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Democratic Leaders (democratic + leader)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Democratic Leaders and the Democratic Peace: The Operational Codes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2006
MARK SCHAFER
Do the beliefs of leaders make a significant difference in determining if democracies are peaceful and explaining why democracies (almost) never fight one another? Our comparisons of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton reveal that both leaders view democracies as more friendly than nondemocracies, and they have significantly less cooperative beliefs toward the latter than toward the former, a difference that extends to the behavior of their respective governments during the Kosovo conflict. We also find that individual differences in the operational codes of the two leaders matter in the management of conflict with nondemocracies; the leaders exhibit opposite leadership styles and behavior associated with the domestic political culture of the two states. Overall, these results support the dyadic version of the democratic peace and suggest that the conflict behavior of democratic states depends upon the beliefs and calculations of their leaders in dealing with nondemocracies. [source]

Political Institutions and Constrained Response to Economic Sanctions

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 3 2008
Susan Hannah Allen
Institutional constraints within the target state not only influence a leader's ability to resist economic sanctions, but they also affect the decision-making process within the target state and the nature of information that a sender can ascertain about likely response. Autocratic leaders, who are less constrained, send noisier signals about their probable behavior. This lack of constraint also allows more freedom to resist sanctions, as they can shunt the costs of sanctions off onto the general public, who have little influence over policy outcomes or leadership retention. Democratic leaders are more constrained and more susceptible to sanctions pressure. As result, there is less uncertainty for senders about probable response. Using a heteroskedastic probit model to explore potential systematic components of the variation surrounding sanctions response, the impact of sanctions is shown to differ by regime type,both in the response to coercion as well as in the variance surrounding that response. The results presented here suggest that as expected, democracies are more susceptible to sanctions pressure, but the response of mixed and authoritarian systems are more difficult to predict. These findings have implications for the design of future sanctions policy as well as suggesting which states make the best targets for economic coercion. [source]

Does the Diversionary Use of Force Threaten the Democratic Peace?

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2006
Assessing the Effect of Economic Growth on Interstate Conflict
A democratic leader, anticipating a "rally ,round the flag effect," may have an incentive to divert attention from domestic economic problems by becoming involved in military conflict abroad, undermining Immanuel Kant's prescription for "perpetual peace." We assess the risk to the democratic peace by evaluating this diversionary incentive within a general dyadic model of interstate conflict, 1921,2001, using both directed and nondirected analyses. Our results indicate that economic conditions do affect the likelihood that a democracy, but not an autocracy, will initiate a fatal militarized dispute, even against another democracy. Economic growth rates sufficiently low to negate the democratic peace are, however, rare; and the behavior of five powerful democracies raises further doubts about the importance of diversions. We find no significant evidence that a bad economy makes a democratic state less likely to be targeted by others, nor does the timing of legislative elections influence the decision of democratic leaders to use force. Although economic conditions affect the likelihood of a fatal dispute for democracies, the influence is sufficiently small that Kant's hope for a more peaceful world does not seem misplaced. [source]