Assessing military intervention and democratization: Supportive versus oppositional military interventions

Democracy and Security

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 18-37

  Williams, Lethia ^a   Masters, Daniel ^b  

^a APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA WILMINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

Democratization; IMI; Military intervention; Polity

Indexed keywords

EID: 79952414727     PISSN: 17419166     EISSN: 15555860     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/17419166.2011.549049     Document Type: Article

References (65)

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52. It is not possible to positively assert that public statements on democratization truly underlie any military intervention. Other motivations may, and likely do, exist and we cannot dismiss the reality that democratization goals are mere rationalizations or pretexts for the military intervention. However, democratization is a well-established goal for the United States and other major democracies and international organizations. Therefore, this analysis adopts the same rationalization as Meernik to assess if democratization is hindered or helped in cases where democratization is clearly articulated as a goal of the military intervention.
53. Meernik, "United States Military Intervention," 394.
54. In the Polity IVd dataset there are a range of numbers used to represent states in various stages of political transformation including interregnums or anarchy (-77), transition (-88), or outside interventions (-66). Such scores fall well outside the normal -10 to +10 range of the polity scale. For purposes of this study all such codings are treated as missing cases. This step does violate the norms of other studies, where -66 is treated as missing, while -77 is coded as zero on the polity scale, and -88 is transformed into an average of the pre- and postintervention polity score (for examples, see Hermann and Kegley, 'U.S. Use of Military Intervention'; Peceny, 'Forcing Them to be Free'; Pickering and Peceny, 'Forging Democracy at Gunpoint'). The logic for our decision is that -77 represents failed states, which is captured by the MAGFAIL variable, and the transformation of -88 into a pre-/postaverage does not really capture the nature of what is taking place during a transition; the average can actually misrepresent what is taking place in the target state at the time of the transition.
55. Pickering and Peceny, "Forging Democracy at Gunpoint," 544.
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57. James Raymond Vreeland, "The Effect of Political Regime on Civil War: Unpacking Anocracy," Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 3 (2008): 401-425.
58. Treier and Jackman, "Democracy as a Latent Variable," 204.
59. The coding convention adopted here replicates the scheme adopted by Meernik with a couple of caveats. First, the period of observation in the present study is one-year preintervention, one-year postintervention, and five-years postintervention for each target state. Meernik's study observed target states three-years preintervention and three-years postintervention. Second, Meernik's study focused on cases of US intervention. This study incorporates all cases of established democracies and international organizations, providing for a broader and more comprehensive analysis.
60. Meernik, "United States Military Intervention."
61. Pearson and Baumann, International Military Intervention.
62. Pickering and Peceny, "Forging Democracy at Gunpoint," 547.
63. Russett, "Bushwhacking the Democratic Peace."
64. Monty G. Marshall, Ted Robert Gurr, and Barbara Harff, PTIF-State Failure Problem Set: Internal Wars and Failures of Governance, 1955-2008 (College Park: University of Maryland, Center for International Development and Conflict Management [CIDCM], 2008). Available at http://systemicpeace.org/inscr/PITFStateFailureCodebook2008.pdf (accessed April 2008).
65. One concern is that state failure may be an intervening variable related to military intervention. As such, using this variable runs the risk of multicollinearity. However, a Pearson's Correlation Coefficient between military intervention and state failure suggests no correlation (-.0536), making it safe to use the state failure variable as a distinct variable.