Defense effort and institutional theories of democratic peace and victory why try harder?

Security Studies

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 189-222

  Goldsmith, Benjamin E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34250693035     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410701399432     Document Type: Article

References (168)

1. David A. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War," American Political Science Review 86 no. 1 (1992): 24-37
2. Dan Reiter and Alan C. Stam III, "Democracy, 'War Initiation and Victory," American Political Science Review 92 (1998): 377-89
3. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam III, Democracies at War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)
4. Bruce Russett and John Oneal. Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001)
5. For a dissenting view on the democratic victory proposition, see Michael C. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," International Security 27, no. 2 (2002): 5-47
6. Michael C. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Fair Fights or Food Fights?" International Security 28, no. 1 (2003): 180-94
7. and also rejoinders by Ajin Choi, "The Power of Democratic Cooperation," International Security 28, no. 1 (2003): 142-53
8. David A. Lake, "Fair Fights? Evaluating Theories of Democracy and Victory," International Security 28, no. 1 (2003): 154-67
9. Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, "Identifying the Culprit: Democracy, Dictatorship, and Dispute Initiative," American Political Science Review 97, no. 2 (2003): 333-37
10. and Dan Reiter and Alan Stam, "Understanding Victory: Why Political Institutions Matter," International Security 28, no. 1 (2003): 168-79.
11. I define defense effort simply as the proportion of total resources devoted to the military. For other studies using similar measures of defense effort see Keith Hartley and Todd Sandler, "NATO Burden-Sharing: Past and Future," Journal of Peace Research 36, no. 6 (1999): 665-80
12. and M. Aufrant, "France and Its Allies: A Comparative Study of Defence Spending Trends Since 1985," Defence and Peace Economics 10, no. 1 (1999): 79-102.
13. Liberal theorists point to both institutional (or structural) and normative (or cultural) factors explaining the democratic peace; and see Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, "Normative and Structural Causes of the Democratic Peace," American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 624-38.
14. Desch, "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," 27-28
15. and Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War.
16. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, "An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace," American Political Science Review 93, no. 4 (1999): 791-807
17. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists," 24-37
18. and Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, "The Dilemma of Rising Demands and Insufficient Resources," World Politics 20, no. 4 (1968): 660-93.
19. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation" 791-807
20. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, "Testing Novel Implications from the Selectorate Theory of War," World Politics 56, no. 3 (2004): 363-88
21. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003)
22. and David A. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists."
23. Similar studies are Benjamin O. Fordham and Thomas C. Walker, "i Kantian Liberalism, Regime Type, and Military Resource Allocation: Do Democracies Spend Less?" International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2005): 141-57
24. and Benjamin E. Goldsmith, "Bearing the Defense Burden, 1886-1989: Why Spend More?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 5 (2003): 551-73.
25. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "Testing Novel Implications" examines changes in absolute spending levels, rather than defense burdens.
26. Some related studies are not discussed here. In particular, both Steve Chan, "Democratic Change and Defense Allocation in East Asia," in Frank P. Harvey and Ben D. Mor, eds. Conflict in World Politics: Advances in the Study of Crisis, War, and Peace (London: MacMillan Press, 1998), 272-87
27. and Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, "Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength, and War," International Organization 56, no. 2 (2002): 297-337 suggest that some transitional regimes may have different conflict behavior and defense effort.
28. Michelle R. Garfinkel, "Domestic Politics and International Conflict," American Economic Review 84, no. 5 (1994): 1294-1309 advances an economic logic to explain why democracies bear lower defense burdens, but this has been critiqued.
29. See Goldsmith, "Bearing the Defense Burden."
30. Richard C. Eichenberg and Richard Stoll, "Representing Defense: Democratic Control of the Defense Budget in the United States and Western Europe," Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 4 (2003): 399-422
31. and Bruce Russett, Controlling the Sword: The Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 99-100, present evidence that military spending responds to public opinion in the United States and western Europe, but do not draw conclusions about whether this causes overall levels to be higher or lower than in non-democracies.
