Media openness, democracy and militarized interstate disputes

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 23-46

  Choi, Seung Whan ^a   James, Patrick ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846049589     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123407000026     Document Type: Article

References (116)

1. Sebastian Rosato, 'The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory', American Political Science Review, 97 (2003), 585-602.
2. For representative studies, see Harvey Starr, 'Why Don't Democracies Fight One Another? Evaluating the Theory-Findings Feedback Loop', Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 14 (1992), 41-59;
3. Harvey Starr, 'Democracy and Integration: Why Democracies Don't Fight Each Other', Journal of Peace Research, 34 (1997), 153-62;
4. Steve Chan, 'In Search of Democratic Peace: Problems and Promise', Mershon International Studies Review, 41 (1997), 59-91;
5. James Lee Ray, 'Does Democracy Cause Peace?' Annual Review of Political Science, 1 (1998), 27-46;
6. John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, 'The Kantian Peace: The Pacific Benefits of Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885-1992', World Politics, 52 (1999), 1-37;
7. Bruce Russett and John R. Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001);
8. Brandon C. Prins, 'Institutional Instability and the Credibility of Audience Costs: Examining the Impact of Political Participation on Interstate Crisis Bargaining', Journal of Peace Research, 40 (2003), 67-84;
9. Brandon C. Prins, 'Democratic Politics and Dispute Challenges: Examining the Effects of Regime Type on Conflict Reciprocation, 1816-1992', International Journal of Peace Studies, 8 (2003), 61-84;
10. and Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James, 'No Professional Soldiers, No Militarized Interstate Disputes? A New Question for Neo-Kantianism', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 47 (2003), 796-816.
11. A MID is defined as 'a set of interactions between or among states involving threats to use military force, displays of military force, or actual uses of military force' (Charles S. Gochman and Zeev Maoz, 'Military Interstate Disputes, 1816-1976: Procedures, Patterns, and Insights', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 28 (1984), 585-615, p. 587). Although many disputes occur that are not brought on by crises (i.e., there are low-level MIDs), the focus here is on disputes linked to crises. Fatal MIDs are counted for cases with at least one soldier killed per dyad-year. On concept formation and data as related to MIDs and fatal MIDs,
12. see Meredith Reid Sarkees, 'The Correlates of War Data on War: An Update to 1997', Conflict Management and Peace Science, 18 (2000), 123-44.
13. For example, Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976);
14. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3rd edn (New York: The Free Press, 1988);
15. John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War, 8th edn (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2001).
16. James D. Fearon, 'Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes', American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 577-92, at p. 583.
17. See Scott Gates and Brian D. Humes, Games, Information, and Politics: Applying Game Theoretic Models to Political Science (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997). It should be noted that some studies disagree with the idea that war does not occur in full and perfect information environments. Further, although the orthodox rationalist explanation for conflict involves private information with an incentive to misrepresent, Fearon offers two other possible reasons for conflict that may or may not require uncertainty: issue indivisibility and credible commitment
18. (see James D. Fearon, 'Rationalist Explanation for War', International Organization, 49 (1995), 379-414).
19. Along the same lines, Slantchev claims that war is not necessarily ex-post inefficient (Branislav L. Slantchev, 'The Power of Hurt: Costly Conflict with Completely Informed States', American Political Science Review, 97 (2003), 123-33).
20. See Fearon, 'Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes';
21. Alastair Smith, 'International Crises and Domestic Politics', American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 623-38;
22. Kenneth A. Schultz, 'Domestic Opposition and Signaling in International Crises', American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 829-44;
23. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alistair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003).
24. Fearon, 'Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes', p. 587.
25. Fearon, 'Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes', p. 581.
26. Smith, 'International Crises and Domestic Politics', p. 623;
27. Joe Eyerman and Robert A. Hart Jr, 'An Empirical Test of the Audience Cost Proposition: Democracy Speaks Louder Than Words', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 40 (1996), 597-616, p. 599.
28. Smith, 'International Crises and Domestic Politics', p. 623.
29. Fearon, 'Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes'; Smith, 'International Crises and Domestic Politics'; Schultz, 'Domestic Opposition and Signaling in International Crises';
30. Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson and Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival.
