Democratizing the dispute: democratization and the history of conflict management

ABSTRACT

What explains the complex processes of democratization and conflict management? Are new democracies more likely to use peaceful means or engage in militarized means when presented with opportunities to resolve their territorial disputes? In this paper, we hypothesize that democratizing states still engaged in territorial disputes are more likely to attempt conflict management following the transition to democracy to remove flashpoints that the military and other former autocratic regime elements can use to discredit democracy and prevent consolidation of democracy. Depending on the history of past conflict management attempts, newly democratic leaders either continue or break with the past policies of non-democratic leaders, indicating a degree of interdependence in the conflict management process. Using multinomial logistic regression on claim-year dyad data from the Issues Correlates of War project, we find that previous management attempts and democratization interact to make peaceful conflict management more likely when past leaders have been successful in peaceful conflict management, but not with failed peaceful attempts or militarized attempts. Our results indicate that previous arguments overstate the propensity for democratization to spark armed conflict, attempted conflict management is more often peaceful, and current attempts are highly influenced by the history of attempts pursued by past leaders.

 

¿Cómo se explican los complejos procesos de democratización y manejo de conflictos? ¿Existe mayor probabilidad de que las nuevas democracias utilicen medios pacíficos o empleen medios militarizados cuando se les presenten oportunidades para resolver sus disputas territoriales? En este artículo, planteamos la hipótesis de que es más probable que aún se encuentran inmersos en disputas territoriales intenten manejar los conflictos después de la transición hacia la democracia a fin de eliminar los puntos álgidos que los militares y otros elementos del antiguo régimen autocrático pueden utilizar para desacreditar la democracia e impedir su consolidación. Según la historia de los intentos de manejar conflictos pasados, los nuevos líderes democráticos continúan o infringen las políticas anteriores de los líderes no democráticos, lo que indica cierto grado de interdependencia en el proceso de manejo de conflictos. Mediante la regresión logística multinomial en los datos de díadas del presente año del proyecto Issues Correlates of War (Cuestiones relacionadas con la guerra), descubrimos que los intentos anteriores de manejo y democratización interactúan para facilitar el manejo pacífico de los conflictos cuando los líderes del pasado han tenido éxito en el manejo pacífico de los conflictos, pero no a través de intentos militarizados o intentos pacíficos fallidos. Nuestros resultados indican que los argumentos anteriores exageran la tendencia de la democratización a desencadenar un conflicto armado, los intentos de manejar conflictos suelen ser más pacíficos y los intentos actuales están muy influenciados por la historia de los intentos que realizaron los líderes del pasado

 

Comment s’expliquent les processus complexes de démocratisation et de gestion des conflits ? Les nouvelles démocraties sont-elles davantage susceptibles d’avoir recours à des moyens paisibles ou d’engager des moyens militaires lorsqu’elles sont face à des opportunités de résoudre leurs conflits territoriaux ? Dans cet article, nous émettons l’hypothèse que les États en voie de démocratisation qui sont encore engagés dans des conflits territoriaux sont davantage susceptibles de tenter de gérer les conflits une fois la transition vers la démocratie effectuée afin d’éliminer les points chauds que les militaires et autres éléments de l’ancien régime autocratique pourraient utiliser pour discréditer la démocratie et empêcher sa consolidation. Selon l’historique des tentatives passées de gestion des conflits, les nouveaux dirigeants démocratiques peuvent poursuivre ou rompre avec les politiques de leurs prédécesseurs non démocratiques, ce qui indique un degré d’interdépendance dans le processus de gestion des conflits. Nous avons utilisé une régression logistique multinomiale sur les données de la dyade revendication-année du projet Issues Correlates of War et constaté que les tentatives de gestion des conflits antérieures et la démocratisation interagissaient et rendaient la gestion pacifique des conflits plus probable lorsque les anciens dirigeants avaient réussi à gérer les conflits de maniére pacifique, alors que ce n’était pas le cas lorsque des tentatives pacifiques ou militarisées avaient échoué. Nos résultats indiquent que les arguments précédents surestiment la propension de la démocratisation à déclencher un conflit armé, que les tentatives de gestion des conflits sont plus souvent pacifiques et que les tentatives présentes sont fortement influencées par les tentatives passées menées par les anciens dirigeants.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratization
• conflict management
• territorial disputes

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Gary Goertz, Molly Melin, Jaroslav Tir, William Thompson, Steve Saideman, Lucia Manzi, four anonymous reviewers, and the editors of International Interactions for their helpful comments and suggestions. Benjamin Denison is also grateful for the support of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame for their research support.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ This finding has focused on dyadic democracy and the settlement joint borders, which is slightly different than the monadic democratization process we focus on in this article.

² Scholars have argued that democracies prevent territorial disputes from escalating to conflict. See Huth and Allee and Allee (2002), Mitchell and Prins (1999), and Bueno De Mesquita, et al. (1999). Others have argued democratization unleashes forces that provoke armed conflict (Mansfield and Snyder 1995). For example, Huth and Allee (2002) find that a change in net democracy scores for a challenger state from highly non-democratic (−10) to highly democratic (10) makes initiation of force 70% less likely.

³ This is similar to what Huntington (1991, 209) calls the praetorian problem.

⁴ Others have argued that potential democratization would be hazardous for militarily powerful states such as Russia and China as democratization could unleash the nationalistic forces Mansfield and Snyder caution against. See McFaul (1997) on Russia and Shirk (2008) on China.

⁵ For more critiques of the Mansfield and Snyder dangerous democratizers argument, see: Thompson and Tucker (1997); Ward and Gleditsch (1998); Braumoeller (2004).

