Strongmen and Straw Men: Authoritarian Regimes and The Initiation of International Conflict

Strongmen and Straw Men:
Authoritarian Regimes and the Initiation of International Conflict
Jessica L. Weeks1
Department of Government
Cornell University
[email protected]
Abstract
How do domestic institutions affect autocratic leaders' decisions to initiate military conflicts? Contrary to the
conventional wisdom, I argue that institutions in some kinds of dictatorships allow regime insiders to hold
leaders accountable for their foreign policy decisions. But the preferences of these autocratic domestic
audiences vary, with domestic audiences in civilian regimes being more skeptical of using military force than
the military officers who form the core constituency in military juntas. In personalist regimes in which there
is no effective domestic audience, no predictable mechanism exists for restraining or removing overly
belligerent leaders, and leaders tend to be selected for personal characteristics that make them more likely to
use military force. I combine these arguments to generate a series of hypotheses about the conflict behavior
of autocracies, and test the hypotheses using new measures of authoritarian regime type. The findings
indicate that despite the conventional focus on differences between democracies and non-democracies,
substantial variation in conflict initiation occurs among authoritarian regimes. Moreover, civilian regimes
with powerful elite audiences are no more belligerent overall than democracies. The result is a deeper
understanding of the conflict behavior of autocracies, with important implications for scholars as well as
policymakers.
1
The author thanks Daniel Blake, Katrina Browne, Dave Clark, Jeff Colgan, Allan Dafoe, Kendra Dupuy,
Matthew Evangelista, Michael Horowitz, Peter Katzenstein, Jonathan Kirshner, Sarah Kreps, Ashley Leeds,
Margaret Levy, Andrew Moravscik, David Patel, Thomas Pepinsky, Jon Pevehouse, Michael Reese, Jacob
Shapiro, Kenneth Schultz, Christopher Way, Joseph Wright, Keren Yarhi-Milo, Pablo Yanguas, and
participants in workshops and seminars at Cornell University, the Elliot School at George Washington
University, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, and the University of Washington for
helpful comments at various stages. The author also thanks Barbara Geddes for sharing data.
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1. Introduction
Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Idi Amin – these are names synonymous not only with domestic
repression, but also with international conflict. In fact, the record of international violence of tyrants such as
these has fostered the impression that authoritarianism is inexorably linked to war and other international
tensions. Policymakers have drawn on this view to recommend democratization and even regime change in
the name of international peace.
But are all dictatorships equally belligerent? The historical record suggests that some authoritarian
regimes have been much less conflict-prone than the headline-grabbing Kims and Husseins of recent history.
China after Mao, Tanzania under Nyerere, Kenya under Kenyatta, Mexico under the PRI, and even the
former Soviet Union have all been relatively cautious in their decisions to threaten or use military force.2 But
what makes some authoritarian regime less likely to initiate military conflicts than others? What specific
political institutions in dictatorships encourage leaders to initiate military disputes abroad, and why?
Surprisingly little scholarship exists on this important question. The scant research that has emerged in
recent years has made some progress by identifying potential correlates of greater conflict initiation in
autocracies: for example, the size of the leader‘s supporting coalition (Bueno de Mesquita et al 2003, Peceny
and Butler 2004; see also Peceny, Beer, and Sanchez-Terry 2002 and Peceny and Beer 2003) or whether the
regime is led by military officers (Lai and Slater 2006, Sechser 2004). But while this scholarship contains
important insights, I show below that in fact the existing theoretical frameworks cannot explain patterns of
dispute initiation among autocracies, and existing measures of authoritarian institutions are imperfect. As a
consequence, we still have much to learn about why some dictatorships are more likely to initiate military
conflicts than others, and how their behavior compares to that of democracies.
This article attempts to fill this gap by synthesizing insights from the study of comparative
authoritarianism with those on conflict initiation into a theoretical framework that explains why some
dictatorships are more belligerent than others, and how their behavior compares to that of democracies. I
2
Indeed, scholars such as Oren and Hays 1997 have noted that single-party states seem more peaceful than
other authoritarian regime types. Weart 1994 shows that oligarchies are also relatively peaceful. See also
Sobek 2005.
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begin by laying out a simple framework that highlights the different factors that affect a leader‘s decision to
initiate conflict. The framework highlights potential costs of using military force – the costs of defeat, the
costs of fighting – and weighs these against the potential benefits. It then compares these costs to the costs of
not using military force, which could leave the state open to exploitation. Together, these factors shape
preferences over the use of force, and therefore, behavior.
The framework draws attention to three questions crucial to understanding why some leaders initiate
more international military conflicts than others. The first is, does the leader face a domestic audience able to
punish him for decisions about international conflict? Some dictatorships do not face powerful domestic
audiences, notably ―personalist‖ dictatorships such as North Korea or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, where the
leader has eliminated potential rivals and personally controls the state apparatus (Geddes 2003). Contrary to
the conventional wisdom, however, non-personalist authoritarian leaders typically face powerful domestic
audiences composed of regime elites (Weeks 2008). Despite the absence of elections or even formally
institutionalized procedures for removing leaders, leaders of non-personalist autocracies have strong
incentives to attend to the preferences of their domestic audience – more so than the existing literature
suggests. The existence or absence of a domestic audience – i.e., whether or not the regime is personalistic –
is thus a first dimension affecting leaders‘ decisions to initiate military conflict.
This leads to the second question – what are the preferences of the domestic audience? Counter to
existing perspectives such as selectorate theory, I argue that even in dictatorships with relatively small
winning coalitions, domestic audiences often have strong incentives to punish leaders who behave recklessly
or incompetently in international affairs. Autocratic audiences consisting primarily of civilians, I argue, are
scarcely more likely to forgive unnecessary or failed uses of force than democratic audiences of ordinary
voters. Autocratic audiences composed primarily of military officers, however, are more likely to view force
as necessary and appropriate than audiences consisting primarily of civilians, due primarily to their particular
belief structures regarding the use of military force. The military or civilian background of the domestic
audience is therefore a second dimension affecting decisions to start military disputes.
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Finally, what about personalist leaders who do not face a powerful domestic audience? Given
personalist leaders‘ supremacy in international and domestic affairs, we must inquire into the preferences and
tendencies of these kinds of leaders, rather than of their audiences. I argue that the challenges of attaining
and maintaining absolute power mean that personalist regimes tend to ―select for‖ leaders who are
particularly drawn to the use of military force as a policy option. Combined with the fact that personalist
dictators face few domestic consequences for defeat or for starting fights unwisely, this means that
personalists are, on average, more likely to initiate military conflicts than non-personalist leaders.
After developing these arguments, I carry out an extensive empirical analysis on a new dataset of
authoritarian institutions that allows me to test these predictions against the expectations of existing theories.
Existing measures of authoritarian institutions either conflate the two dimensions I highlight – personalism
and military leadership – or do not measure them accurately. Using my new finer-grained measures, I carry
out a battery of statistical analyses that provide strong support of my arguments, while they are inconsistent
with the expectations of other existing theories. The findings have many implications for the study of
domestic politics and international conflict, and also suggest valuable lessons for policymakers and
statesmen confronting autocracies abroad.
2. Existing literature on dictatorships and international conflict
To date, only a handful of studies have explored variation in the conflict behavior of autocracies. A
series of early studies by Mark Peceny et al (Peceny, Beer, and Sanchez-Terry 2002; Peceny and Beer 2003;
Peceny and Butler 2004) concluded that personalist dictatorships, in which the leader depends on only a
small coterie of supporters, are more likely to initiate conflicts than both democracies and other authoritarian
regime types. Peceny and Butler (2004) attribute this pattern to Bueno de Mesquita et al‘s (2003) selectorate
theory, arguing that the personalist regimes are less likely to initiate conflicts than single party regimes
because of their small coalition size.3 Selectorate theory posits that when the winning coalition (the group of
regime insiders whose support is necessary to sustain the leader in office) is small relative to the selectorate
3
Others discuss some additional possible theoretical explanations, but do not develop and test one core
argument (Peceny, Beer, and Sanchez-Terry 2002 and Peceny and Beer 2003).
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(the group of individuals who have a role in selecting the leader), members of the winning coalition have
strong incentives to stay loyal to the leader regardless of the leader‘s performance in providing public goods,
such as national security. In contrast, when the winning coalition (w) is large relative to the selectorate (s), or
w/s is large, as it is in democracies, members of the winning coalition have greater incentives to evaluate
leaders based on public goods provision. According to the authors, these factors combine to imply that large-
coalition leaders have incentives to only initiate military disputes that they are likely to win at low cost,
which depresses their rates of dispute initiation.
However, there are problems with using selectorate theory to explain why smaller-coalition personalist
regimes might be more belligerent than larger-coalition non-personalist dictatorships.4 A first problem is that
selectorate theory assumes that regime insiders have no tools to mitigate the uncertainty that members of
small-winning-coalition regimes face about their likely survival under a new ruler. Instead, selectorate
theory assumes that small-w/s regime insiders believe that their survival is inescapably connected to the
survival of the incumbent, which drives them to remain loyal even in the face of bad policy. One just as
plausible assumption would be that these individuals hold their privileged economic, social, or military
positions for material or historical reasons that make it very difficult to replace these elites even if a new
leader comes to power. Another is that elites can find ways to coordinate to prevent the leader from gaining
power at their expense (Magaloni 2008, Svolik 2009). If either of these are true, the probability of surviving
under a new leader would not be closely related to w/s.
Many real-world examples support this alternative assumption. Even in relatively small-coalition
regimes such as post-Stalin USSR, modern China, and Argentina and Brazil under their military juntas,
regime insiders knew that they could jettison an incompetent or reckless leader and survive politically, just as
most of the members of Khrushchev‘s Politburo did after they ousted their premier. In fact, members of the
winning coalition often coordinate to establish and maintain norms against arbitrarily dismissing top party
officials, precisely because such rules help regime insiders credibly constrain the leader in the future. In
many dictatorships, therefore, leaders are not insulated by loyalty in the way that selectorate theory assumes,
4
See also Ezrow and Frantz 2011, Haber 2006, Magaloni 2006, Clarke and Stone 2008, and Kennedy 2009
for additional critiques of selectorate theory and the evidence supporting it.
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and the conclusion that they do not care greatly about foreign policy outcomes does not necessarily follow.
In sum, selectorate theory relies on a key assumption that at best holds only in some authoritarian regimes.
A second problem with selectorate theory is that its point of departure is that two states already find
themselves in dispute over some international good (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999 p. 794). The existence of
a disagreement or competing claims is assumed to be exogenous to regime type, and the model simply
analyzes the decision to fight or negotiate conditional on the existence of that disagreement. But many
scholars have argued that regime type can affect states‘ perceptions of their own interests and the optimal
strategies for pursuing those interests (Finnemore 1996; Katzenstein 1996; Snyder 1984), which could
increase or decrease the likelihood that an international dispute arises in the first place.5 This, in turn, could
undermine the conclusions of selectorate theory. For example, selectorate theory assumes that payoffs and
costs from international settlements and wars are public goods. But the theory also assumes that small-
coalition leaders are not motivated to pursue public goods, and should focus instead on private goods. Why
then, would a small-coalition leader bother to waste resources in a dispute over supposed public goods such
as national security in the first place? Selectorate theory does not provide the answer.
In contrast to selectorate theory, a second line of argument focuses not on coalition size, but rather on
the fact that different authoritarian regimes have different sources of ―infrastructural power,‖ defined as
―institutions to help manage elite factionalism and curb mass dissent‖ (Lai and Slater 2006, p. 114). Lai and
Slater‘s argument is built on two core assumptions. First, it assumes that leaders start international conflicts
primarily as a way to deflect attention from domestic troubles. Second, it assumes that military-led regimes
have less infrastructural power than party-based regimes. Combining these assumptions implies that military
regimes are more likely to use (diversionary) force, because it meets their need for domestic support and
legitimacy (p. 117).6
But existing scholarship casts doubt on both of these assumptions. First, diversionary gambles
typically only make sense when the leader is highly insecure (Downs and Rocke 1994). This condition
5
Constructivist scholars, for example, have argued that pairs of democracies are more likely to perceive
shared interests (Katzenstein 1996, Wendt 1992). Below, I flesh out monadic variants of such arguments.
6
See also Debs and Goemans 2010 for an argument about military regimes that rests on the technology of
leadership removal.
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probably does not hold often enough to drive overall levels of dispute initiation, even if it can explain
isolated cases. Moreover, potential targets of diversion may deliberately avoid conflict, thus short-circuiting
the mechanism (Smith 1996, Leeds and Davis 1997, Clark 2003). Perhaps for these reasons, empirical
evidence that diversionary motives drive patterns of conflict initiation is at best mixed.7
Second, even if diversion is common enough to explain variation in belligerence, it is not clear that
infrastructural power causes military regimes engage in diversion more frequently than other types of
regimes. Democracies and civilian autocracies also suffer the crises of legitimacy that supposedly motivate
diversion, particularly in tough economic times. Party-based regimes such as China often stoke domestic
nationalism to shore up their popularity (Ross 2009). In fact, some argue that because democratic leaders
lack other options for stabilizing their rule, diversionary war is most common in democracies (Gelpi 1997).8
Given these issues, it is unsurprising that studies have failed to find evidence that military regimes engage in
more diversionary force than civilian regimes. Indeed, recent empirical work on diversion in authoritarian
regimes finds that it occurs most frequently in single-party regimes (Pickering and Kisangani 2010).
3. Domestic institutions and international conflict: a theoretical framework
Existing attempts to explain variation in the conflict behavior of autocracies thus rest on shaky
theoretical foundations. To build a framework for understanding conflict initiation by dictatorships, I instead
draw on the large literature that discusses how domestic institutions affect decisions to initiate international
military disputes,9 and modify this framework to accommodate insights about different kinds of authoritarian
regimes. Constraints can take the form of either ex ante constraints in implementing policy decisions, or ex
post accountability for a leader‘s decisions. First, ex ante constraints could prevent leaders from initiating
certain policies at all (Reiter and Stam 2003). However, even in democracies, executives can often
circumvent ex ante constraints, particularly for short-term military activities. Many scholars have therefore
7
See for example James 1987, Chiozza and Goemans 2003. Tir (2010) suggests that diversionary arguments
may apply only to the subset of conflicts with high public salience.
8
Other research finds that only mature democracies and ―consolidating‖ autocracies show evidence of
diversion (Pickering and Kisangani 2005, 2009). See also Chiozza and Goemans 2003 and Chiozza and
Goemans 2004 on regime type and diversion.
9
Among many, see Maoz and Russett 1993, Dixon 1994, Ray 1995, Morgan and Campbell 1991, Schultz
1999, Howell and Pevehouse 2007.
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focused on the second type of constraint: ex post accountability that deters leaders from choosing unpopular
or risky policies. I adopt this approach below.
Of course, knowing whether or not a leader can be punished for his decisions is not enough – we must
also understand the preferences of the actors who could punish the leader, thus creating the constraint. This