31. Fearon, 'Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes', p. 581. The emphasis is ours.
32. It should be noted that Chiozza and Goemans offer some preliminary evidence that leaders do not get punished for failure in foreign policy (Giacomo Chiozza and H. E. Goemans, 'Peace through Insecurity: Tenure and International Conflict', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 47 (2003), 443-67).
33. Doris A. Graber, 'Press Freedom and the General Welfare', Political Science Quarterly, 101 (1986), 257-75, p. 258.
34. See also, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason: Domestic and International Imperatives (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992);
35. Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategy in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
36. Kenneth A. Schultz, 'Do Democratic Institutions Constrain or Inform? Contrasting Two Institutional Perspectives on Democracy and War', International Organization, 53 (1999), 233-66, p. 238.
37. st Century (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 11-26;
38. John Zaller and Dennis Chiu, 'Government's Little Helper: U.S. Press Coverage of Foreign Policy Crises, 1946-1999', in Nacos, Shapiro and Isernia, eds, Decisonmaking in a Glass House, pp. 61-84).
39. Bennett and Paletz's edited volume provides an excellent collection on the debates (W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz, Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994)).
40. Douglas A. Van Belle, 'Press Freedom and the Democratic Peace', Journal of Peace Research, 34 (1997), 405-14, p. 410.
41. See Paul K. Huth and Todd L. Allee, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 2.
42. Shaw, 'Media and Public Sphere without Borders?', p. 30.
43. Natalie La Balme, 'The French and the Use of Force: Public Perceptions and Their Impact on the Policy-Making Process', in Philip Everts and Pierangelo Isernia, eds, Public Opinion and the International Use of Force (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 186-204;
44. Pierangelo Isernia, 'Italian Public Opinion and the International Use of Force', in Everts and Isernia, eds, Public Opinion and the International Use of Force, pp. 86-115;
45. Brigitte L. Nacos, Robert Y. Shapiro and Pierangelo Isernia, 'Old or New Ball Game? Mass Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World', in Nacos, Shapiro and Isernia, eds, Decisonmaking in a Glass House, p. 5.
46. Eyerman and Hart, 'An Empirical Test of the Audience Cost Proposition'; Schultz, 'Do Democratic Institutions Constrain or Inform?' It should be noted that, despite the theoretical reasoning on audience costs, no empirical studies directly test the argument. This is because no direct measure of the existence and magnitude of audience costs is available.
47. Dean V. Babst, 'Elective Governments - A Force for Peace', The Wisconsin Sociologist, 3 (1964), 9-14, p. 10;
48. Babst, 'A Force for Peace', Industrial Research, 14 (1972), 55-8, p. 55.
49. Melvin Small and David J. Singer, 'The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965', Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 1 (1976), 50-69, p. 51;
50. Maurice A. East and Phillip M. Gregg, 'Factors Influencing Cooperation and Conflict in the International System', International Studies Quarterly, 11 (1967), 244-69.
51. Kenneth A. Bollen, 'Issues in the Comparative Measurement of Political Democracy', American Sociological Review, 45 (1980), 370-90.
52. Starr, 'Why Don't Democracies Fight One Another?' Starr, 'Democracy and Integration'.
53. Van Belle, 'Press Freedom and the Democratic Peace';
54. Douglas A. Van Belle and John Oneal, 'Press Freedom and Militarized Disputes', in Douglas A. Van Belle, Press Freedom and Global Politics (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000), pp. 47-75.
55. These two studies should be considered as pioneering works on media and conflict. We attempt to go beyond their seminal contribution in three ways. First, utilizing the deductively derived theory of audience costs, this study further refines the causal mechanism. In doing so, we directly link the democratic features of media openness to what the audience costs literature has yet to explore. Thus we seek to avert the familiar criticism that '[democratic peace] theory building efforts have been too inductive and driven by attempts to develop explanations for already-known empirical findings' (Huth and Allee, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century, p. 5). Secondly, employing multivariate analysis with a more fully specified causal model, our study is the first to explore the impact of media on conflict rigorously. In fact, the results (reported later) that media openness enjoys success along with institutional features of democracy (as measured by the Polity dataset) break new ground in the democratic peace literature. Thirdly, our study reports a comparison of all MIDs and fatal MIDs. Despite burgeoning theoretical and empirical activity, the latter has not yet been fully explored by students of international conflict.
