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Identifying the Culprit: Democracy, Dictatorship, and Dispute Initiation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2003

DAN REITER  and
ALLAN C. STAM
DAN REITER
Affiliation:
Associate and Winship Research Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 ([email protected]).
ALLAN C. STAM
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Government and Deputy Director, Rockefeller Center, 211 Silsby Hall, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 ([email protected]).
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Abstract

Peceny, Beer, and Sanchez-Terry (2002) find that interstate dyads containing a democracy and a personalist dictatorship are more likely than other types of dyads to experience militarized disputes. They argue that this is because democracies are especially likely to challenge personalist dictatorships. Unfortunately, they do not identify which state in a conflictual dyad initiated the dispute and so cannot present data to support their claim. We improve on their research design by using “directed dyads” to identify potential initiators. We confirm their finding that democracy–personalist dictatorship dyads are particularly conflict-prone, but we also disprove their argument that democracies attack dictators, as we find that personalist dictatorships are more likely to challenge democracies, but not vice versa. We also find that other kinds of autocracies, namely, military regimes and single-party regimes, are more likely to challenge democracies than vice versa. Our findings have important implications for understanding the relationships between regime type and international conflict.The authors thank Caroline Beer very much for assistance with data.

Type
FORUM
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 97 , Issue 2 , May 2003 , pp. 333 - 337
Copyright
© 2003 by the American Political Science Association

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