32. Sprout and Sprout, "The Dilemma of Rising Demands," 676-77. See also Bruce Russett, What Price Vigilance?: The Burdens of National Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 171, 250, n. 6.
33. Alan C. Lamborn, The Price of Power: Risk and Foreign Policy in Britain, France, and Germany (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 84.
34. Miroslav Nincic and Thomas R. Cusack, "The Political Economy of U.S. Military Spending," Journal of Peace Research 2, no. 16 (1979): 101-15
35. Miroslav Nincic, "U.S. Soviet Policy and the Electoral Connection," World Politics 42, no. 3 (1990): 370-96
36. Kenneth R. Mayer, "Elections, Business Cycles, and the Timing of Defense Contract Awards in the United States," in Alex Mintz, ed., The Political Economy of Military Spending in the United States (London: Routledge, 1992), 28-29
37. Alex Mintz and Michael Ward, "The Political Economy of Military Spending in Israel," American Political Science Review 83, no. 2 (1989): 521-33
38. Alex Mintz and Michael Ward, " Electoral Cycles and Defense Spending in Israel," in Andrew L. Ross, ed., The Political Economy of Defense: Issues and Perspectives (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 135-53
39. and Russett, Controlling the Sword, 28-29.
40. Alan C. Lamborn, The Price of Power, 348. See also Kevin Narizny, "Both Guns and Butter, or Neither: Class Interests in the Political Economy of Rearmament," American Political Science Review 97, no. 2 (2003): 203-20.
41. John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War," International Security 15, no. 1 (1990): 5-56.
42. Jacek Kugler and William Domke, "Comparing the Strength of Nations," Comparative Political Studies 19, no. 1 (1986): 39-69
43. Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945 (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 55-57, 216
44. and see also ibid., 40-41, 53 where Milward notes the U.K.-U.S. strategy to "outproduce the enemy" in World War II. Below I present evidence that this strategy was more effective than Milward may have believed.
45. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War.
46. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation," 791-807
47. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "Testing Novel Implications," 363-88
48. and Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists."
49. Kenneth A. Schultz and Barry R. Weingast, "Limited Governments, Powerful States," in Randolph M. Siverson, ed., Strategic Politicians, Institutions, and Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 16-17.
50. See also Kenneth A. Schultz and Barry R. Weingast, "The Democratic Advantage: Institutional Foundations of Financial Power in International Competition," International Organization 57, no. 1 (2003): 3-42.
51. Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 218-19.
52. Lamborn, The Price of Power, cited in Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation." I have found no studies arguing that democratic regimes systematically exert less defense effort when at war.
53. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).
54. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (London: Mercury Books, 1966).
55. John Braithwaite, "Institutionalizing Distrust, Enculturating Trust," in Valerie Braithwaite and Margaret Levi, eds. Trust and Governance (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998): 343-75
56. Harry Eckstein and Ted Robert Gurr, Patterns of Authority: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1975)
57. and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
58. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "Testing Novel Implications," 384.
59. Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival, 254-55.
60. See also Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation." They present a somewhat different argument in their 2004 paper, arguing that military spending will increase only after the first year of war and that democracies will demobilize more slowly after the end of a war. But their new theoretical arguments are based on the same formal model presented in previous work, and arrive at predictions by including political competition with "a rival's coalition" within the selectorate in what seems an ad hoc way.
61. See ibid., 364. 24 Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation,"792.
62. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation," 797.
63. Atsushi Ishida, "Electoral Incentives and the Political Economy of National Defense Spending Decisions," in Randolph M. Siverson, ed., Strategic Politicians, Institutions, and Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 169-91.
64. Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, "Blind Retrospection: Electoral Responses to Drought, Flu, and Shark Attacks," (typescript, Princeton University, 2004).
65. Michael Colaresci, "Aftershocks: Postwar Leadership Survival, Rivalry, and Regime Dynamics," International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2004): 713-27.
66. See also Achen and Bartels, "Blind Retrospection."
67. James Madison cited in Russell Hardin, "Trust in Government," in Valerie Braithwaite and Margaret Levi, eds. Trust and Governance (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998), 9-27, 20.
