What's Stopping you?
The Sources of Political Constraints on International Conflict behavior in Parliamentary Democracies
Glenn Palmer
Penn State University
Patrick M. Regan
Binghamton University - SUNY
Tamar R. London
Penn State University
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1999 meetings of the Peace Science Society and the Nordic Political Science Association, and the 2000 meeting of the International Studies Association.
Much of the work on the democratic peace treats democracies as a homogenous set. In this paper we focus on the heterogeneity of established parliamentary democracies in terms of the domestic constraints on their conflict behavior. We emphasize the constraints emanating from two aspects of a ruling coalition: 1) its political position, that is, whether a government is “right” or “left”; and 2) its structural complexity. We present a model of the relationship between levels of conflict and the domestic political constraints on the use of force. The model concludes that states that have low political costs associated with the use of force are more likely to become involved in militarized interstate conflict; and that, once involved, states with high costs are more likely to allow their conflicts to escalate. We find that right governments (which face low domestic costs associated with the use of force) are more likely to be involved in militarized disputes, while left governments (which face high costs) are more likely to see the disputes in which they are involved escalate. Our evidence suggests that structural complexity is largely unrelated to the likelihood of either involvement in or escalation of militarized interstate disputes.
Acknowledgements
The paper has benefited from comments we received from Chris Anderson, Scott Bennett, Ian Budge, Dave Clark, Andrew Enterline, Scott Gates, Nils Petter Gleditsch, Matts Hammarstrom, Bill Reed, Ken Schultz, Chris Sprecher, Erik Tillman, and Guy Whitten. Palmer would like to thank the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), and Nils Petter Gleditsch, for their research support. He also thanks Scott Gates and the National Science Foundation, which aided financially through its grant SBR-981009.
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Address all correspondence to : Patrick M. Regan , Center on Democratic Performance (CDP), Department of Political Science, Binghamton University, SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, USA. Tel: (607) 777-2167; Fax: (607) 777-2675; E-mail: pregan@binghamton.edu .