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Explanations for the democratic peace have developed along two broad lines: those that focus on democratic-specific mechanisms and those that focus on institutional similarity mechanisms. We test these competing mechanisms against each other by examining a range of regime types and a variety of institutional mechanisms, and for the first time, test them in logistic multiple regression models of rivalry onset using three rivalry datasets. Our comparative test of the two approaches largely justifies democratic-specific explanations for the democratic peace. That is, more than any other regime pairing, two democracies are less likely to engage in a rivalry. We also find some evidence that socialist single-party dyads are less likely to experience rivalry than other dyads, but overall the support for a broader institutional similarity peace is quite limited. (International Interactions/ FUB 2011)

Selectorate theory posits that leader accountability increases with the size of the winning coalition. Recent research contends that capitalism also increases leader accountability because leaders are more dependent on the public for revenue in more capitalist economies. The authors argue that extant tests of accountability arguments of interstate conflict initiation and targeting are flawed. Accountability theories of foreign policy expect leaders to selectively initiate disputes based on their probability of winning. Accountability arguments, then, expect a conditional relationship between the accountability mechanism and the balance of power. For example, if capitalism produces peace through accountability, then more capitalist states should be less likely to initiate militarized disputes as their power advantage decreases. The authors find that this is not the case. At the same time, the authors find robust support for selectorate theory's contention that larger winning coalitions are more selective about using military force. Political institutions induce accountability; capitalism does not.

Multiple theories posit the existence of a dyadic democratic peace. The authors extend the logic of three theories of the democratic peace — informational, normative, and preferences — and find that they make different predictions with respect to the onset and escalation of disputes across the range of similar regime dyads. First, regarding dispute onset, the preferences argument, but not the normative and informational arguments, expects autocratic dyads of similar type to have less conflict onset than mixed dyads. Second, the normative argument expects democratic, but not non-democratic, dyads to be less likely to escalate their disputes, while the informational argument expects democracy to have little impact, after conflict onset has been taken into account. The preferences argument expects all dyads of similar regime type to be less likely to escalate their disputes. Critical tests of these expectations are conducted by estimating a censored choice model of conflict onset and escalation, using multiple measures of interstate conflict. The authors find little support for a broader regime-similarity peace, and their findings on democratic dispute escalation favor the informational argument over the normative argument.

Why are some foreign policy votes partisan and others bipartisan? The authors argue that an electoral connection drives partisanship in congressional foreign policy voting. Members of Congress depend on core supporters for mobilization and money, and primary voters are likely to follow the opinion cues of partisan elites; as a result, when Republican and Democratic opinion elites hold more distinct views on an issue, one may expect to observe more partisan behavior in Congress on both low and high-politics foreign policy issues. An empirical analysis of elite public opinion and congressional voting on foreign policy issues for six Congresses between 1975 and 1996 supports the elite opinion cleavage argument.

Why do economic sanctions sometimes succeed, but often fail, to produce a policy change? The authors argue that the effect of economic punishment is conditional on a state's political institutions. In all cases, the key to sanctions success is to generate political costs for the target regime's winning coalition. However, because of different institutional incentives, economically punishing sanctions are less likely to succeed against a nondemocratic target than against a democratic target. Sanctions increase rents. This benefits nondemocratic leaders more than democratic ones. Also, nondemocratic leaders have smaller winning coalitions, so their core constituents suffer less from sanctions than democratic leaders. Additionally, the authors' strategic argument leads to novel hypotheses regarding the initiation of sanctions. They test hypotheses from their political cost argument against all dyadic sanctions cases between 1948 and 1990, using two different dependent variables and a censored selection estimator to take into account the strategic nature of sanctioning.

This article argues that the influence of democratic institutions in international relations extends beyond the military realm and into the economic. The authors extend Bueno de Mesquita et al.'s institutional theoryof political regimes to explain the use and variety of economic sanctions in world politics. It is argued that democracies impose sanctions more oftenthan other regime types because they encompass a greater variety of interest groups. Yet, institutional incentives for successful foreign policies lead democracies to prefer sanctioning non-democracies instead of democracies.The pacifying influence of jointly democratic regimes, then, extends into the economic realm. Further, these same institutional incentives account forvariation across regime types in the choice of sanctions used and the goalspursued. Owing to incentives to minimize harm to their public and achieve successful foreign policies, democratic regimes are more likely than non-democracies to impose financial sanctions and pursue minor foreign policy goals. The authors use the Hufbauer, Schott & Elliott sanctions dataset to empirically evaluate each hypothesis. The empirical analysis supports the argument that domestic political institutions affect the incentives of leaders and, therefore, the foreign policies of states.