turns our attention to the preferences of the domestic audience, if one exists – the group with the means to
punish the leader, for example by removing him from office. In democracies, the domestic audience typically
consists of voters or some subset of the electorate. In autocracies, as I will argue in greater detail below, the
audience typically consists of regime insiders.10
It is also important to consider whether and why an audience might actually be motivated to punish or
reward a leader for foreign policy decisions. The most plausible argument is that the audience draws
inferences about the leader‘s competence or preferences by comparing the outcome of an international
dispute to what would have happened had the leader chosen differently, a form of ―sophisticated
retrospection.‖11 Most studies of domestic politics and crisis bargaining indicate that if audiences care about
competence, and the costs of removing the leader are not too great, audiences will punish leaders for policy
failures (however defined), and reward leaders for policy successes.
This leads us to ask how different kinds of audiences define success and failure in international
politics.12 Unlike selectorate theory, which assumes the existence of some pre-existing dispute, in my
framework the leader first chooses whether to initiate a military dispute with another state, or rather to stick
with the status quo. If the leader initiates a dispute, this leads to some probability of victory or defeat, which
result in some division of the international goods or resolution of the issue at stake. Each possible outcome
entails some combination of costs and benefits, be they material or normative; the question is then how the
relevant actors perceive these costs and benefits and hence how they define success and failure.
10
See Kinne 2005 for an argument about autocratic domestic audiences drawing on ―poliheuristic theory,‖
Weiss 2008, n.d. on mass audiences in authoritarian regimes, and Kirshner 2007 on financial elites.
11
Smith 1998, Fearon 1999, Johns 2006. Alternatively, the audience could wish to incentivize future
behavior, or the audience could wish to rehabilitate the country‘s international reputation; see for example
Fearon 1994 and Guisinger and Smith 2002.
12
A more complicated strategic model could also model the audience‘s reaction, but the central points can be
illustrated by focusing on the leader‘s decision.
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The framework highlights the audience and leader preferences that are relevant to understanding
leaders‘ decisions to initiate conflict. First, the audience perceives costs of fighting, whether or not the
country wins the dispute. The audience could be averse to using force because it is either materially costly, or
because it is morally undesirable. For example, drawing on Kant‘s early insight, many scholars have argued
that voters (the audience in democracies) are more sensitive to the material or moral costs of military conflict
than leaders or other elites.
But in addition to the audience‘s generic views about force, it could perceive additional costs of defeat
in a military challenge. In fact, many scholars have argued that defeat in international disputes is one of the
cardinal sins of international politics (Goemans 2000). The costs of defeat could be either direct, in the form
of lost military and economic resources, or more indirect: for example, defeat could invite future attacks by
revealing military weakness.
Next, audiences form views about value of international goods such as territory, economic rights, or
the removal of an external threat, compared to the status quo. On the one hand, holding constant the costs of
using military force, some audiences are more ―greedy‖ in that they desire more goods.13 Sticking with the
status quo, on the other hand, could be more or less attractive depending on decisionmakers‘ assessments of
how threatening the international environment is. Actors may fear that failure to act today will invite a costly
future attack, or in contrast they might feel perfectly safe. If the audience forms an ominous view of
maintaining the status quo, it might wish to initiate conflict today even if victory is not assured.14 If it thinks
the status quo is just fine, it would be more hesitant to initiate conflict.
If we know an audience‘s views about each of the possible outcomes of a leader‘s decision, assume
that audiences will punish leaders and reward leaders based on international outcomes, and assume that
leaders then choose what they perceive to be the most personally beneficial course of action, we can generate
predictions about the relative conflict initiation propensities of different kinds of leaders. For example,
13
See for example Lake 1992 and Snyder 1991 on expansionist motives, Schweller 1994 on revisionist
states, or Glaser 2010 on ―greedy‖ states.
14
Finally, independent of the audience‘s preferences, the leader must reach some assessment of the
probability that the country will win the dispute. While it is possible that some types of leaders make
systematically biased estimates of victory, we will assume for simplicity that all leaders make unbiased (if
imperfect) estimates. See however Frantz 2008.
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holding constant all other factors, actors that perceive high costs of using military force would initiate fewer
military conflicts than other leaders. Holding constant other factors, leaders with greedy audiences that
desperately wish to attain international goods or that fear the continuation of the status quo would tend to
initiate more disputes. Leaders with audiences that perceive high costs of military defeat would tend to avoid
disputes out of fear of losing. The following section turns to how these parameters vary among authoritarian
regimes, and what this means for regime type and constraints on the initiation of international conflict.
4. Audiences, preferences, and authoritarian leaders’ initiation of conflict
Modern scholarship has identified two dimensions central to understanding the internal logic of
authoritarian regimes: whether the regime is led by civilians or the military, and the degree of personal power
of the dictator (Geddes 2003).15 The discussion below will show that the two dimensions of militarism and
personalism form natural cleavages when it comes to explaining variation in constraints and preferences
across dictatorships. Because regimes can have any combination of these two characteristics, the two
dimensions combine to form four ideal types of dictatorships, shown in Figure 1.16 I adopt Slater‘s (2003)
labels, distinguishing between non-personalist civilian regimes (machines), non-personalist military regimes
(juntas), personalist civilian regimes (bosses) and personalist military regimes (strongmen).17
[Figure 1 about here]
4.1. Domestic audiences: personalist vs. elite-constrained dictators
The first question is what types of regimes face a powerful domestic audience that can punish, or at the
extreme, remove leaders who do not represent their interests. Scholars have shown empirically that most
authoritarian leaders lose power at the hands of government insiders (Geddes 2003, Bueno de Mesquita et al.
15
Space does not exploring the merits of alternative typologies, but see Friedrich and Brzezinski 1956,
Arendt 1973, O'Donnell 1978, Linz 2000, Brooker 2000, Wintrobe 2000, Gandhi and Przeworski 2006,
Magaloni 2006, 2008, Brownlee 2007, Hadenius and Teorell 2007, Pepinsky 2009, Cheibub, Gandhi, and
Vreeland 2010, and Ezrow and Frantz 2011.
16
Most previous work has used a three-part typology that does not allow separate examination of the military
and personalist dimensions; for example Peceny and Beer (2003) group strongmen and bosses together as
―personalists.‖
17
See also Lai and Slater 2006. A possible point of confusion is that while I use Slater‘s labels, I argue that
the military dimension is important because it conditions how decisionmakers interpret threats and
opportunities, not because lower ―infrastructural power‖ in military regimes lead to diversion.
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2003, Svolik 2009). But dictatorships vary enormously in the extent to which regime insiders have the
opportunity and incentives to oust their leader.
At one end of the spectrum are despotic, sultanistic, or, here, ―personalistic‖ regimes, in which one
individual controls the instruments of state such as the military forces, any ruling party, or the state
bureaucracy (Weber 1997, Chehabi and Linz 1998, Geddes 2003). Not only is the leader insulated from free
and fair elections, but he is typically able to appoint friends, relatives, and cronies to important offices. These
hand-picked regime insiders have strong incentives to remain loyal to and uncritical of the leader, lest they
risk their own political demise (Bratton and Van de Walle 1994). Therefore a defining feature of personalist
regimes such as North Korea under the Kims, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the Soviet Union under Stalin,
Syria under the Assads, and Libya under Gaddafi is that their leaders do not face a strong, organized
domestic audience able to exert ex ante or ex post constraints on the leader‘s policy choices.18
But this lack of a domestic audience in personalist dictatorships contrasts greatly with the powerful
domestic audiences found in non-personalist autocracies. Unlike their counterparts in personalist
dictatorships, government insiders in non-personalist autocracies often have both the will and the means to
punish their leader. The reason is that in non-personalist party-based ―machines‖ such as contemporary
China and the post-Stalin Soviet Union, government insiders rise through the ranks based in significant part
on merit and seniority, rather than personal or family relationships to the paramount leader. Moreover, in
these regimes the leader cannot typically spy on subordinates and dispose of them if he detects disloyalty.
Regime insiders‘ loyalty to the incumbent is thus more tenuous; if regime elites do succeed in ousting an
incompetent leader, they are likely to survive.
The ability to punish or oust the leader is not limited to single-party regimes. In many military
dictatorships – many of those in Latin America, and the former military regimes of Algeria, South Korea,
and Thailand – the officer corps and other junta members do not all depend on the incumbent for their own
political survival. Just as the Argentine junta ousted Galtieri after the Falklands debacle, high-ranking
officers in non-personalist military dictatorships often punish or even oust the leader for policy failures.
18
These constraints can be formal or informal. Often, the degree of constraints in authoritarian regimes does
not reflect the letter of the law. See also Wright 2008 on how legislatures can constrain authoritarian rulers.
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Officers in the Argentine military acted as a ―constituency to which the junta remained attentive… much
evidence exists to support the notion that a very real form of political constraint was exercised on
Argentina‘s putative rulers‖ at the hands of these officers (p. 762). In sum, government insiders pose a
powerful domestic audience in non-personalist regimes.
Of course, even non-personalist dictators tend to be more secure in office than democratic leaders
(Frantz 2008), reducing the likelihood of punishment.19 But this greater likelihood of remaining in power
could be offset by the leader‘s fear of his post-ouster fate (Goemans 2000, Debs and Goemans 2010). Some
lucky ousted non-personalist dictators (such as Khrushchev) go into a ―retirement‖ of house arrest. But other
ex-dictators face physical violence or exile. Thus, even if autocrats are less likely to lose office than
democrats, they may fear the possibility of punishment more acutely.
The distinction between severe and non-severe punishment raises the question whether personalist
dictators, while less likely to be punished than non-personalist leaders, are even more likely to be punished
severely. If so, the small threat of the ―ultimate punishment‖ could induce just as much caution in personalist
as non-personalist leaders (Goemans 2008). Indeed, there is some evidence that personalist leaders are more
likely to face severe punishment (such as exile or death) than leaders of machines, who more often face a
quiet, if forced, retirement (Debs and Goemans 2009). But on the other hand, given the historically low
probability that personalist leaders will lose office even when they are defeated, these fears are unlikely to
overwhelm the relative lack of accountability that personalists enjoy. Elsewhere, I show that of the
personalistic leaders who lost wars, only 12.5 percent lost office within two years (Weeks 2009), a much
lower rate than both democrats and non-personalist dictators, for whom military defeat usually spelled
ouster. Importantly, the differences in punishment between democrats and non-personalist dictators were
19
A few scholars would dispute this conventional claim about democracies. Chiozza and Goemans 2003 and
Chiozza and Goemans 2004 argue that democracies – typically viewed as the most accountable regime type
– are less sensitive to conflict outcomes than non-democracies. Debs and Goemans 2010 and Chiozza and
Goemans 2011 suggest that modes of leadership removal affect leaders‘ sensitivity to conflict outcomes.
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small. Absent a reliable threat of punishment, personalist leaders do not suffer the same extra cost of defeat
as democrats and non-personalist dictators, and consequently can take greater risks.20
Thus, one way to measure the first dimension – whether the leader faces a powerful domestic audience
with the ability to punish or even depose him – is whether or not a regime is ruled by a personalist dictator.
Personalist dictators are particularly unlikely to face an effective domestic audience. In contrast, non-
personalist dictators must reckon with powerful domestic audiences. When combined with the potentially
unattractive fate of being deposed, non-personalist dictators‘ fear of removal at the hands of regime insiders
can strongly condition their behavior. The preferences of domestic audiences in non-personalistic
dictatorships are therefore important.
4.2. The content of constraints: audience and leader preferences
The second question, then, is what are audience preferences concerning the initiation of military
conflict? Below, I argue that preferences vary according to the composition of the audience, with important
differences between military and civilian regimes. In personalist regimes without an effective domestic
audience, we inquire instead into the preferences and behavior of the dictator. The discussion of each of the
dictatorial types compares the preferences of the autocratic audience to those of a typical democratic
audience (voters).
4.2.1. Peaceful machines: elite-constrained dictatorships with civilian audiences
What are the preferences of the civilian elites composing audiences in non-personalist civilian
machines? These elites are typically officials in a dominant party, though they could also potentially be
family members in a non-personalistic monarchy such as Saudi Arabia, or high-level officials in an autocracy
with limited multi-party competition. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I argue below that civilian
20
Is retrospective punishment credible in these autocracies? Above, I argued that audiences draw inferences
about the leader‘s competence or preferences by comparing the outcome of a dispute to the audience‘s
expectations had the leader chosen differently. Faced with the rotten fruits of a leader‘s decision, audiences
may conclude that the leader is either unable or unwilling to further their policy interests, and that a new
leader would improve their well-being. The question then becomes whether other concerns – such as the fear
of losing insider status – overwhelm audience members‘ desire for a competent leader who does not make
poor foreign policy choices. Above I argued that audience members in non-personalist autocracies can
usually assure themselves that they can hold on to their positions even under a new leader. They should
therefore wish to replace leaders who make unwelcome foreign policy decisions.
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regime insiders in autocracies are not substantially more enthusiastic about initiating military force, on
average, than democratic voters. Recall also that I argue that selectorate theory‘s assumption that small-
coalition regime insiders are dependent on the leader‘s survival for their own survival does not usually hold
in non-personalist autocracies. The relatively small size of the winning coalition in machines therefore does
not imply that these elites have little motivation to be concerned with foreign policy outcomes.
First, many scholars have argued that the perceived costs of fighting are lower for autocratic than for
democratic audiences. The most obvious perceived costs are the material costs of fighting to which Kant
alludes: authoritarian elites might be more insulated from the direct costs of war than ordinary citizens. But
despite the long pedigree of the Kantian argument, there are reasons to doubt it. Except in the most serious
conflicts involving mass conscription, most wars involve the mobilization of only a very small proportion of
the population. Moreover, democratic governments often adopt policies that minimize the costs of war to
their constituents (Valentino, Huth, and Croco 2010); the direct personal costs of war for any individual
citizen are therefore likely to be low. The direct costs of war may be no lower for elites in autocracies; in fact
smart enemy governments will often specifically target high-level officials in their wartime efforts.21 For
example, the US explicitly used this kind of decapitation strategy in the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Unlike the paramount leader, most audience members do not enjoy personal security details or have access to
multiple secret underground bunkers to protect them and their families, much less their land or property.
Of course, other costs of war accrue even to citizens off the battlefield, for example disruptions in the
economy. Most scholars assume that ordinary citizens are more vulnerable to these economic costs than
wealthier elites, who can absorb a drop in income. But the logic of authoritarianism actually suggests that
only a very narrow circle of the elite would ignore such costs when it comes to evaluating the leader. Elites‘
economic interests are likely to be hard-hit by a conflict, which can both destroy infrastructure and disrupt
trade. And elites cannot simply compensate themselves by taxing the public at a higher rate. As Wintrobe
(2000) argues, most autocratic regimes stay in power through a combination of repression and loyalty. Defeat
in war damages an important instrument of repression – the military. And taxing the citizens at higher rates
21
In fact, the expectation that war will destabilize the enemy is common enough that many belligerents fight
wars with this express goal in mind; see Holsti (1991).
- 14 -