68. For example, Lisa L. Martin, Democratic Commitments: Legislatures and International Cooperation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
69. Russell Hardin, "Trust in Government," in Braithwaite and Levi, eds. Trust and Governance (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998), 9-27
70. and Levi, "A State of Trust." 33 Martin Daunton, "Trusting Leviathan: British Fiscal Administration from the Napoleonic Wars to the Second World War," in Braithwaite and Levi, eds. Trust and Governance (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998), 102-34
71. Schultz and Weingast, "Limited Governments, Powerful States"
72. and Schultz and Weingast, "The Democratic Advantage."
73. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists," 30.
74. Ibid., 30. Lake's model also relies on expectations about wealth, democratic alliances, and liberal imperialism, but these are not directly relevant to my argument. Assumptions that democracies are wealthier and that they ally with each other have been challenged by subsequent research. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, chap. 4, present evidence against the contention that democracies tend to ally with each other, and also against the claim that democracies are wealthier or have larger economies. See ibid., chap. 5, 116-17.
75. Other studies argue that democracy and development are correlated because development is a cause of democracy (for example, Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
76. and see also Lake, "Fair Fights?" For empirical studies arguing that democracies do tend to ally with each other (at least after 1945), see Choi, "The Power of Democratic Cooperation;"
77. Kurt T. Gaubatz, "Democratic States and Commitment in International Relations," International Organization 50, no. 1 (1996): 109-39
78. Douglas M. Gibler and Meredith Reed Sarkees, "Measuring Alliances: The Correlates of War Formal Interstate Alliance Dataset, 1816-2000," Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 2 (2004): 211-22
79. Brian Lai and Dan Reiter, "Democracy, Political Similarity, and International Alliances, 1816-1992," Journal of Conflict Resolution 44, no. 2 (2000): 203-27
80. Brett Leeds, Jeffrey Ritter, Sara Mitchell, and Andrew Long, "Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions, 1815-1944," International Interactions 28, no. 3 (2002): 237-60
81. Michael W. Simon and Eric Gartzke, "Political System Similarity and the Choice of Allies: Do Democracies Flock Together, or Do Opposites Attract?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 4 (1996): 617-35.
82. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation," 792, claim that the "institutional-constraints" model of the democratic peace logically implies only that democracies are more pacific in general, rather than explaining the fact that democracies tend not to fight each other. But Lake, "Powerful Pacifists," 24, model clearly supports the dyadic democratic peace effect because democracies are less rent-seeking and thus less imperialistic than other regime types: "in their relations with each other, where the absence of imperialist bias is manifest, the relative pacifism of democracies appears." Lake, "Powerful Pacifists," 29-30
83. also recognizes the historical existence of liberal imperial states, and incorporates this into his model, contrary to the claims of Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation," 792, 801.
84. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation," 793.
85. Kenneth A. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 84.
86. Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, "The Dilemma of Rising Demands," 660-93.
87. Achen and Bartels, "Blind Retrospection."
88. Sprout and Sprout, "The Dilemma of Rising Demands," 677.
89. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, 119.
90. On data quality see 137, 299 note 22. 42 See Fordham and Walker, "Kantian Liberalism," 145-46 for details of their GDP indicator which includes data from the widely used dataset compiled by Kristian Gleditsch and pre-1950 estimated values based on components of the COW CINC capabilities data. In addition, similar results were obtained using GDP data for 1885-87 from Goldsmith, "Bearing the Defense Burden," which uses data from Mark Harrison, "The Economics of World War II: An Overview," in Mark Harrison, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),1-42
91. Brian Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: 1750-1993, [all regions] 3rd ed. (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1998)
92. Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace, and World Development Indicators, CD-ROM (World Bank Publications: 2002). As far as I am aware, Mitchell's compilation is the only other source of (actual, non-estimated) GDP time-series data covering all countries for long time periods pre-1950, so the fact that Fordham and Walker's indicator produces similar results enhances confidence in it. The Goldsmith and Fordham and Walker indicators use different base years to adjust for inflation. The correlation for GDP indicators is .827 after 1949, but a modest .570 for 1886-1949. However, when the defense burden ratio indicator is created, eliminating distortions of currency conversion and inflation adjustment, the correlations are quite high: .937 for 1950-1987, and .912 for 1886-1949. This is especially important because is of course the dependent variable in the present study.
93. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "Testing Novel Implications."
94. Christopher H. Achen, "Why Lagged Dependent Variables Can Suppress the Explanatory Power of Other Independent Variables," (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association, UCLA, 2000)
95. and Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan N. Katz, "What To Do and Not To Do with Time-Series Cross-Section Data," American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995): 634-47.
96. Fordham and Walker, "Kantian Liberalism." Goldsmith, "Bearing the Defense Burden."
97. Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism
98. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, 139-42. Russett, What Price Vigilance? 2.
99. Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Correlates of War Project: Data Sets, 1977. http://www.umich.edu/~cowproj/dataset.html#States (accessed 2002-2003). Lake, "Powerful Pacifists," 31 notes that data on military expenditures may be unreliable because autocracies may inflate their military spending data. This would bias the data against my major finding that democracies bear higher defense burdens during war, however, so is not a problem for my central argument. It is a problem for the argument that democracies bear lower defense burdens during peace.
100. But on such data issues see James H. Lebovic, "Consider the Source: Organizational Bias in Estimates of Foreign Military Spending," International Studies Quarterly 42 (1998): 161-74.
101. Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Polity IV Project: Data Users Manual (College Park: Polity IV Project, University of Maryland, 2000). The "Polity2" variable is used. See http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity/index.htm.
102. The results are very similar substantively and statistically if a categorical indicator for democracy is used.
103. Kristian S. Gleditsch and Michael D. Ward, "Double Take: A Reexamination of Democracy and Autocracy in Modern Polities," Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, no. 3 (1997): 361-83 argue that the overall Polity indicator is biased towards the executive constraints component. They suggest that "an analysis of the constituent authority patterns is likely to be fruitful for the democratic peace and democratization literature." See ibid., 361.
104. Marshall and Jaggers, Polity IV Project, 21.
105. Dan Reiter and Erik R. Tillman, "Public, Legislative, and Executive Constraints on the Democratic Initiation of Conflict," Journal of Politics 64, no. 3 (2002): 810-26.
106. Various measures of regime type are discussed by Gerardo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, "Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Indices," Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 1 (2002): 5-34.
107. Geraldo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, "Generating Better Data: A Response to Discussants," Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 1 (2002): 52-57.
108. Tatu Vanhanen, A Dataset on Measures of Democratization, 1999. http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/data/vanhanen/pdf/ (accessed on 28 December 2004).
109. Marshall and Jaggers, Polity IV Project, 17-20.
110. Ibid., 17-20.
111. Ibid., 20.
112. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation," 793.
113. Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival, 51-55, 134- 35. The W index is constructed using both Polity IV and Arthur Banks's indicators. While they argue that "a large selectorate and a large coalition do not in themselves define democracy" (72, italics removed), the measure does consider whether a regime is dominated by the military and whether there is competition among political groupings, as well as two aspects of executive recruitment as measured by the Polity project. As such, their measure may conflate different aspects of democracy more than the Polity executive recruitment index does. The data are found at http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/data/bdm2s2/Logic.htm.
114. Lake, "Powerful Pacifists," 26.
115. Schultz and Weingast, "The Democratic Advantage," 14.
116. Marshall and Jaggers, Polity IV Project, 22-25.
117. Sprout and Sprout, "The Dilemma of Rising Demands," 678, 681.
118. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, 236.
119. Faten Ghosn and Glenn Palmer, "Codebook for the Militarized Interstate Dispute Data, Version 3.0," 2003. http://cow2.la.psu.edu. (accessed 29 May 2003).
