Perilous Polities? An Assessment of the Democratization-Conflict Linkage

Abstract

While evidence continues to mount that democracies resort to military force reluctantly, the transition to democracy may in fact be a dangerous and conflictual one. Given the emphasis now being put on democratization, a reassessment of the relationship between the stability of domestic institutions and interstate conflict seems fitting. To date, the evidence remains mixed. No clear consensus has emerged on whether regime transition either increases or decreases conflict propensities. Employing a logit specification with splines and robust standard errors, this research analyzes the conflict behavior of transitioning states for the 1950—2000 period. The results indicate that `rocky' transitions or democratic reversals increase the likelihood of conflict occurrence. I demonstrate, however, that this result is driven by the conflict behavior of autocratizing countries. An interaction term shows that although regime change itself may increase conflict propensities, such exacerbating effects are reversed for democratizing states.