in order to compensate for wartime losses is likely to reduce the regime‘s other resource, the loyalty of the
public. In other words, when resources are destroyed in war, the only way that elites could insulate
themselves economically would be to take steps that imperil the regime‘s stability, and thus their own
survival. In sum, it is not clear that autocratic elites are substantially more insulated from the direct or
indirect material costs of fighting than ordinary citizens.
Alternatively, normative or moral concerns could raise the perceived costs of fighting.22 Perhaps elites
in autocracies are socialized to view military force as a more appropriate way to settle disputes than leaders
or citizens in democracies. While I return to this issue in the discussion of military officers, there is at best
weak evidence that civilian elites in dictatorships are less likely than their democratic counterparts to see war
as inappropriate. Democratic pacific norms, most literature suggests, apply only when the opponent is a
democracy; these are dyadic, rather than monadic, beliefs about the appropriateness of using force (Maoz and
Russett 1993, Dixon 1994). Little scholarship demonstrates that there are monadic differences in norms
between democracies and autocracies, and in fact many scholars have commented on democracies‘
willingness to use force even against innocent civilians (Downes 2008). Even when scholars have found
monadic differences in the willingness of democracies to refrain from certain practices, such as abusing
enemy combatants, they have attributed these to strategic rather than normative factors (Wallace 2010). In
sum, there is little existing evidence that civilian autocratic audiences view the costs of fighting as
systematically lower than democratic audiences do.
A second possibility is that high-level officials in autocratic regimes are less concerned with the costs
of defeat. But this argument is also flawed. Outright military occupation and immediate regime change aside,
defeat in war or even lower-level disputes could weaken domestic support for the regime by providing a
focal point for citizen discontent, as demonstrated by the fate of the Argentine military regime after its defeat
in the Falklands. Or, defeated soldiers might turn against their own regime, as many Arab soldiers did in the
aftermath of an embarrassing defeat to Israel in 1948. Given the drastic consequences of regime change, the
22
I define norms broadly as standards of appropriate behavior shared by a particular community – in this
case, a domestic community of policymakers. The norms could either involve moral beliefs about what is
right, or could refer simply to standard behaviors. See Goldstein and Keohane 1993, Katzenstein 1996,
Wendt 1992, Risse-Kappen 1995, and Mercer 1995.
- 15 -

