Testing Competing Institutional Explanations of the Democratic Peace: The Case of Dispute Duration

Bruce Bueno De Mesquita, Michael T. Koch and Randolph M. Siverson
Additional contact information
Bruce Bueno De Mesquita: Hoover Institution Stanford University Stanford, California, USA, Department of Politics New York University New York, New York, USA
Michael T. Koch: Department of Political Science University of California Davis, California, USA
Randolph M. Siverson: Department of Political Science University of California Davis, California, USA, rmsiverson@ucdavis.edu

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2004, vol. 21, issue 4, 255-267

Abstract: Drawing upon two alternative versions of the institutional explanation for the democratic peace, we suggest competing hypotheses about the relationship between democratic political institutions and the length of dispute participation. One set of hypotheses originates in the argument that because of the bargaining arrangements internal to democratic states, disputes between democratic states will necessarily be drawn out, so that in the time that it takes to secure the domestic political base for war, diplomats have time to find nonwar solutions. A second set of hypotheses, derived from the selectorate argument about how institutions shape the behavior of leaders who want to remain in power, leads to the expectation that selection effects over which disputes to participate in make disputes between democracies shorter than disputes between pairs of other types of states. Using a Weibull survival model we analyze data on the length of Militarized Interstate Disputes during the period 1816 to 1992; we find clear support for the selectorate explanation. Two ancillary hypotheses from the selectorate argument are also tested and supported by the data.

Keywords: democratic peace; dispute duration; institutions; power disparity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/07388940490882532 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:compsc:v:21:y:2004:i:4:p:255-267

DOI: 10.1080/07388940490882532

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Conflict Management and Peace Science from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().