⁶ Gibler and Owsiak (2018) and Owsiak and Vasquez (2016) similarly argue that democratic regimes do not settle border disputes any more frequently than non-democracies, and instead find that settling border disputes produces peaceful relations and the environment conducive to democratization. While these arguments focus on jointly democratic dyads, the presence of unsettled disputes requiring conflict management after one state in a dispute undergoes democratization remains an important piece of understanding how these processes can impact and transform conflict management.

⁷ For a full accounting of the debate over democratization and war, see Cederman, Hug, and Wenger (2008).

⁸ As O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986, 23) say, there is an “omnipresent fear, during the transition, and often long after political democracy has been installed, that a coup will be attempted”.

⁹ See Linz and Stepan (1996) and Huntington (1968) for more on democratic consolidation and the threats posed after transition.

¹⁰ See Schenoni et al. (2020, 4) for more on how the military can threaten new democracies when territorial disputes are present.

¹¹ In fact, Ruhl (1996) notes that failure to fully consolidate democracy at times in Honduras during the 1980s through various spells of attempted democratization left the military in change of foreign policy, and eventually desires and attempts to sideline the military helped lead to more peaceful attempts at conflict management.

¹² Discussing the threat of military coups and takeovers in newly democratic states, O’Donnell and Schmitter  (1986, 23) state: “By being obsessed with its probable occurrence, contending forces in the transition take steps to prevent such an outcome and avoid taking decisions which they fear might encourage it.” Peaceful conflict management provides one means to prevent this outcome and remove an issue that might encourage greater involvement of the military in foreign affairs.

¹³ In addition to cost of potential military takeover, the sheer material costs of conflict, potential losses to the rival disputant, and potential reputation costs all make the costs of militarized attempts high. See Smith (2014).

¹⁴ We define successful resolution as a formal agreement made between two disputing states to drop or compromise on some or all territorial sovereignty. Failure implies that no agreement has occurred or a state has not militarily succeeded in seizing control of disputed territory.

¹⁵ In a given claim-year, states can attempt both peaceful and militarized resolution. To ensure a claim-dyad-year is not double counted in our analysis, we code for the highest level of militarized activity in a given year.

¹⁶ Conflict management attempts, rather than dispute resolution, is our dependent variable because we have a monadic theory of how democratization affects the foreign policy behavior of the newly democratic state, and not a theory of how democratization changes the dyad overall. As such, we can only explain and model the challenger state’s attempt at conflict management and not the target state’s acceptance or refusal.

¹⁷ The logic of this coding is that some states might strategize that using militarized force is the best way to get a better peaceful settlement of the dispute. See Hensel and Mitchell (2005) for an example of when states are more likely to attempt both peaceful and militarized conflict management when intangible salience is high.

¹⁸ Here, the logic is that newly democratic leaders might be willing to engage in a show of force but would be unwilling to actually engage in armed action to attempt to resolve the dispute.

¹⁹ Recognizing that scholars have noted there are issues in identifying democratic transitions through Polity scores when looking at the individual cases included. However, given the widespread use of Polity data in these of democratization and foreign policy behavior, we wanted to include it as a measure of democratization while also using the better specified CHISOLS dataset. See Haggard and Kaufman (2012, 501) for more on the deficiencies in coding of democratic transitions in Polity.

²⁰ Coding democratization as a dichotomous variable and not just an increase in the Polity score toward democracy is important, as Goertz (2006) argues, because movement from −7 to 3 and 4 to 8 on the Polity scale are very different and simply magnitude of change does not capture the actual democratizing process.

²¹ To ensure that our results are being driven by democratization and not just democracy, we run a model in Table 3A in the appendix, restricting the sample to only democracies to show newly democratic states attempt conflict resolution more frequently than long-standing democracies.

²² For further robustness, we also use the Varieties of Democracy baseline measure of electoral democracy to code democratization as when the value of electoral democracy crosses the.5 threshold and does not recede in the following 10 years for additional model specifications in Table 7A in the appendix (Coppedgeet al. 2019).

²³ Successful peaceful attempts are conflict management attempts that produced some agreement at the end that neither sides ratified or carried out. Unsuccessful peaceful attempts that either did not produce an agreement or one that one side didn’t carry out (Hensel et al. 2008).

²⁴ To ensure this is not affecting our results, we include in the appendix models without issue salience.

²⁵ Data are from http://ksgleditsch.com/data-5.html.

²⁶ This is necessary to avoid conflating militarized conflict management and no conflict management attempts, for instance, when only using peaceful attempts as the dependent variable.

²⁷ Previous failed peaceful attempts are statistically significant only at the .10 level for militarized conflict management.

²⁸ Marginal effects for Model 1 are shown in Figure 1A in the appendix.

²⁹ The switch in coefficient signs in the democratization variable once the interaction term is introduced is due to the fact that in the interactive model, the coefficient for democratization refers to only democratizers with no conflict management history.

³⁰ Table 5A in the appendix presents the full marginal effects numerically rather than graphically.

³¹ This uses the CHISOLS data on regime type to allow us to only include transitions to democracy from a military regime, which is where our hypothesized causal story should be most likely to be present.

³² Further confirming this result, we also use the V-Dem democratization measure to confirm these results in Table 7A in the appendix (Coppedge et al. 2019).

³³ To ensure this is not affecting our results, Table 8A in the appendix includes models without issue salience. In these models, the results between democratization and previous history of conflict management continue to be robust.

³⁴ Joint democracy however does reduce the likelihood of fatal MIDs occurring in one model.