Regime Types and International Conflict, 1816-1976

TLDR

The study replicates and extends prior work on regime type and conflict, testing robustness across regime attributes, conflict measures, and analytical units. Using two comprehensive datasets on polity characteristics and militarized interstate disputes, the authors find no relation between regime type and conflict when analyzing individual polities, a result that holds across most regime characteristics and conflict measures. The analysis reveals that dyadic regime composition matters: democracies rarely clash and never fight in war, while higher proportions of democratic dyads lower war initiation and escalation, whereas autocratic dyads increase dispute frequency.

Abstract

This study replicates and extends previous inquiries on the relations between regime type and conflict involvement of states. It examines the robustness of previous findings with respect to various regime attributes, various conflict involvement measures, and units of analysis. Using two comprehensive datasets on polity characteristics and militarized interstate disputes, the empirical analyses reveal: (1) There are no relations between regime type and conflict involvement measures when the unit of analysis is the individual polity (i.e., a state characterized by a certain regime type over a given time span); this finding is robust in that it holds over most regime characteristics and conflict involvement measures. (2) There is a significant relationship between the regime characteristics of a dyad and the probability of conflict involvement of that dyad: Democracies rarely clash with one another, and never fight one another in war. (3) Both the proportion of democratic dyads and the proportion of autocratic dyads in the international system significantly affect the number of disputes begun and underway. But the proportion of democratic dyads in the system has a negative effect on the number of wars begun and on the proportion of disputes that escalate to war.