Sword versus shield: The impact of democracy on rivalry
Item
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Title
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Sword versus shield: The impact of democracy on rivalry
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:2a55fb3386e8:11703
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identifier
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12290
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Creator
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Tan, Bann Seng,
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Contributor
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Peter Liberman
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Political science | International relations | Peace studies | Democratic Peace | Democratization | Ecuador-Peru | Rivalry | Survival Analysis
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Abstract
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The democratic peace deals with pairs of states that are least likely to fight. Rivalry scholarship deals with pairs of states that are most likely to fight. By putting the two phenomena together, one can examine the effects of democratization on the conflict behavior of states. Does democratization exacerbates existing tensions or mollify them? I argue that when a rivalry between a democracy and a non-democracy becomes jointly democratic, the rivalry as a whole deescalates. Since the institutional explanation of the democratic peace, unlike the case for the normative explanation, is power sensitive, I infer that the magnitude of de-escalation itself should be also conditioned by the relative power between the rival states. In so doing, I am in essence, applying the logic of the democratic peace to the domain of enduring rivalry.;I test the theoretical expectations using both statistics and case studies. Using data on conflict behavior from the Correlates of War and on regime characteristics from the Polity project, I conduct two sets of quantitative tests using logistic and survival analysis. I also use the rivalry between Peru and Ecuador over a disputed border from 1979 to 2000 as a case study. I split the rivalry into two time periods based on the direction of dyadic regime change. Overall the evidence supported the theoretical expectation that democratization ameliorates conflict, even within rivalry. Furthermore, I found more support for the institutional explanation compared to the normative alternative.;The research makes three contributions to the literature. First, I identify regime change in rivalry as a domain suitable for a critical test of the democratic peace and conduct one such test. Second, I investigate behavioral change in rivalry rather than just rivalry termination. The field knows that democracy helps to terminates rivalry but lacks a theory of how this comes to be. I provide a first cut at such a theory. Third, I address the cost-benefits analysis of democratization. Contrary to works which asserts that democratization increases the likelihood of war, I demonstrate evidence that democratization does not exacerbate on-going rivalries.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Political Science