audience would be wary of a leader who takes what seems to be a foolish or selfish risk in this regard, and
might jettison the leader in order to stave off citizen discontent. Defeat could also reveal or even increase a
country‘s military vulnerability and make the country more open to future invasion by hostile neighbors.
Political and military elites might be especially attuned to the perils of having their military weakness
exposed, or losing strategic territory, because of their greater understanding of international affairs. Unlike
the ordinary public, authoritarian elites also have their own access to information about the details of the war
outcome, and are not vulnerable to favorable framing by the leader. The consequences of defeat should
therefore loom as large in the minds of autocratic audiences as democratic audiences.
What about the value of the status quo compared to the value of international goods such as territory,
economic rights, or the removal of an external threat? While I return to this issue in the discussion of military
regimes below, there are no clear reasons to think that ordinary authoritarian elites are more paranoid or view
other states as more threatening than voters in democracies. The value of the status quo should not therefore
be substantially lower for civilian autocratic elites than for democracies. In contrast, perhaps autocratic
audiences are more likely to favor conflict because they have a greater desire for the potential benefits of
victory, or ―international goods.‖ The most prominent formulation of this argument is that since authoritarian
elites can keep the spoils rather than sharing them with the population, military conquest may seem more
attractive to autocrats than to democrats (Lake 1992). But the autocratic expansionism argument hinges on
whether conquering foreign territory disproportionately benefits elites or the public; if the latter, we might
actually expect authoritarian audiences to be better off directly consuming the resources that it would take to
successfully conquer foreign territory (Bueno de Mesquita et al 2003), leading to an anti-expansionist bias.
Absent evidence that expansion and war disproportionately benefit the elite, this argument would not imply
that autocrats start more wars.
In sum, the discussion suggests that civilian authoritarian audiences – even when they are small and
not representative of the broader public – tend to view the initiation of military conflict with the same
trepidation as democratic audiences. While these audiences may approve of using force if the benefits
outweigh the material or moral costs, they are extremely wary of defeat, both for its direct effects and the
- 16 -

message it sends about their leader‘s competence or preferences. The fear of ex post punishment, in turn,
induces conservatism in the leaders of these machines.
This conclusion is, of course, at odds with much of the conventional wisdom. One might expect that it
is much easier for a leader to convince a small coalition of elites to forgive him for launching a foolish war
than it would be to assuage Congress or voters.23 But for the reasons provided above, the conventional
wisdom underestimates the vulnerability of non-personalist autocrats. First, the lonely post-tenure fates of
leaders of machines may encourage even greater caution than in democracies, even if the odds of losing
office are slightly lower. Second, leaders of machines may find it much more difficult to massage domestic
opinion when the audience consists of high-level officials – themselves often active in foreign policy and
with no special appetite for force – than a ―rationally ignorant‖ mass public (Downs 1957). Even long after
the fall of Baghdad, for example, voters had substantial misperceptions about the threat Iraq had posed (Kull,
Ramsay, and Lewis 2003). Together, these factors combine to produce, on average, no greater incentives for
leaders of machines to initiate conflicts than leaders of democracies.
H1: Machines are no more likely to initiate military conflicts than democracies.
4.2.2. Militant juntas: elite-constrained dictatorships with military audiences
Having discussed civilian non-personalist ―machines,‖ I now turn to military ―juntas‖ in which the
audience is composed primarily of military officers.24 While many of the arguments about elite audiences in
non-personalist civilian autocracies apply to military regimes as well, an important exception exists in
regards to the regime‘s perceived costs of fighting and the value of the status quo. Military officers have been
selected for, and socialized to hold, specific beliefs about the utility and appropriateness of military force as
an instrument of politics. Specifically, military officers are more likely than civilians to view military force
23
I thank an anonymous reviewer for putting it this way.
24
On military regimes, see Nordlinger 1977, Remmer 1989, Geddes 2003, Gandhi and Przeworski 2006.
- 17 -

as an effective strategy, and also more likely to form ominous views of the status quo.25 These views offset
the costs of using force and raise its perceived net benefits.
This argument emphasizes not the material interests of elites in juntas, but rather their deeply-
engrained beliefs about the role of military force in international affairs. As many scholars have shown,
military training inculcates individuals with systematic beliefs about the appropriateness, effectiveness, and
utility of using military force abroad (Sechser 2004). In the seminal work on the beliefs of military officers,
Huntington (1957) argues that ―the military ethic views conflict as a universal pattern throughout nature and
sees violence rooted in the permanent biological and psychological nature of men‖ (p. 64).26 In officers‘
Hobbesian worldview, resort to force is unavoidable and therefore morally acceptable. Moreover, soldiers
base their perceptions of threats not on information about the political intentions of the other state, but on the
state‘s military capabilities: ―Human nature being what it is, a stronger state should never be trusted even if it
proclaims the friendliest intentions‖ (p. 66), and soldiers are socialized to ―view with alarm the potency and
immediacy of the security threats to the state‖ (p. 66). Because officers are less likely, on average, to feel
comfortable with the status quo, they perceive higher net benefits of using force.
Over time, these tendencies can become so strongly engrained that professional officers become
―functionally specialized‖ (Posen 1984, p. 57) and ―forget that other means can also be used toward the same
end‖ (Snyder 1984, p. 28). Over time, they may even harden into offensive doctrines (Posen 1984, Snyder
1984).27 As Brecher (1996) puts it, ―The leaders of military regimes are the most likely to rely on violence,
whatever the nature of the initial catalyst. Violence is normal behavior for the military in power, for the
military generally achieves and sustains power through violence and tends to use this technique in all
situations of stress, internal or external. They also see violence as legitimate and effective‖ (p. 220).28 In sum,
in addition to viewing force as necessary because of the costs of inaction, officers become habituated to the
25
This argument reaches a similar conclusion as Debs and Goemans‘ (2010) argument that military officers
are punished more severely for making peaceful concessions, though their mechanism relies on the
technology of leadership removal rather than officers‘ perceptions of necessity.
26
See also Snyder 1984 p. 28
27
Vagts 1958 expresses a similar view (p. 263), though see also Kier (1997).
28
See also Horowitz and Stam (2010).
- 18 -

role of force in international politics. While their material costs of fighting may be no lower than for civilian
autocratic elites or ordinary citizens, officers‘ perceived costs of fighting are lower.
A potential counterargument is that military officers‘ Hobbesian views are offset by otherwise
conservative tendencies.29 Although Huntington saw military leaders as prone to exaggerating external
threats, he ultimately believed that professional soldiers favor war only rarely, because ―war at any time is an
intensification of the threats to the military security of the state‖ (p. 69).30 Feaver and Gelpi (2004) report a
similar conclusion in their study of the beliefs of American military officers, and Richard Betts (1977) finds
that in the context of Cold War crises, U.S. military officers did not uniformly advocate more aggressive
policies than civilian officials.
But importantly, these studies do not necessarily imply that officers in military juntas are less
aggressive than elites in machines or ordinary citizens. First, the above-cited studies are of military officers
in democracies with strong civil-military relations, usually the U.S. In contrast, the military officers who rule
military dictatorships have shaken off civilian control and declared the military‘s right to intervene in
domestic politics. Even if it were true that military officers in the U.S. are relatively cautious, military juntas
explicitly ―select for‖ groups of officers who are decidedly not conservative about using force to settle
political questions.
Second, even if we do believe that the American experience sheds light on the attitudes and
preferences of military officers in dictatorships, empirical evidence in favor of the military conservatism
hypothesis is actually quite limited. For example, though Betts (1977) is often cited as evidence that military
officers are not more hawkish than civilians, his conclusion was actually that military opinion was often
divided and that the hawkish military officers rarely influenced U.S. policy. In fact, Betts‘ own data show
that during Cold War crises, military officers advocated more hawkish policy positions than civilians 21
percent of the time, equally hawkish positions 65 percent of the time, and were less hawkish only 14 percent
29
For a helpful overview of this literature, see Sechser (2004).
30
Andreski (1992) reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that sending the army abroad for military adventures
renders it unavailable for internal policing (p. 105), and politicizing the army undermine its war-fighting
effectiveness. But Andreski‘s evidence is purely anecdotal, and his argument should apply to any regime in
which the military is important to the stability of the country, not only military dictatorships.
- 19 -

of the time.31 And when it came to tactical escalation decisions after an intervention, military officers were
never less aggressive than civilians.
Feaver and Gelpi‘s (2004) surveys of American military and civilian elites, moreover, suggest that
military officers are only more conservative about using force when the mission involves ―interventionist‖
goals such as spreading democracy or protecting human rights. When it comes to realpolitik questions such
as the rise of China or WMD proliferation, military officers do not display this conservatism about using
force. Rather, military officers were more likely than civilians to perceive external threats stemming from
China, nuclear weapons, and the spread of arms; less likely to perceive diplomacy and diplomatic tools as
important; and more likely to view the military as an important instrument of foreign policy.32 This matters
because the U.S., as a liberal superpower, is relatively unique among countries in its ability to use force to
pursue non-security goals. When it comes to the types of realpolitik security situations that most countries
face, the evidence from the U.S. actually seems to suggest that military officers are more hawkish than
civilians.
In sum, due to the background and training of military officers, autocratic audiences composed
primarily of military men should tend to be more forgiving of using military force than civilian audiences.
This is because military officers‘ training leads them to view force as an effective and appropriate policy
option, and to fear the consequences if they do not act. This increases their perception of the net benefits of
using force. Leaders facing such a ―constituency‖ will therefore be more likely to initiate military conflicts
than counterparts who face a civilian audience.
H2: Juntas are more likely to initiate military conflicts than machines and democracies.
4.2.3. Personalist dictators: ambitious and unconstrained
Finally, what behavior should we expect from personalist dictators, such as civilian bosses and military
strongmen? There are several reasons that we should expect these leaders to initiate more military conflicts
31
Author‘s calculation from Table A, p. 216.
32
For more detail, see online appendix.
- 20 -

