate conflict. Consistent with one of the model's novel predictions, empirical analyses indicate democratic challengers are less likely to make demands that lead to fighting than non-democratic challengers when the distribution of capabilities is roughly equal, but not when one state is substantially stronger than the other state. My findings have implications for our understanding of when and why crisis bargaining and interstate conflict processes differ across regime type.