120. I thank the anonymous reviewers for suggesting closer attention to these important issues.
121. Fordham and Walker, "Kantian Liberalism" and Goldsmith, "Bearing the Defense Burden."
122. Correlates of War Project (COW), "National Material Capabilities Data Documentation," Version 3.0 (May 2005). http://www.correlatesofwar.org/COW2%20Data/Capabilities/nmc3-02.htm, 17.
123. There is no indication that change in defense burden is related to war in simultaneous equations using 2-stage probit least squares. Omar M.G. Keshk, "CDSIMEQ: A Program to Implement Two-Stage Probit Least Squares," Stata Journal 3, no. 2 (2003): 157-67. Models using equation 1) War (instrumental variable), GDP per capita, Growth, Regime type (or components), Civil war and lagged Defense burden as predictors of Defense burden and equation 2) Defense burden(instrumental variable), Allies' capabilities, Rivals' capabilities, and lagged War as predictors of War yielded highly significant positive effects of War instrumental variables on Defense burden (p = .000) and consistently insignificant effects of Defense burden instrumental variables on War (p = .748 [regime type]; p = .667 [components]). Interestingly, there is evidence for simultaneity between War and the Human defense burden, with the instrumental variable having a positive effect on War (p = .018 [regime type]; p = .039 [components]) for the same independent variables as above. But the key results are not affected. In the simultaneous model the effect of executive recruitment on the Human defense burden is negative (p = .058), the effect of executive constraints is positive (p = .020), and that of political competition is negative (p = .000), just as in Models 7 and 8, Table 3. Further, introducing lags for all variables (and necessarily dropping 1-year wars, interaction terms with 1-year wars, and demobilization), yields the same patterns of sign and significance for the components and their interaction with war for Models 7 and 8, with the single exception that the interaction of executive recruitment and war produces a significant negative effect on the human defense burden for the equivalent of Model 7 (consistent with H3).
124. Although regional controls are not always included in studies of military spending or conflict, the high degree of regional variation in defense effort not accounted for by controls included in standard models has been noted (for example, Alberto Ades and Hak B. Chua, "Thy Neighbor's Curse: Regional Instability and Economic Growth," Journal of Economic Growth 2 (1997): 279-304). Theoretically, these can be seen as proxies for arms racing and security dilemma dynamics.
125. See Goldsmith, "Bearing the Defense Burden." Models using country-level fixed effects yield similar results.
126. These measures use rivals identified by William R. Thompson, "Identifying Rivals and Rivalries in International Politics," International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 4 (2001): 557-86, allies identified as having mutual defense pacts by COW and total COW CINC values for capabilities. Capabilities of allies and rivals might be seen as more important controls when the dependent variable is absolute military expenditures, rather than the ratio defense effort used here. However, there is still a strong logical argument that variation in allies' and rivals' capabilities will affect defense effort. The consistent and significant results in Tables 3 and 4 support this.
127. James L. Ray, "Explaining Interstate Conflict and War: What Should Be Controlled For?" Conflict Management and Peace Science 20, no. 2 (2003): 1-31.
128. When all controls, except those for the lagged dependent variable (where appropriate) and those associated with conflict (interstate war, MID 2 to 4, 1-year war, and civil war) are removed, there are few differences in the directions of the regime-type effects for the equivalent of the models in Tables 3, 4 and A. Most importantly, the effects of political competition on defense effort remain significant and in the predicted directions in 16 of 24 coefficients. Of the insignificant effects, 6 are also in the predicted directions, while only 2 switch signs, both in the equivalent of Model 8 for the human defense burden with no lagged dependent variable. The insignificant effects all occur in models for the human dense burden or using the Vanhanen indicators as in Table A. For the two other components of democracy, the results are also similar to those with control variables. Measures for participation reach significance in 16 of 24 coefficients, with 8 significantly negative in their effects on defense effort during war and only one significantly positive (for the human defense burden in the equivalent of Model 8). There are 4 significant positive coefficients during peacetime and 3 significant negative coefficients. Insignificant coefficients for participation are similarly inconsistent. Of the 17 significant coefficients for executive constraints, 8 show a positive effect during peace and 6 a positive effect during war. The 3 negative effects are either in the models using Vanhanen indicators for the other components or for the effect on the human defense burden during war (again in the equivalent of Model 8). Of the 7 insignificant effects, 5 are of positive sign. Overall, these robustness checks support the interpretation of the models including control variables, and further weaken the institutional-participation and winning-coalition hypotheses. The control variables are included because the models are more theoretically grounded, and less susceptible to omitted variable bias.