56. See Starr, 'Why Don't Democracies Fight One Another?' Starr, 'Democracy and Integration'.
57. See Ted Robert Gurr, Keith Jaggers and Will H. Moore, Polity II Codebook, 1989;
58. Ted Robert Gurr, Keith Jaggers and Will H. Moore, 'The Transformation of the Western State: The Growth of Democracy, Autocracy, and State Power Since 1800', in Alex Inkeles, ed., On Measuring Democracy: Its Consequences and Concomitants (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991);
59. Kristian S. Gleditsch and Michael D. Ward, 'Double Take: A Reexamination of Democracy and Autocracy in Modern Polities', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41 (1997), 361-83.
60. Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy toward Consolidation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 9.
61. See Gleditsch and Ward, 'Double Take'.
62. Gerardo Munck and Jay Verkuilen, 'Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Indices', Comparative Political Studies, 35 (2002), 5-34, p. 26.
63. T. Clifton Morgan and Sally Howard Campbell, 'Domestic Structure, Decisional Constraints, and War: So Why Kant Democracies Fight?' Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35 (1991), 187-211; Gleditsch and Ward, 'Double Take'.
64. Van Belle's global press freedom data collection relies on the annual International Press Institute (IPI), World Press Freedom Review and survey of historical documents. World Press Freedom Review currently examines the state of the media in over 184 countries, documenting press freedom violations and major media developments all over the world. For more details, see Van Belle, Press Freedom and Global Politics, pp. 137-48; the IPI website in http://www.freemedia.at/.
65. It should be noted that the media openness hypothesis does not adopt the widely used 'weak link' assumption, which requires at least an ordinal level measurement (William J. Dixon, 'Democracy and the Management of International Conflict', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 37 (1993), 42-68;
66. William J. Dixon, 'Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict', American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 14-32).
67. Although it is tempting to treat the media openness variable as a scale, Van Belle notes that 'categorical coding used for this analysis does not produce a five-point interval scale and the degree to which it can be used as an ordinal scale is unclear' (Van Belle, Press Freedom and Global Politics, p. 140).
68. Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace'. Gartzke, in fact, made this observation about even earlier iterations of the Oneal and Russett research design (Erik Gartzke, 'The Logic of the Democratic Peace' (doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 1997) pp. 13 and 51;
69. see also Erik Gartzke, 'Kant We All Just get Along? Opportunity, Willingness, and the Origins of the Democratic Peace', American Journal of Political Science, 42 (1998), 1-27).
70. Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace'.
71. Appendix 1 summarizes the hypotheses, operationalization and data sources. For more details, see Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace'.
72. Two characteristics of the members of this list of variables should be acknowledged: first, the five variables, aside from a loose connection with political realism vis-a-vis capabilities and accessibility for the purposes of violent conflict, lack theoretical integration. Secondly, the presence of the closely related contiguity and distance variables might be questioned on various grounds. Taken together, the two preceding points might produce scepticism about the results obtained later in this study as a function of the possible distorting effects from the control variables. However, use of a technique from Achen, described in fn. 71, effectively addresses such concerns (Christopher H. Achen, 'Toward a New Political Methodology: Microfoundations and ART', in Nelson W. Polsby, ed., Annual Review of Political Science, 5 (2002), 423-50).