than other leaders. I first discuss the two types of leaders together, and then comment on how strongmen may
differ from bosses due to their military background.
First, when it comes to their perceptions of the costs of war and the costs of not using military force,
personalist dictators are, like military officers, particularly likely to view military force as necessary,
effective, and hence net less costly, than either democratic voters or civilian officials in non-personalist
regimes. One reason is that unlike elites in machines, who are typically bureaucrats who have risen through
the civilian ranks, many personalist dictators, such as Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin attained
their personal status through violent means such as revolution, civil war, or violent coup. These leaders have
learned that force is an effective and even necessary means of dispute resolution, lowering their perception of
the costs of force (Gurr 1988, Colgan 2010 and Colgan n.d.).
Second, these leaders are more likely to desire international goods, or are more ―revisionist,‖ than
typical audience members in a democracy, machine, or junta. Again, personalist regimes select for leaders
who are particularly likely to cherish grand international ambitions. One way to think of personalist leaders is
as individuals with ―tyrannical‖ personalities who managed, through force and luck, to create domestic
political conditions (personalist regimes) that feed this desire to dominate others. Rosen (2005) draws on
classical works by Xenophon and others to argue that tyrants are particularly likely to crave supremacy over
others (pp. 156-157), and Glad argues that many tyrants are narcissists who attempt to ―buttress [their]
exalted self-image‖ by placing themselves above others (Glad 2002, p. 26). Psychological studies of tyrants
(i.e., the types of individuals who are particularly likely to become personalist dictators) in turn consistently
highlight these leaders‘ need for absolute domination and their consequent ―grandiose‖ ambitions.33 Among
Saddam Hussein‘s many ambitions, for example, was his desire to establish a pan-Arab caliphate – with
himself, of course, as Caliph. As the heir of Nebudchadnezzar and Saladin, it was only natural that Saddam
would order the construction of an ostentatious palace in Babylon – with his own initials inscribed on each
brick (Woods et al. 2006). Muammar Gaddafi of Libya notoriously dubbed himself the ―King of Kings,‖ in
2008 gathering together over 200 African tribal rulers and monarchs, and declaring his hope for a single
33
See for example Post 2004 and Glad 2002. Moreover, many personalist dictators are revolutionary leaders
who wish to change the status quo both domestically and internationally (Walt 1996, Colgan n.d.).
- 21 -

African government over which he would presumably preside. Such personal ambitions offset the fact that
personalist leaders are not as motivated by the prospect of direct audience rewards for success in conflicts..
While leaders of other regime types may also be prone to dreams of empire (Snyder 1991), in
personalist dictatorships, the sycophants surrounding the dictator are particularly unwilling to reign in the
leader‘s excessive ambition.34 In the Kremlin under Stalin, ―There was a clear etiquette: it was deadly to
disagree too much… Silence was often a virtue and veterans advised neophytes on how to behave and
survive‖ (Montefiore 2004, p. 341). While of course even subordinates in democracies may find it difficult to
disabuse the leader of unrealistic goals, these tendencies are exacerbated in personalist autocracies, in which
the leader is so unusually powerful.
Finally, the costs of defeat will be lower for personalist dictators compared to not only democrats, but
also compared to audiences in non-personalist dictatorships. Personalist dictators have extraordinary
resources at their disposal to protect themselves from harm during wartime, compared to other regime elites.
And their ability to disrupt coordination among regime elites means that even if they are defeated, they do
not face the same threat of domestic punishment.
In sum, the internal logic of personalist dictatorships points clearly toward greater conflict initiation by
personalist dictators compared to democracies or machines. First, the path toward becoming a personalist
dictator ―selects for‖ leaders who both have grand international ambitions and view force as an effective
longer-term strategy, raising its net benefits and reducing its net costs. Second, personalist dictators are less
vulnerable to punishment for defeat than other types of leaders. This increases their willingness to initiate
disputes that they have only a low likelihood of winning and inflates their overall rate of dispute initiation.
The implication for conflict initiation is that strongmen and bosses tend to, on average, initiate more military
disputes than constrained leaders.
H3: Bosses and strongmen are more likely to initiate military conflicts than machines and democracies.
34
For a related argument about the effects of personalist dictatorship on variation in intelligence quality, see
Frantz and Ezrow 2009. See also Geddes 2003, Bratton and Van de Walle 1994, Brooks 1998, Biddle 2004,
Egorov and Sonin 2009 on the tradeoffs that dictators make between loyalty and military competence. For
related logic pertaining to military technology and combat ability, see Biddle and Zirkle 1996 and Quinlivan
1999.
- 22 -

4.2.4. Strongmen: more belligerent than bosses or juntas?
A final question is whether the effects of personalism and militarism are additive, or redundant. Are
personalistic strongmen are more likely to initiate conflict than non-personalistic juntas? Are strongmen –
personalist leaders with a military background and who are surrounded by military advisers –more likely to
embrace international conflict than (civilian) bosses? I consider each comparison –strongmen vs. juntas, and
strongmen vs. bosses – in turn.
First, are strongmen more belligerent than juntas? The argument about juntas was that even though
leaders of juntas must please a domestic audience, that audience – composed of military officers – is more
likely than a civilian audience to view force as a sound long-term strategy, and to perceive the status quo
ominously. This raises the perceived net benefits of using force. Like militarism, one of the effects of
personalism is that, due to selection, personalist leaders tend to believe that military force is necessary,
effective, and superior to compromise. However, unlike personalist dictators, leaders of juntas can expect
domestic punishment if they miscalculate or make a foolish decision. Personalist strongmen should therefore
be more likely to initiate conflict than non-personalist juntas, though the difference should be smaller than
the differences between bosses and machines, where both beliefs and accountability are different.
Second, are strongmen more belligerent than bosses? Given that both are personalist regimes in which
the leader faces few consequences from a domestic audience, the question is whether the military
background of a strongman would lead him to favor the initiation of conflict more than a boss. Since a
substantial proportion of bosses must have a predilection for violence in order to survive their ascent to
power and then keep the job, they will be attracted to violent strategies even if they do not have formal
military training. In strongman regimes, the leader‘s military experience is largely redundant given that all
personalist regimes select for highly violent and ambitious leaders. On the margins, we would expect military
strongmen to be more belligerent on average than civilian bosses, though the difference is likely smaller than
between other regime types. In sum, there are reasons to expect that while the effects of personalism and
militarism are additive, there is some redundancy when both attributes are present.
- 23 -

H4: The effects of personalism and militarism are partially redundant. Strongmen are only somewhat more
likely to initiate military conflicts than juntas, and only marginally more likely than bosses.
5. Measuring authoritarian regime type
In order to assess the predictions laid out above, we require data that capture whether the regime is led
by civilians or the military, and to what extent the paramount leader is free of domestic political constraints
at the hands of domestic elites. Previous attempts to measure these concepts, however, suffer from important
shortcomings. For example, Lai and Slater (2006) rely on a combination of the Polity executive constraints
(xconst) variable (Marshall and Jaggers 2002) and the Banks Cross-National Time-Series ―regime type‖
variable, which identifies whether the government is controlled by a civilian or military elite (Banks 2007).35
However, the xconst variable is problematic for measuring political constraints in authoritarian regimes
because it focuses on formal institutional constraints and ―regular‖ limitations on the executive‘s power,
explicitly excluding ―irregular limitations such as the threat or actuality of coups and assassinations‖
(Marshall and Jaggers 2002). This overlooks the possibility that the threat of coups, including both military
coups and ―palace coups‖ at the hands of political elites, is more predictable and credible in some regimes
than others.36
Other scholars have used Geddes‘ (2003) typology, which distinguishes between military, single-party,
and personalist regimes. An advantage of this classification is that it does not rely purely on formal
institutions. However, the Geddes typology does not distinguish between military-backed personalists
(strongmen such as Pinochet or Idi Amin) and party-backed personalists (bosses such as Saddam Hussein or
North Korea under the Kims), so as Lai and Slater point out, we cannot assess whether personalist regimes
are more conflict-prone because they are personalist, led by the military, or both. Moreover, Geddes counts
quite personalistic leaders, such as Stalin and Mao, as single party leaders because of the party institutions
35
Variable S20F7 – ―Type of Regime‖ in the Banks (2007) dataset.
36
In fact, of the four specific examples Lai and Slater provide of ―juntas‖ – Burma, Algeria, Greece (pre-
1974), and Argentina (pre-1983), their own empirical analysis actually counts all four as strongmen because
these regimes score low on formal ―institutional constraints‖ according to the xconst measure.
- 24 -

that undergird the regime. In contrast, the above framework refers to the personal power of the leader,
indicating that we should consider Stalin and Mao to be ―bosses‖ rather than ―machines.‖
A different approach allows me to draw on the strengths of the Geddes‘ data while classifying regimes
according to both personalism and military background. As part of her research, Geddes gathered
information about a large number of domestic political variables for each regime. Three groups of questions
reflect the characteristics of three regime types (personalist, single party, and military); Geddes aggregated
the answers from each group of yes/no questions and assigned her three regime type categories based on
these sub-scores. One attractive feature of the raw data is that many of the variables vary within the regime
over time, unlike the tripartite regime typologies. For example, the raw data allow us to distinguish between
the USSR under Stalin, which I code as a ―boss,‖ and the post-Stalin Soviet Union, which I code as a
―machine.‖ Both of these are coded as single party regimes in the Geddes typology that other scholars have
used, but the raw data indicate that, for example, Stalin chose most of the members of the Politburo and that
the Politburo acted primarily as a rubber stamp, while in the post-Stalin era, neither of these were true.
Because of these advantages, I use the raw Geddes regime type data to both create independent
measures of the two dimensions (personalism and military leadership) and also indicator variables for each of
the four regime types - machine, junta, strongman, and boss. To measure the personalist dimension, I create
an index of eight variables, including whether access to high government office depends on the personal
favor of the leader, whether country specialists viewed the politburo or equivalent as a rubber stamp for the
leader‘s decisions, whether the leader personally controlled the security forces, and five similar questions.37
To measure the military dimension, I use five questions: whether the leader was a current or former high-
ranking military officer,38 whether officers hold cabinet positions not related to the armed forces, whether the
military high command is consulted primarily about security (as opposed to political) matters, whether most
37
The five other questions were: 1) If there is a supporting party, does the leader choose most of the
members of the politburo-equivalent? 2) Was the successor to the first leader, or is the heir apparent, a
member of the same family, clan, tribe, or minority ethnic group as the first leader? 3) Has normal military
hierarchy been seriously disorganized or overturned, or has the leader created new military forces loyal to
him personally? 4) Have dissenting officers or officers from different regions, tribes, religions, or ethnic
groups been murdered, imprisoned, or forced into exile? 5) If the leader is from the military, has the officer
corps been marginalized from most decision making?
38
I use the Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (2010) indicator for the effective leader‘s military background.
- 25 -