129. Nathaniel Beck, "Time-Series-Cross-Section Data: What Have We Learned in the Past Few Years?" Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 271-93
130. and Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan N. Katz, "What To Do and Not To Do with Time-Series Cross-Section Data," American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995): 634-47.
131. Achen, "Why Lagged Dependent Variables." But see Beck and Katz, "Time-Series-Cross-Section Issues."
132. Thomas Brambor, William Roberts Clark, and Matt Golder, 2005. "Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses," Political Analysis Advanced Access. http://pan.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/mpi014v2
133. Bear F. Braumoeller, "Hypothesis Testing and Multiplicative Interaction Terms," International Organization 58, no. 4 (2004): 807-20
134. and Robert J. Freidrich, "In Defense of Multiplicative Terms in Multiple Regression," American Journal of Political Science 26, no. 4 (1982):797-833.
135. The correlation for W and executive recruitment is .7985, but these are not included together in any model.
136. Although the mean VIF for the models ranges between 4.5 and 6.4, some variables do reach VIF values between 10 and 15.2 (a VIF of 10 or higher usually indicates potential collinearity problems). But collinearity does not distort the results regarding regime type and war for either the defense burden or the human defense burden. To establish this I ran models including only the regime type components, interstate war, and civil war, as well as interaction terms for the components and interstate war, and the lagged dependent variable where appropriate, as in Table 3. The interaction terms for the component variables and war regressed on the defense burden have VIF values ranging from 1.07 to 9.32. When the human defense burden is the dependent variable, the range is 1.07 to 9.15. There are only minor differences in sign and significance levels for the key variables relative to the results for the full models in Table 3. Most importantly, political competition remains negative and significant for the reduced versions of models 5-7, while the interaction term with war remains positive and significant for these models. The effects for the reduced version of model 8 are both negative but insignificant. The effect of executive recruitment and it's interaction term with war are negative and significant for the reduced versions of models 5 and 6; the effect of executive constraints and it's interaction term with war are positive and significant for the same models. Thus these results are perfectly consistent with H3-H5 for the defense burden. Results for the human defense burden are less consistent. Executive constraint is significantly positive for the reduced version of model 7 while executive recruitment is significantly negative and it's interaction term with war is significantly positive for the reduced version of model 8. A discussion of VIFs can be found in Xiao Chen, Philip B. Ender, Michael Mitchell and Christine Wells, Regression With Stata. http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/webbooks/reg/ default.htm accessed on 23 December 2004. 80 Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "An Institutional Explanation," 798 also note that their theory may not apply to wars with very low or very high salience. In such cases they expect all leaders to exert very minimal or very extensive effort to win, respectively. This qualification may limit the applicability of the hypothesis, but it should apply equally to all hypotheses about the connection between regime type and defense effort. Therefore it does not bias the results presented here. Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, "Testing Novel Implications," do not allow for this concern in their own tests, either.
137. For example, Reiter and Stam, "Democracy, War Initiation."
138. For example, Stanlislaw Andrzejewski, Military Organization and Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954).