73. The data availability on media openness limits the study period from 1950 to 1992, which mostly overlaps with the era following the Second World War. The study period may evoke realist (or other) criticism that mutual security interests between democratic dyads provide a better explanation for conflict as an artefact of Cold War stability. However, the analysis not only concurs with the standard choice in the conflict literature, but also focuses on the most recent decades of world politics for which data are available. This makes sense for at least one other reason as well, introduced by Van Belle in summing up the relevance of his own study for the same period: 'The limited temporal domain of the analysis necessitates caution when generalizing the conclusions to broader time periods. The technical ability of free presses to communicate transnationally is an important factor in looking at conflicts prior to 1948' (Van Belle, 'Press Freedom and the Democratic Peace', p. 412). In other words, the ability to generalize from the results obtained using Van Belle's data would appear to be greater in relation to the period after 1992. Transnational movement of information is trending upwards in terms of both basic ability and economy (for example, electronic exchange of files).
74. Stata Statistical Software (version 8.0) is used for empirical tests.
75. Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace'. The relevance of media openness to escalation across categories of MIDs, which could be tested through an ordered logit model, is a separate question that will not be pursued further here.
76. Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace', p. 21.
77. Starr, 'Why Don't Democracies Fight One Another?' p. 46.
78. Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, 'Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986', American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 624-38.
79. For example, Erik Gartzke, 'Democracy and the Preparation for War: Does Regime Type Affect States' Anticipation of Fatalities?' International Studies Quarterly, 45 (2001), 467-84.
80. See Thomas Risse-Kappen, 'Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign Policy in Liberal Democracies', World Politics, 43 (1991), 479-512.
81. Everts, 'Introduction', in Everts and Isernia, Public Opinion and the International Use of Force, p. 18.
82. Edward N. Luttwak, 'A Post-Heroic Military Policy', Foreign Affairs, 75 (1996), 33-44, p. 36.
83. Everts, 'Introduction', p. 1; see also Philip Everts, Democracy and Military Force (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 158-81.
84. John R. Oneal, Bruce Russett and Michael Berbaum, 'Causes of Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885-1992', International Studies Quarterly, 47 (2003), 371-93.
85. It should be noted that, in opposition to the body-bag syndrome, Feaver and Gelpi argue that the public is not casualty-averse, despite what political and military leaders might believe (Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
86. A caveat is that research on fatal MIDs is not in the spotlight of neo-Kantian or democratic peace research, at least in comparison to the highest level of hostility in dyadic disputes. Oneal, Russett and Berbaum's article appears to be a first, provocative introduction of lethal dispute analysis into the democratic peace literature (Oneal, Russett and Berbaum, 'Causes of Peace'). This relatively recent turn of interest may be because of missing observations; Maoz warns that, 'due to considerable missing information, this [fatality level] variable should be used with a great deal of caution' (Maoz, 'Dyadic Militarized Interstate Disputes (DYMID1.1) Dataset', p. 3).
87. Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace'.
88. Maoz's dyadic MID dataset version 1.1 (updated January 2001) is found at ftp://spirit.tau.ac.il/zeevmaoz/dyadmid.html.
89. Oneal, Russett, and Berbaum, 'Causes of Peace'.
90. Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace'.
91. Van Belle, 'Press Freedom and the Democratic Peace', p. 409.
92. Van Belle, 'Press Freedom and the Democratic Peace', p. 409.
93. Spearman's rho reports a correlation of - 0.0279 between media openness and MID involvement and - 0.0131 between media openness and fatal MIDs.
94. The replicated results for MID involvement, in general, concur with the reported results of Oneal and Russett with respect to direction of signs and statistical significance (see Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace', p. 22). An exception is the economic interdependence variable for all dyads that barely misses statistical significance at the 0.05 level, with p < 0.101. The replicated results for fatal MIDs, however, are at some distance from our expectations. When the dependent variable is fatal MIDs, all of the three neo-Kantian variables, surprisingly enough, turn out to be statistically insignificant. All of the replications can be obtained upon request from the authors.
95. This also follows Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace'.
96. Oneal and Russett, 'The Kantian Peace', p. 22.
97. Van Belle, 'Press Freedom and the Democratic Peace', p. 409. (This result parallels Van Belle's bivariate findings that associate press freedom and (a) interstate wars and (b) uses of force.)