members of the cabinet or politburo-equivalent are civilians, and whether the Banks dataset considers the
government to be ―military‖ or ―military-civilian.‖
I first create indices representing the proportion of ―yes‖ answers on each of the questions out of the
total non-missing answers.39 I then create dummy variables for each of the four regime types, using a cutoff
of .5 to classify countries as either personalist or non-personalist, military or civilian, and combining the two
dimensions to create four regime types.40 For example, a country-year is coded as a strongman if it scored
more than .5 on the personalist index and .5 on the military index. Choosing the particular cutoff of .5 does
not affect the substantive results; nor does weighting certain important sub-components of the index more
heavily than others or revising the components of the index in reasonable ways. I also show below that the
results are similar whether one uses the indices, or the categories.41 I provide additional detail on the
construction and distribution of the regime type variables in the web appendix. Later I also describe two
different ways to score democracies on these indices.
Finally, Geddes did not code monarchies, theocracies, or unconsolidated regimes in her research; while
these could in principle be coded according to my measures, I create additional dummy variables to identify
―other‖ non-democracies (regimes that have Polity scores of 5 or lower, but no Geddes regime type data).
Figure 2 summarizes the distribution of machines, bosses, juntas, and strongmen for the 1946-1999 period,
and provides examples of each category.
39
I code the index as ―missing‖ when I have data on fewer than 4 of the sub-questions.
40
For constructing the personalist dummy variable, I used the following rules to deal with missing values. If
there were at least 4 non-missing answers, I counted a country as personalist if it received a ―yes‖ on more
than 50 percent of the questions. In the few cases where 2 or 3 of the questions were answered, I counted a
country as personalist if it scored yes on all of those nonmissing answers, and a country as not personalist if
it scored no on all of those nonmissing answers. Otherwise, I coded non-democratic observations as missing
on the personalist dummy variable. I also experimented with other cutoffs, or basing the cutoffs on a
weighted version of the index, or increasing the threshold for coding an observation as ―missing;‖ such
changes did not affect the substantive results. I coded democracies as non-personalist. I followed similar
procedures for the military dummy variable; additional details are available in the web appendix.
41
For example, Egypt is coded as a strongman under Nasser, when military officers held many cabinet-level
positions, but a boss under Sadat and Mubarak, when the role of the military became more indirect.
- 26 -

6. Empirical analysis: the probability of initiating a military conflict
The discussion above focused on the consequences of a country‘s domestic institutions for the leader‘s
decisions to initiate military force, rather than the interactions of different types of polities. Some scholars
have therefore used a monadic set-up in which the unit of analysis is the country-year (Lai and Slater 2006).
The problem with a country-year setup is that it is difficult to take into account salient factors such as the
balance of military power, alliance relationships, trading relations, and geographic proximity between the
country and potential targets of force; a directed-dyad analysis allows us to control for these factors directly
and so I opt for that approach (Most and Starr 1989, Oneal and Tir 2006).
For the dyadic analyses below, the outcome of interest is whether country A in a directed dyad initiated
military conflict against country B during year t. For data on military conflict, I use Maoz‘s recoded dyadic
version (Maoz 2005) of the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) dataset, which identifies all ―united
historical cases in which the threat, display or use of military force short of war by one member state is
explicitly directed towards the government, official representatives, official forces, property or territory of
another state‖ (Jones, Bremer, and Singer 1996, p. 168). Following the bulk of the literature, I code a
variable initmid that has a value of 1 if a country initiates a MID against the other state in the dyad, i.e. is the
first state to threaten or use military force.
Since the dependent variable is dichotomous, I estimate the models using logistic regression. To
correct for temporal dependence, I follow Beck, Katz, and Tucker (1998) and include cubic splines of the
number of years since the last time State A initiated a MID against that opponent. In addition to cross-section
analyses, I also carry out the analyses with fixed effects in order to correct for the possibility of omitted
variables that are specific to directed dyads (Green, Kim, and Yoon 2001, Schultz 2001). This is analogous
to including a separate intercept for each directed dyad; coefficients in these models are estimated based on
within-directed-dyad variation in dispute initiation.
Control variables
The existing literature suggests a number of control variables that could affect a state‘s decision to
begin military hostilities, including some that could be correlated with domestic political regime.
- 27 -

Capabilities: Many scholars have argued that more powerful states have wider-ranging interests than
minor powers, therefore initiating military force more frequently. I included several different measures of
power, including the raw military capabilities score of each side (cap1 and cap2), the initiator‘s share of the
dyad‘s total capabilities (initshare), and dummy variables marking whether states in the dyad are major
powers: majmaj, majmin, and minmaj; minmin is the reference category.42
Alliances and Geopolitical Interests: Next, I included two measures of alliance similarity, which may
proxy for broader geopolitical interests. First, states that share similar alliances may have fewer competing
interests for reasons that have nothing to do with regime type (Gowa 1999). I therefore include a measure of
the similarity of the two states‘ alliance portfolios (weighted global s-score, s_wt_glo). Second, states that are
more strongly allied with the most powerful state in the system may be more satisfied with the status quo,
reducing their motivation to fight (Schultz 2001). Third, states may be deterred from initiating a MID against
a state that is closely allied with a superpower. I therefore include a weighted measure of the similarity of
each state‘s alliance portfolio with the system leader (s_lead).43
Geographic Contiguity: Another important predictor of international conflict is geographic contiguity.
Geographically close countries are more likely to have disagreements (such as over the precise location of a
border), and it is easier for a county to deploy its military forces against an immediate neighbor. A dummy
variable contig marks whether the two states either share a land border or are separated by less than 24 miles
of water, and a variable logdist measures the logged distance between the capitals of the two countries
(Stinnett et al. 2002).
Trade Dependence: Many scholars have argued that trade interdependence can dampen incentives to
use military force against a trading partner. For the dyadic analyses, I therefore control for trade dependence
in the dyad using data by Gleditsch (2002).44
42
These measures rely on the COW CINC data.
43
Data for these variables came from EUGene. The United States was the system leader in this time period.
44
For each member of the dyad, I measure trade dependence as country A‘s total trade with country B as a
proportion of its GDP, and vice versa. For the analyses reported below, I follow Russett and Oneal (2001)
and Oneal et al (2003) and include the trade dependence of the less-dependent country. The results do not
change if each country‘s trade dependence is entered separately.
- 28 -

Regime Instability: I create a new/unstable regime indicator for whether a country has undergone
substantial domestic institutional change within the past three years, because domestic turmoil could
potentially spill over into a country‘s international relations (Colgan 2010). Including this variable also
mitigates the possibility that military regimes (which tend to be shorter lived) are more belligerent because
they are typically younger than other regime types.45
Side B Regime Type: Finally, I include a variable that measures whether ―Side B‖ in the dyad is a
democracy. This is not to test hypotheses about target regime type per se, but rather to ensure that the results
for democratic Side A states are not due to peaceful clusters of democratic neighbors. In the online appendix,
I also control for the authoritarian regime type of Side B. Importantly, controlling for the regime type of Side
B does not affect the significance of the results for the regime type of Side A.
Results
I start by estimating the models with the regime type dummy variables. While less flexible, these are
more straightforward to interpret than the results using the raw indices; as I show below, the two approaches
produce the same inferences. The analyses below set the base regime type category for Side A as democracy;
we would expect junta, boss, and strongman to have positive and significant coefficients, with strongmen
being the most belligerent of all. Machines should not initiate significantly more conflict that democracies,
according to the arguments.
The results support these predictions. The cross-sectional results are shown in Columns 1 and 2 of
Table 1. I begin by estimating an extremely parsimonious model in which the only control variables other
than regime type are each side‘s raw military capabilities and major power status, both of which affect a
regime‘s ability to project power. In these models, as well as the subsequent model that controls for
additional covariates, the coefficients on junta, boss, and strongman are positive and significant at the .05
level or greater. Machines, in contrast, are not more likely to initiate conflicts than democracies; indeed, in
the cross-sectional model controlling for the full set of covariates, machines are slightly less likely to initiate
conflicts than democracies, though this result does not hold in all of the analyses. Column 2 indicates that
45
This dummy variable receives a value of ―1‖ if the regime has a Polity IV durable score of less than 3.
- 29 -

covariates such as trade interdependence and additional measures of power generally perform as expected
based on the existing literature (full results available in the web appendix).46
Not only are there significant differences between democracies, on the one hand, and juntas, bosses,
and strongmen on the other hand, but there are significant differences among authoritarian regime types as
well. Tests of equality between coefficients indicate that juntas, bosses, and strongmen are all statistically
different from machines. Moreover, there is evidence for H4: strongman is different from junta at the .04
level in Model 1, and at the .05 level in Model 2 (using two-tailed tests). The coefficient on strongman is
larger than the coefficient on boss in both models, though the difference is only significant at the .17 and .23
level using a two-tailed test. Later, I explore the interaction between personalism and militarism in more
detail by exploiting the raw data.
[Table 1 about here]
The results in the more demanding fixed-effects analysis again strongly support the hypothesis that
juntas, bosses, and strongmen are more likely to initiate conflicts than machines, and to a somewhat lesser
extent democracies. Machines, again, are no more belligerent than democracies. The one unexpected result in
the fixed-effects models is that the coefficient on strongman is smaller – though not significantly so – than
the coefficient on either boss or junta, which contradicts H4. One reason is that the fixed-effects analysis
drops all directed dyads in which Side A never initiated conflict, as there is no variation in the dependent
variable within that cross-section. Accordingly, the sample size drops from 901,540 directed dyad-years in
the cross-sectional analysis in Column 1 to 29,051 directed dyad-years in the fixed-effects analysis in
Column 3, and drops some peaceful dyads in which Side A was a boss or junta. Another reason is that the
fixed-effects analysis identifies coefficients based only on within-directed-dyad variation in the predictor
variables; countries only contribute to the regime type parameter estimates when they change their regime
type. The results therefore depend on which countries happened to switch regime type during the sample
period; among the countries that did switch regime type and initiated at least one MID, the strongmen are not
46
The one unanticipated result is that the coefficient on regime instability is negative and significant;
controlling for autocratic regime type, countries that have recently undergone domestic institutional changes
are actually less likely to initiate MIDs. Dropping this variable does not affect the results.
- 30 -

