Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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A preliminary statistical analysis suggests, contrary to this counterargument, that the result is actually being driven primarily by the non-communist Machines (countries like Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party PRI, post-independence Kenya and Tanzania, and Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad), but disentangling this relationship is not straightforward given the broad overlap.

It is particularly important for policy makers understand how and why certain dictatorships are more prone to war and less competent at it than their democratic counterparts. Finally, there is the difficulty of sorting out the independent effect of regime type given possible confounds.For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management.

But these leaders may also face threats of removal from the military audience if they do not behave more aggressively. As he notes, I differentiate regimes around two dimensions: first, whether or not the leader faces a powerful domestic audience, and second, whether the key decisionmakers in the regime are civilians or military officers. One significant result of the military’s autonomy in the German system was the mismatch between German political goals—such as keeping Britain on the sidelines of a European war—and its military strategy (the Schlieffen Plan)—which was predicated on violating Belgian neutrality, making it highly likely that Britain would enter any such war. If the peacetime threat of domestic punishment is high, the use of force with the potential for political domestic rewards in the case of victory can be a rational gamble, even if defeat carries a high concomitant likelihood of punishment.Jessica Weeks is Associate Professor and Trice Faculty Scholar in the department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Especially since the end of the Cold War, international-relations scholars have been consumed with the scientific exploration of the democratic peace proposition. Downes correctly points out that my argument assumes that machines feature strong civilian control of the military.