Democracy and the Management of International Conflict

William J. Dixon
Additional contact information
William J. Dixon: University of Arizona

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1993, vol. 37, issue 1, 42-68

Abstract: The research reported here extends investigation of the democracy-war hypothesis by focusing on the norms of dispute resolution integral to the democratic process. If we extend these norms to the international arena, then it becomes reasonable to expect democratic states to adopt compromise solutions to international problems. One implication of this logic is that democracies are likely to be more amenable than others to efforts of third parties to resolve or ameliorate interstate disputes. This hypothesis is examined in the present study. A sample of strictly interstate disputes acquired from the Alker-Sherman disaggregated conflict set provide the basis for this inquiry. Democracy is assessed for each disputant party with the composite index from the Polity II data collection. In order to control for extraneous effects on the probability of management, the author develops a baseline model consisting of prior management activity, the costs of conflict, and the power of the disputants. Because the dependent variable in this analysis is a binary indicator, the author employs probit regression to estimate the effects of democracy while partialling out the controls. The empirical results show that democracy does carry the systematic positive influence on the probability of conflict management expected of it.

Date: 1993
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002793037001002 (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:jocore:v:37:y:1993:i:1:p:42-68

DOI: 10.1177/0022002793037001002

Access Statistics for this article

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