more belligerent than bosses or juntas. Nonetheless, the positive and significant coefficients on the regime
type variables in the fixed-effects analysis enhance our confidence that the effect of regime type is not due to
unmeasured heterogeneity that happens to be correlated with regime type.
Next, I operationalize regime type differently, entering the raw scores on the personalist and military
indices rather than dummy variables. A clear advantage of this approach is that we are not forced to define a
particular cutoff between ―personalist‖ and ―non-personalist‖ or ―military‖ and ―civilian.‖ I enter the indices
in two ways. First, in columns 1 (cross-sectional) and 2 (with fixed effects) of Table 2, the sample only
includes countries where I had enough data to construct the indices for personalism and militarism. This
drops democracies, for which we do not have data on personalism and only limited data on militarism, and
also the autocracies that Geddes did not code. The analysis in the first two columns therefore assesses the
effect of personalism and militarism among autocracies. Columns 3 and 4 show the results when we code all
democracies as ―0‖ on personalism, and code democracies as ―0‖ on all components of the military indicator
other than the leader‘s military background, which is known for democratic leaders through the Cheibub,
Gandhi, and Vreeland (2010) data. For all of the models, I also include an interaction term between
militarism and personalism. This allows us to assess whether the two factors are additive or, as hypothesized,
partially redundant.
[Table 2 about here]
The results are consistent with the hypothesis that personalism and militarism are to some extent
redundant. In order to interpret the interaction effects, we must consider both the constitutive terms and the
interaction term (Brambor, Clark, and Golder 2006). Note that since the indices for personalism and
militarism range from 0 to 1, the coefficient on the interaction term is multiplied by an even smaller number
(for example, if personalism and militarism are each .25, personalism*militarism is .0625). Figure 3 shows
how the marginal effect of a unit change in militarism changes as the level of personalism increases, and vice
versa.47 The effect of a unit change in personalism on conflict initiation is positive and significant, except
when militarism is at its highest values. Similarly, the effect of a unit change in militarism is positive and
47
Both are based on the pooled analysis shown in column 1 of Table 2, which includes only the authoritarian
regimes for which there is detailed regime type data.
- 31 -

significant over the entire range of the personalism index. However, the graph also indicates that the effect of
personalism decreases as militarism increases, and vice versa. If the two dimensions were perfectly additive,
the lines would be flat, indicating that the effect of one dimension does not depend on the value of the other
dimension. In contrast, the negative slopes of the lines indicate some redundancy in personalism and
militarism, supporting H4.
I also carried out an extensive additional set of robustness checks, reported in the online appendix;
none overturned the central regime type findings in the cross-sectional analyses. While the fixed-effects
analyses are slightly less robust, they also hold given most changes.
 Including Side B regime type in the model to ensure that certain regime types were not
disproportionately likely to have neighbors that incited more MIDs.
 Dropping the Warsaw Pact countries (other than the USSR) from the sample
 Restricting the sample only to dyads that are not allied
 Dropping individual countries, such as the USSR, China, Iraq, and the U.S. from the sample,
both individually and in various combinations.
 Estimating models that control for Polity scores and/or dropping ―anocracies‖ (regimes with
Polity scores between -5 and +5) from the sample to ensure that machines are not simply the
―most democratic‖ or participatory of the authoritarians.
 Restricting the sample to only minor powers
 Controlling for region in the cross-sectional analyses
 Controlling for Civil War: Gleditsch, Salehyan, and Schultz (2008) show that states
undergoing civil war are significantly more likely to become involved in international
conflict as well. I therefore include variables civilwara and civilwarb, which mark whether
either Side A or Side B of the dyad was experiencing a civil war in that year.48
Next, what are the substantive effects of these differences in regime type? I used CLARIFY (Tomz,
Wittenberg, and King 2003) to estimate the predicted probability of conflict initiation in a number of
hypothetical scenarios. As an example, Figure 4 shows the predicted probability that a state initiates a MID
when all of the covariates are set to the observed values for Iraq vs. Kuwait in 1990 (based off of Column 2
of Table 1). It indicates that even when controlling for all of the covariates, strongmen, juntas, and bosses are
more than twice as likely to initiate disputes as machines. Democracies and machines, in contrast, have lower
48
This creates a harder test for the hypotheses since civil wars appear more common among juntas, bosses,
and strongmen than among machines or democracies though it is also potentially induces post-treatment bias
if the relationship between regime type and civil war is causal (Fjelde 2010).
- 32 -

rates of dispute initiation; indeed in this specification, the dispute initiation rates of machines are slightly
lower even than those of democracies.
Finally, the findings indicate that existing arguments about variation in the conflict propensity of
dictatorship are not supported by the evidence. First, the expectations of Lai and Slater‘s (2006)
infrastructural-power theory of conflict are not borne out. According to their arguments, bosses should be no
more conflict-prone than machines, since according to their view what matters is not the level of personalism
of the regime, but rather whether the regime has a party infrastructure to provide stability and co-opt dissent.
With the improved measures of autocratic institutions that I present here – including the improved ability to
distinguish juntas from strongmen – their argument is not supported.49
Second, the evidence appears inconsistent with selectorate theory. Previous research assessing the
ability of selectorate theory to explain conflict among autocracies, such as Peceny and Butler 2004, relied on
less accurate measures of autocratic institutions, for example classifying Mao and Stalin as single-party
rather than personalist leaders. Second, the research design made it difficult to gain a picture of overall
patterns of dispute initiation by the initiator‘s regime type. While selectorate theory‘s predictions are usually
dyadic (ie, they take into account the interaction between the regime types of the initiator and target), we
would still expect that averaging across all of the types of dyads, small-coalition regimes should initiate more
conflict than large-coalition regimes.50 Instead, we find that machines – which have small winning coalitions
both in absolute size and relative to the selectorate (w/s)51 – are no more belligerent, and indeed sometimes
less belligerent than, democracies, which have much larger coalitions. Moreover, small-coalition bosses do
not initiate significantly more conflicts than juntas, which should also have a larger w/s.52 Existing
theoretical perspectives, in sum, cannot explain the findings.53
49
Lai and Slater report monadic analyses in which the country-year is the unit of analysis whereas I analyze
directed dyad-years due to the greater measurement precision this allows. I also do not find support for their
hypotheses, however, when I replicate their modeling approach using my data.
50
Indeed, Bueno de Mesquita et. al (2003) suggest this on p. 245.
51
See for example Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003), p. 440.
52
See Peceny and Butler 2004 for a discussion of selectorate size and authoritarian regime type. While
Peceny et. al (2002, 2003, 2004) and Reiter and Stam (2003) operationalized regime type dyadically, my
- 33 -

7. Conclusions
This article raises the possibility that conventional views of the relationship between regime type and
foreign policy, including the argument that democracies are in general more selective about initiating
international conflict than non-democracies,54 are at best incomplete, and at worst wrong. Focusing
myopically on the usual dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism could lead to faulty inferences
about the role of regime type on foreign relations. The combination of better data and theoretical arguments
that draw on recent advances in the study of comparative authoritarianism reveals that there are substantial
differences in the tendency of different types of authoritarian regimes to initiate international conflicts.
The framework introduced here not only helps us understand how authoritarian regimes vary in their
conflict behavior, but also opens new avenues for creative theorizing about how domestic institutions affect
both preferences and constraints, which combine to affect states‘ foreign policy behaviors more generally.
The first task is to be more specific about what kinds of domestic constraints matter; here the question is
whether the leader faces any domestic audience that could punish him for his decisions about international
conflict. I argue that contrary to the conventional wisdom, many authoritarian leaders face powerful domestic
audiences composed of regime elites. Like democratic leaders, many autocracies must therefore be attentive
to the preferences of these domestic constituents – more so than the existing literature suggests.
This, however, leads to a second question: what are the interests and preferences of that domestic
audience in matters of war and peace? I first argue that contra selectorate theory, even small-coalition
audiences such as those in machines have strong incentives to jettison a leader who starts unnecessary or
foolish conflicts. However, audience members‘ background experiences and socialization affect their
findings appear consistent with theirs in that personalist regimes (roughly comparable to my bosses and
strongmen) or military regimes (roughly comparable to my juntas) are more belligerent against some types of
targets than single-party regimes (roughly comparable to my machines) or democracies.
53
Another question is whether these findings are consistent with Weeks (2008), who finds that personalist
regimes are the least able to signal credibly, while non-personalist regimes – including juntas – tend to be no
different from democracies. If the costs of war are lower for strongmen, bosses, and juntas, as I have argued,
then we might expect them to do better in crisis bargaining because it is credible that they will use force. One
possibility is that the extremely low accountability of personalist leaders offsets their greater ―inherent‖
credibility due to their lower costs for war. As for juntas, the combination of lower costs for war and high
accountability would indeed seem to imply a signaling advantage, which was not evident in Weeks 2008‘s
analysis. Future research could attempt to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings.
54
Gelpi and Griesdorf 2002, Reiter and Stam 2002, Schultz 2001.
- 34 -

preferences, and therefore their conclusions about whether the use of force was warranted. Specifically, the
military officers who form the leader‘s constituency in junta regimes tend to view the world more ominously
than their counterparts in civilian-led regimes. They fear the consequences if they do not act aggressively,
and they view the use of force to settle political matters as ―business as usual.‖ This leads them to favor the
initiation of international conflict more frequently than their civilian counterparts in machines.
Finally, in personalist regimes in which the leader has eliminated rivals and consolidated power into
his own hands, conflict initiation depends on the paramount leader‘s whims. Unfortunately, given the
treacherous road to power in a personalist dictatorship, these unconstrained leaders are often precisely the
types of individuals who seek out international conflict and can survive defeat, only to repeat the cycle.
In sum, beyond the central point that differences among authoritarian regimes matter just as much for
explaining international conflict as differences between democracies and dictatorships, this article has three
theoretical implications. First, the article suggests that we cannot simply deduce decisionmakers‘ preferences
by focusing on the presence or absence of ―constraints.‖ Rather, the impact of ―constraints‖ or accountability
depends on the preferences of the audience with the power to impose those constraints.
Second, we should not assume that preferences can be deduced simply from the relative size of the
domestic audience or winning coalition. Rather, this article suggests that scholars should focus more on
understanding the sources of preferences and how different institutional structures make those preferences
salient. For example, my argument suggests that the background experiences of domestic audiences matter
by shaping views about the use of force. This approach of blending measurable features of institutions with
more ―sociological‖ or ―constructivist‖ insights about the sources of foreign policy preferences suggests
productive lines of future research.
Third, the analysis suggests a way to integrate ―first image‖ theories, which focus on the behavior of
individuals, with ―second-image‖ theories about the importance of domestic political institutions. For
example, I argue that the background experiences of individual leaders may be especially important for
understanding behavior when the regime is personalist and the leader faces fewer domestic constraints
(Byman and Pollack 2001). This leads to propositions that can potentially be tested with new data sources
- 35 -

