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Democracies rarely fight interstate wars against one another, but democratic dyads frequently engage in hostile acts short of war, such as militarized interstate disputes and the backing of coups. Do democracies wage proxy war against other elected regimes by aiding rebels with weapons and other assistance? Scholars have found that democracies generally avoid doing so—a phenomenon we term the "democratic embargo." However, the democratic embargo remains under-theorized. Using both datasets and close examination of purported instances of democratic aid to rebels fighting other democracies, we show that the democratic embargo is stronger than first thought. In addition, we explain the democratic embargo by arguing that strong democratic institutions prevent elected leaders from engaging in proxy war against sister regimes, and embargo violations tend to occur when democratic institutions are weak. We test our theory in two ways. First, using large-N qualitative analysis (LNQA), we examine all potential exceptions to the democratic embargo between 1945 and 2011 to establish the external validity of our claim. Second, we use case studies of the Irish decision not to aid rebels fighting the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland and Pakistan's decision to support rebels fighting India in Kashmir to assess the internal validity of our theoretical logic. The results provide clear support for our institutional explanation of the democratic embargo. Our argument has significant implications for the democratic peace theory, the study of proxy wars, and the capacity of democracies to fight rebellions.

Democratic leaders are commonly thought to be more likely than autocrats to select into conflicts where the ex ante probability of victory is high. We construct a novel empirical test of this notion by comparing democracies to various types of autocracies and determining which states are most likely to initiate disputes against relatively strong or weak opponents. Contrary to common belief, we find that democracies are not more selective than most forms of autocracy. Only military regimes demonstrate unique patterns of target selection, with these states being particularly likely to initiate disputes against relatively strong opponents. Our findings suggest a need to further scrutinize the conventional wisdom on democratic target selection and to disaggregate autocratic regimes into more refined categories when doing so.

AbstractHow do leaders influence national-level economic outcomes? We address this question by considering how leadership turnover influences volatility in economic growth. In doing so, we theorize that leaders from mixed regimes will reduce economic volatility due to domestic political incentives to create stable economic outcomes. Furthermore, we decompose the influence of leaders in non-democratic regimes and argue that leaders in party-based authoritarian regimes will also reduce economic volatility. To test our hypotheses, we focus on the effect of leadership turnover due to natural leader death to control for issues of endogeneity. We find that leaders in mixed regimes reduce volatility more than leaders in autocratic and democratic regimes and that leaders in party-based authoritarian regimes reduce volatility more than those in military or monarchy-based regimes. We conclude by explaining the implications of our findings for the study of leaders in international politics and their impact on economic growth and development.

Previous empirical research has demonstrated that war-weariness is not a universal characteristic of na tion-state behaviour. But a scholarly consensus agrees, for reasons originally advanced by Kant, that war-weariness is more applicable to democratic than to nondemocratic states. This is true despite evi dence that democracies are not more peaceful than autocracies — with the notable exception that war fare virtually never occurs between democracies. Empirical analyses of war (interstate and extrasy stemic) and dispute data from the Correlates of War Project reveal no statistically significant (p < .05) relationship between war-weariness and the conflict behaviour of the three principal democracies (France, United Kingdom, and United States) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some pat terns of behavior, especially the severity of subsequent wars, do appear to be in the predicted direction. However, the coefficients are so small that even if the number of cases were large enough to make the results statistically significant, only a minute fraction of the variance in international violence would be explained. These results, and those of other researchers, refute war-weariness as a general hypothesis. But they do not disprove the impact of war-weariness in particular cases such as France in 1940 and the United States in 1954.

AbstractThis article introduces the main themes of the special section 'The Global Diffusion of Policies, Practices and Values: Democracies and Autocracies Compared'. It discusses various strenghts and shortcomings of the existing research, outlines the unifying research questions that tie the various contributions to this special section together and briefly introduces each of the five contributions to this special section.

Abstract.In recent years, several prominent political scientists have argued that quantitative and qualitative methodologies should be seen as united by a single logic of scientific inference. Just exactly how this reconciliation of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches should be effected in practice, however, remains highly contentious. For all its promise, the project of uniting quantitative and qualitative methods in political science has thus reached something of an impasse. Participants on both sides of the quantitative/qualitative debate are convinced that this methodological divide should eventually be transcended, but few have abandoned the conviction that their preferred approach sets the standard by which progress in this endeavor should be judged. Evidently, we still lack consensus on precisely where the distinctive strengths of each methodological approach lie, and how these strengths can be combined effectively in systematic investigations of the political world. In this essay, we argue that a satisfactory synthesis of quantitative and qualitative methods for making causal inferences in comparative politics depends upon the resolution of a prior theoretical problem at the stage of research design: establishing a typology of political regimes and accounting for the mechanisms of their reproduction and diffusion over time and space.Résumé.Ces dernières années, plusieurs politologues éminents ont soutenu qu'il faudrait considérer les méthodologies quantitative et qualitative comme étant unies par une même logique de déduction scientifique. Comment réaliser cette réconciliation des approches quantitative et qualitative dans la pratique demeure cependant un sujet hautement contesté. Tout prometteur qu'il soit, le projet d'unifier les méthodes quantitative et qualitative en science politique se retrouve en fait dans une impasse. Les participants des deux côtés du débat quantitatif/qualitatif sont persuadés qu'il faudra un jour transcender cette fracture méthodologique, mais ils sont peu nombreux à avoir abandonné la conviction que l'approche qu'ils privilégient établit la norme qui permettra d'évaluer les progrès accomplis. Il est évident qu'il n'y a pas encore de consensus quant aux forces respectives précises de chaque méthode, ni sur la manière de les combiner efficacement pour procéder à des études systématiques du monde politique. Dans cet article, nous avançons qu'une synthèse satisfaisante des méthodes quantitative et qualitative pour arriver à des déductions causales en politique comparée exige qu'on s'emploie à résoudre d'abord un problème théorique à l'étape de la conception de la recherche, à savoir l'établissement d'une typologie des régimes politiques et l'inventaire des mécanismes de leur reproduction et de leur diffusion dans l'espace et dans le temps.