Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction -- 2. Learning in International Politics -- 3. Realism, Balance of Threat, and Alliances -- 4. Cases, Hypotheses, and Variables -- 5. Quantitative Results -- 6. Case Studies: Lessons Heeded -- 7. Case Studies: Lessons Not Learned? -- 8. Political Structure and Learning -- 9. Conclusion.

Military strategy is an area of growing interest in the study of international conflict. It is linked to the outbreak, duration, and outcome of wars. This article presents the first quantitative empirical tests of the proposition that military strategy affects the outbreak of international conflict. The focus is on maneuver-oriented military strategies, such as the German blitzkrieg in World War II, which are hypothesized to be particularly conflict prone. Tests were conducted on the initiation and escalation of militarized interstate disputes for a sample of states from 1903 to 1992. The results indicate that states with maneuver strategies were significantly more likely to initiate disputes in general, although not disputes that escalate to the use of force. However, dispute participants with maneuver strategies were significantly more likely to escalate a dispute to war if the adversary employed a military strategy that emphasized attrition.

This article presents and tests a theory of learning in international politics. Drawing primarily from social psychology and organization theory, the learning theory proposes that lessons tend to be drawn only from high-impact events in world politics, such as large wars and economic depressions. Lessons drawn tend to be simple and are oriented around the question of which policies are likely to be successful and which policies are likely to fail. This learning theory is tested on the alliance choices of small powers in the twentieth century. The predictions of two learning hypotheses are compared with those of a leading realist explanation of alliance choices, balance of threat theory. Quantitative analysis of small powers' alliance choices reveals that a small power's experience in the previous world war is a very powerful explanation of its peacetime alliance choices after that war, whereas the level of threat in the international environment has only marginal effects on the small power's alliance choices. Further, these threat effects may be in the opposite direction of that predicted by balance of threat theory.

Why do democracies win the wars they fight? The authors explore this question by examining whether the armies of democratic states fight with higher military effectiveness on the battlefield, testing two general propositions: that the higher legitimacy of democratic states spurs superior individual soldiering and that democratic militaries are likely to have higher organizational efficacy. The authors test their propositions on a comprehensive set of major battles from 1800 to 1982, using data compiled by the Historical Evaluation and Research Organization. The authors find that the armies of democratic states tend to fight with marginally better logistics, substantially better initiative, and superior leadership. They also find that all three of these advantages dwindle as wars lengthen and interpret the results as indicating that although soldiers are not more willing to die for democratic governments, the emphasis on individual initiative in democratic culture generates important advantages on the battlefield.

How do nation-states' political institutions affect the relations between states? This article addresses that question by testing the predictions of different theories linking political institutions to war outcomes. Specifically, rent-seeking and regime legitimacy theories predict that all democratic belligerents are more likely to win wars because they fight more effectively. Alternatively, other theories focusing on the domestic political vulnerability of leaders and the marketplace of ideas predict that democracies are likely to be more careful about choosing when to start war. This would mean that only democratic initiators are more likely to win. Analyzing all interstate wars from 1816 to 1982 with a multivariate probit model, we find that democratic initiators are significantly more likely to win wars; democratic targets are also more likely to win, though the relationship is not as strong. We also find empirical support for several control variables, including strategy, terrain, and capability.

The literature on the democratic peace has emerged from two empirical claims: (1) Democracies are unlikely to conflict with one another, and (2) democracies are as prone to conflict with nondemocracies as nondemocracies are with one another. Together these assertions imply that the democratic peace is a dyadic phenomenon. There is strong support for the first observation, but much recent scholarship contravenes the second. This paper assesses whether the democratic peace is a purely dyadic, a monadic, or perhaps a mixed dyadic and monadic effect. Our analysis offers two important advances. First, our model directly compares the dyadic and monadic explanations by using the state as the unit of analysis rather than the potentially problematic dyad. Second, our model controls for an important but overlooked confounding variable: satisfaction with the status quo. Our results indicate that the initiation of violence within crises is predominantly a dyadic phenomenon, but we also find evidence suggesting a strong monadic effect regarding the emergence of crises.