(Horowitz and Stam 2010). Moreover, I argue that the background experiences of audience members are
consequential, suggesting that scholars of all theoretical orientations would do well to understand what
shapes the worldviews and therefore preferences of influential actors in both democratic and authoritarian
regimes.
The findings also suggest policy-relevant lessons for diplomacy with dictatorships, painting different
pictures of the conflict behavior of machines, juntas, and personalists. For example, China‘s civilian, elite-
constrained government has been the quintessential ―machine‖ for at least the last two decades. The evidence
here suggests that although countries like China repress public participation in politics, they tend to be more
cautious than other authoritarian regime types when it comes to international conflict. Like democratic
leaders, machines face domestic audiences that can punish them for costly or foolish decisions. This could be
good news for deterrent strategies, since like democracies, these regimes tend avoid starting fights that they
cannot win. However, this also implies that when machines do resort to military force, their efforts will be
intense as their leaders cannot afford failure.
The implications for juntas are somewhat different. If the arguments laid out here are correct,
policymakers should consider that military leaders in elite-constrained juntas often use force not because
they necessarily desire expansion for its own sake, but because the military officers staffing these
governments are socialized to see military force as ―standard operating procedure,‖ to view powerful
countries as inherently hostile, and to fear the costs of compromise. In order to persuade military dictators
that threats are not imminent, diplomats may need to devise ways to assuage such fears. On the other hand,
sometimes strong shows of force will be necessary to convince military juntas of the high costs of using
force.
Personalistic ―bosses‖ like Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein, as well as ―strongmen‖ like Pinochet, Idi
Amin, and Nasser, have also been especially belligerent, though the reasons are slightly different. One reason
is that personalist regimes tend to select for leaders with extreme international ambitions. And since
personalist leaders are unusually insulated from the consequences of policy failures, they can act on these
preferences and take risky gambles that more constrained leaders would eschew. The findings therefore
- 36 -

suggest that one way to deter personalists is to emphasize conflict may lead to regime change, while peace
will reduce the likelihood of external interference. Given that personalist dictators are typically surrounded
by sycophants who are afraid to communicate unwelcome news, face-to-face meetings may be necessary to
ensure that the message is received by the person who matters most.
Finally, understanding what aspects of authoritarianism are most detrimental to peace could help guide
policymakers towards promoting reform in cases where democratization seems unlikely. For example,
policymakers might make aid conditional on the leader allowing collective, civilian oversight of
appointments and security organs (though they should expect stiff resistance from the leader). Indeed, given
their greater sensitivity to the potential downsides of defeat, even juntas may be more desirable than
personalist dictatorships on national security grounds. Either way, the evidence here suggests that scholars
should pay careful attention to the type of regime most likely to emerge after foreign intervention or regime
change, designing interventions and state-building activities to lower the likelihood that belligerent regimes
emerge from the rubble.
- 37 -

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- 44 -

Table 1: Directed-Dyad Logit Analysis of Dispute Initiation, 1946-199955
(1) (2) (3) (4)

Basic All Basic All
covariates covariates covariates, FE covariates, FE
Machine 0.166 -0.459 -0.049 -0.164
(1.11) (2.64)** (0.28) (0.91)
Junta 0.676 0.515 0.489 0.449
(3.66)** (3.05)** (2.83)** (2.58)**
Boss 0.842 0.649 0.302 0.321
(6.12)** (4.23)** (2.01)* (2.08)*
Strongman 1.073 0.832 0.266 0.287
(6.61)** (6.29)** (1.85)+ (1.94)+
Other Non-Democracies 0.195 0.147 -0.018 0.016
(1.50) (1.12) (0.14) (0.12)
New/Unstable Regime -0.312 0.024
(3.38)** (0.31)
Military Capabilities, 6.638 5.234 -3.230 -3.735
Side A (6.77)** (3.10)** (2.01)* (2.09)*
Military Capabilities, 7.219 6.340 0.573 3.001
Side B (7.33)** (3.78)** (0.38) (1.78)+
Side A's Proportion of 0.517 1.761
Dyadic Capabilities (3.41)** (3.38)**
Lower Trade Dependence -24.794 -2.153
in Dyad (1.93)+ (0.22)
Additional Controls … … … …
Constant -5.045 -3.784
(35.50)** (8.93)**
Observations 901540 766272 29051 27586
+ significant at 10%; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%
55
Democracy is the base category. In addition to the control variables reported in the table, all models
include temporal controls (years since last conflict initiation and cubic splines of that variable) and dummy
variables marking the combination of major/minor power status in the dyad. Column 2 also includes the
following additional variables: Contiguity; Logged Distance between Capitals; Alliance Portfolio Similarity,
and each state‘s Similarity of Alliance Portfolio with the US. Column 4 does not include these variables as
they do not vary substantially over time, making the fixed-effects analysis difficult to estimate. The web
appendix reports the full tables (not omitting any covariates).
- 45 -

Table 2: Directed-Dyad Lgot Analysis of Dispute Initiation, 1946-1999;
Using the Raw Indices56
(1) (2) (3) (4)

Democracies as ―missing‖ on Code democracies as "0" on
the personalism and militarism the personalism index and
indices ―0‖ or ―0.2‖ on the
militarism index
Pooled FE57 Pooled FE
Personalism Index 1.288 0.671 0.774 0.306
(5.72)** (2.54)* (4.50)** (1.55)
Militarism Index 1.460 1.088 0.947 0.299
(6.03)** (2.98)** (5.55)** (1.54)
Personalism*Militarism -1.048 -1.045 -0.420 -0.383
(3.34)** (2.30)* (1.64) (1.08)
New/Unstable Regime 0.035 0.408 -0.087 0.117
(0.31) (3.60)** (0.86) (1.29)
Military Capabilities Side A 12.689 27.046 4.712 -2.960
(2.80)** (0.75) (3.39)** (2.13)*
Side A's Proportion of 0.219 -1.690 0.270 1.034
Dyadic Capabilities (1.06) (2.03)* (1.56) (1.67)+
Lower Trade Dependence in 14.012 -17.570
Dyad (3.19)** (1.39)
Additional Controls … … … …
Constant -4.635 -3.577
(9.98)** (8.49)**
Observations 289441 11851 559849 21599
Number of directed dyads 342 539
Absolute value of z statistics in parentheses
+ significant at 10%; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%
56
In addition to the variables listed in the table, all models include temporal controls (years since last conflict
initiation and cubic splines of that variable) and major power status of the dyad. Models 1 and 3 also include
Contiguity; Logged Distance between Capitals; Side B Democracy; Alliance Portfolio Similarity; and each
state‘s Similarity of Alliance Portfolio with the US. These latter variables are dropped in the fixed-effects
models shown in Columns 2 and 4 as they do not vary significantly over time. The web appendix reports the
full tables (not omitting any covariates).
57
For the fixed-effects analyses, I drop variables that do not vary significantly over time, such as contiguity,
alliance portfolio similarity, and whether the target is a democracy.
- 46 -

Figure 1: Typology of Authoritarian Regimes
Civilian Military
leadership leadership
Non-Personalist Machine Junta

(Elite-Constrained)
Leader
Personalist Boss Strongman

(Unconstrained)
Leader
- 47 -

Figure 2: Examples of Authoritarian Regime Type, 1946-1999
Civilian Leadership Military Leadership

“Machine” “Junta”
717 country-years 410 country-years
China (after Mao) Algeria

Kenya Argentina
Elite- Malaysia Brazil
Constrained Mexico (until 1997) Greece
Leaders Poland Myanmar (after 1988)
Senegal Nigeria
Tanzania Rwanda
USSR (after Stalin) South Korea
(North) Vietnam Thailand
“Boss” “Strongman”
691 country-years 637 country-years
China (Mao) Chile (Pinochet)

Cuba (Castro) Egypt (Nasser)
Egypt (Sadat, Mubarak) Indonesia (Suharto)
Personalistic Indonesia (Sukarno) Iraq (Qasim, al-Bakr)
Leaders Iraq (Saddam) Myanmar (until 1988)
Libya (Qaddafi) Pakistan (Ayub Khan)
North Korea (Kims) Paraguay (Stroessner)
Portugal (Salazar) Somalia (Siad Barre)
Romania (Ceausescu) Spain (Franco)
USSR (Stalin) Uganda (Idi Amin)
- 48 -

Figure 3: The Interaction between Personalism and Militarism58
.004
.004
.003
.003
Marginal effect of militarism
.002
.002
.001
.001
0
0
-.001
-.001
0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1 0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1
Score on militarism index Score on personalism index
Upper 95% c.i. Lower 95% c.i. Upper 95% c.i. Lower 95% c.i.
58
Estimated using the model from Column 1 of Table 2.
- 49 -

Figure 4: Predicted Percent of the Time that Side A Will Initiate Conflict:
Iraq-Kuwait Scenario Varying Iraq’s Hypothetical Regime Type59
12.00
10.62
10.00
8.98
8.59
8.00 8.20
6.92
6.00 6.12 6.19
4.94 5.16
4.00 4.13
3.75
3.48
2.70
2.41
2.00
1.65
0.00
Democracy Machine Junta Boss Strongman
59
Estimates calculated using CLARIFY on Model 2 of Table 1, with control variables set to the values for
the Iraq-Kuwait dyad in 1990.
- 50 -

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Strongmen and Straw Men:

Authoritarian Regimes and the Initiation of International Conflict

the name of international peace.

preferences over the use of force, and therefore, behavior.

is thus a first dimension affecting leaders‘ decisions to initiate military conflict.

audience is therefore a second dimension affecting decisions to start military disputes.

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statesmen confronting autocracies abroad.

2. Existing literature on dictatorships and international conflict

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which depresses their rates of dispute initiation.

under a new leader would not be closely related to w/s.

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legitimacy (p. 117).6

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3. Domestic institutions and international conflict: a theoretical framework

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or risky policies. I adopt this approach below.

audience typically consists of regime insiders.10

failures (however defined), and reward leaders for policy successes.

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than leaders or other elites.

revealing military weakness.

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4. Audiences, preferences, and authoritarian leaders’ initiation of conflict

[Figure 1 about here]

4.1. Domestic audiences: personalist vs. elite-constrained dictators

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opportunity and incentives to oust their leader.

domestic audiences found in non-personalist autocracies. Unlike their counterparts in personalist

incompetent leader, they are likely to survive.

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powerful domestic audience in non-personalist regimes.

democrats, they may fear the possibility of punishment more acutely.

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dictatorships are therefore important.

4.2. The content of constraints: audience and leader preferences

4.2.1. Peaceful machines: elite-constrained dictatorships with civilian audiences

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indirect material costs of fighting than ordinary citizens.

systematically lower than democratic audiences do.

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therefore loom as large in the minds of autocratic audiences as democratic audiences.

that autocrats start more wars.

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induces conservatism in the leaders of these machines.

leaders of machines to initiate conflicts than leaders of democracies.

4.2.2. Militant juntas: elite-constrained dictatorships with military audiences

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policies than civilian officials.

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never less aggressive than civilians.

than counterparts who face a civilian audience.

4.2.3. Personalist dictators: ambitious and unconstrained

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differ from bosses due to their military background.

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