139. Given the coefficient of about .93 for either measure of lagged defense effort, the issue of a unit root arises. Testing for unit roots in time-series cross-section data is not straightforward and there is no overall test for such data as far as I am aware. Using a test which can be run for each time series in a data set by a program written by Christopher F. Baum, "KPSS: Stata Module to Compute Kwiatkowski-Phillips- Schmidt-Shin Test for Stationarity," Statistical Software Components S410401, (Boston College Department of Economics: 2000, revised 25 Jun 2006) http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html. I find on balance that unit root problems do not dominate the data. One problem is that much of the time-series contain some gaps, which make the tests impossible to run for these series in full. Across the entire time span of the data, there are 99 time-series which do not contain gaps. Of these, the KPSS test rejected the null hypothesis of stationarity in 34 instances at the 95 percent level. In other words, around 66 percent of the time-series show no significant unit root problems, while the remainder do. Similarly, for the period 1970-1997, of 142 time-series without gaps, 49 rejected the null hypothesis of stationarity, indicating that 34.5 percent of the time series show evidence of unit root problems at the 95 percent level, while 65.5 percent do not. Models run as in Tables 2 and 3 for the defense burden using only series without gaps and free of unit-root problems at the 95 percent level produced very similar results to those presented in the tables, with some reduction in significance.
140. 2 statistics are less than .179.
141. Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, 119-20. They also find a significant negative effect for democracy overall on the human defense burden, but an insignificant negative effect during war.
142. Since these are linear effects the values of other variables (median, mean, etc.) do not affect the result.
143. The similar magnitudes for regime-type effects on the defense burden and the human defense burden support the findings of Erik Gartzke, "Democracy and the Preparation for War: Does Regime Type Affect States' Anticipation of Casualties?" International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2001): 467-84.
144. See also Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
145. Fordham and Walker, "Kantian Liberalism;" Garfinkel, "Domestic Politics and International Con-flict;" and Goldsmith, "Bearing the Defense Burden."
146. Reiter and Stam, Democracies At War.
147. Sprout and Sprout, "The Dilemma of Rising Expectations."
148. But see Schultz, "Do Democratic Institutions," and
149. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy.
150. Sebastian Rosato, "The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory," American Political Science Review 97, no. 4 (2003): 585-602
151. Dina A. Zinnes, "Constructing Political Logic: The Democratic Peace Puzzle," Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 3 (2004): 430-54.
152. Lars-Erik Cederman and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, "Conquest and Regime Change: An Evolutionary Model of the Spread of Democracy and Peace," International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2004): 603-29.
153. For example see, Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future" and Desch, "Democracy and Victory." Desch's argument is that regime type is not "the most important factor" in determining war outcomes, and thus is probabilistic and qualified. However, I do note that when the three states which are suspected of skewing democratic victory studies, the United States, Israel, and Britain (see Desch, "Democracy and Victory," 187) are dropped from my data, my results remain virtually unchanged. Direct connections to victory in war must await further investigation, but it cannot be said that my results suffer from excessive influence of these three prominent cases. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this potential problem.
154. Testing the difference of defense burden means between democracies and non-democracies for the states listed, for World War I: T = 1.38, 88 d.f., p =.09; for World War II: T = 4.53, 27 d.f., p = .00. Newly estimated military spending data from Harrison (1998) tell the same story. Defense burdens during the war were: Germany (47.5), Britain (31.2), U.S.A. (29.6), U.S.S.R. (15.0), Italy (3.0) [as calculated by Goldsmith, "Bearing the Defense Burden".
155. Rosato, "The Flawed Logic."
156. Sprout and Sprout, "The Dilemma of Rising Expectations."
157. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, "Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength, and War," International Organization 56, no. 2 (2002): 297-337
158. Martin, Democratic Commitments
159. and Helen V. Milner, Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
160. Mark Peceny and Caroline C. Beer, "Peaceful Parties and Puzzling Personalists," American Political Science Review 97, no. 2 (2003): 339-42
161. Reiter and Stam "Identifying the Culprit;"
162. Reiter and Tillman "Public, Legislative, and Executive;"
163. Schultz "Do Democratic Institutions;"
164. and Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy.
165. Munck and Verkuilen, "Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy;"
166. and Vanhanen, A Dataset on Measures of Democratization.
167. Vanhanen, A Dataset on Measures of Democratization, 6.
168. It is consistent with Bueno de Mesquita et al., "An Institutional Explanation," and The Logic of Political Survival, but not with "Testing Novel Implications."