98. Multicollinearity, especially between media openness and institutional democracy, might be suspected as the reason for statistical insignificance of the three neo-Kantian peace variables. The presence of multicollinearity causes greater standard errors which, in turn, encroach on statistical significance tests. We found that inflation of standard error is not a concern. For example, the standard error for institutional democracy in the column showing MID involvement for all dyads in Table 2 is slightly inflated from 0.0163 to 0.0166, while somewhat deflated for economic interdependence from 28.5656 to 22.5118 and slightly inflated for international organizations from 0.0059 to 0.0060. By contrast, the magnitude of each coefficient turns out to be much smaller than before the introduction of media openness into the model (from - 0.0633 to - 0.0153, from - 46.7964 to - 31.5443, and from - 0.0052 to - 0.0017). The statistical significance tests for the three neo-Kantian peace variables fail not because of multicollinearity, but due to their relative magnitude. Given the fact that multicollinearity has nothing to do with deflating coefficient magnitude, these results suggest that muliticollinearity poses no problem.
99. 2 statistic, Variance Inflation Factor (VIF), eigenvalues and condition index (see D. A. Belsley, E. Kuh and R. E. Welsch, Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity (New York: Wiley, 1980);
100. Damodar N. Gujarati, Basic Econometrics, 3rd edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995);
101. SAS/STAT® User's Guide, Version 7-1,1999 (5); Stata Reference Manual Set 2001). The test results are found in Appendices II and III, and none suggests severe multicollinearity.
102. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981);
103. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War.
104. We speculate that, since there are relatively few MIDs between institutional democracies and the fatality threshold we use is very low (i.e., one battle death), the results may be highly sensitive to a few cases in which joint-democratic disputes generated a very small number of fatalities. Thus the results may reflect an operationalization that makes no distinction between the few people who might be killed in a joint-democratic dispute and the hundreds or thousands who might die in a dispute involving either non-democratic states or a mixed dyad. Another possible explanation is that institutional democracies may not be negatively sensitive to fatalities. Although Feaver and Gelpi's survey-based study focuses on the United States alone, it makes a case that 'the belief, widely accepted by policymakers, civilian elites, and military officers, that the U.S. public is especially casualty phobic (meaning that public support for a mission will evaporate at the first sign of casualties) is a myth' (Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles, p. 7).
105. Hubert M. Blalock, Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964).
106. James Lee Ray, 'Explaining Interstate Conflict and War: What Should be Controlled For?' Conflict Management and Peace Science, 20 (2003), 1-31.
107. For more details, see Christopher H. Achen, Interpreting and Using Regression (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1982);
108. Gujarati, Basic Econometrics; Quan Li, 'Does Democracy Promote Transitional Terrorist Incidents?' (unpublished paper prepared for the Conference on the Political Economy of International Terrorism at University of Southern California, 2004).
109. A statistical model with a large number of control variables may have results that are difficult to interpret (or even meaningless), so we follow Achen's 'Rule of Three' and run various combinations of three variables in a model (Achen, 'Toward a New Political Methodology: Microfoundations and ART', pp. 445-7). An additional consideration might even be the potentially confounding role of the control variables (e.g., contiguity, etc.) in relation to other variables in the model. All of the results concur with what we report in Tables 2 and 3 and thereby assuage the preceding concerns. The results can be obtained upon request from the authors.
110. We have also tested the media openness hypothesis with mixed pairs, i.e., one state's media openness scores a 1 or a 2 and the other state's does not. The mixed pairs hypothesis is not supported; results can be obtained upon request from the authors.
111. James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).
112. Martin Shaw, 'Media and Public Sphere without Borders?'
113. Benjamin I. Page, 'Toward General Theories of the Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy', in Nacos, Shapiro and Isernia, eds, Decisonmaking in a Glass House, pp. 85-91;
114. Balme, 'The French and the Use of Force', in Everts and Isernia, eds, Public Opinion and the International Use of Force, pp. 195-200.
115. On media bias, see Bennett and Paletz, Taken by Storm;
116. Doris Graber, 'The Media and Democracy: Beyond Myths and Stereotypes', Annual Review of Political Science, 6 (2003), 139-60.