Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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While the focus of my theory is not on how regime type affects private information, commitment problems, or indivisible issues, my argument dovetails well with the bargaining model in its attention to the size of the bargaining range between two countries. While the book does not delve into Wilhemine Germany, Downes’s description suggests that the leadership of this period might, like Japan, be coded as a junta because of the domestic power of the military. This is a different line of argument to link the Falklands War to the survival of Galtieri, in office and beyond, than the standard fear of a popular revolt.

I am grateful that four extraordinary scholars—Daniel Reiter, Alexander Downes, Hein Goemans, and Alexander Weisiger took the time to provide such detailed and thought-provoking comments.Downes’s commentary raises an important question about the theory, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify how I conceptualized and coded regime type. For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. On the one hand, the potential for removal at the hands of civilian elites for failed foreign adventures induces caution in the leaders of Machines. A final example of a case that fits uneasily into Weeks’s typology is Egypt at the time of the Six-Day War.

In this cogent analysis of the important variation among autocratic regimes when it comes to decisions about war and peace, Jessica L. The book moves nicely through the theoretical arguments for why different kinds of non-democratic regimes may behave differently with respect to their relations with their neighbors. When civilians share power with the military—that is, when the military can threaten the tenure of the leader directly or indirectly (in Weeks’s terms, the military constitutes an audience)—and the two sides have strongly divergent preferences, then strategic assessment will be very bad. However, Downes raises an important issue that I do not address in the book: whether “civilian-led-juntas” like Japan are different from “pure” juntas like Argentina in the 1970s. Downes then points to Imperial Japan and Wilhemine Germany as examples of regimes that he thinks should be considered machines according to my typology, but which behave more like juntas because civilian elites shared power with, and often could not control, the military.Weisiger challenges some of the books’ findings related to military junta regimes, notes that several dictatorships (such as Persian Gulf monarchies) do not easily fit Weeks’ regime categories, and suggests the possibility that variables outside the theory, such as Communist ideology, might account for the observed findings. First, in the theory, all the variation that potentially drives variation in the use of force is between regime types; there are no time-varying factors or variables. The statistical analysis is thorough and sophisticated, yet simultaneously presented in a way that ensures that the reader can clearly assess the implications of important decisions about variable coding and statistical specification. Downes suggests that power-sharing between civilians and the military could introduce unique pathologies into the decisionmaking process.

To assess the explanatory power of the time-invariant regime-type specific factors requires an evaluation of the counterfactual behavior of the other potential regime types. Still other leaders face few constraints, and it is their own preferences and predilections that matter. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. To examine war outcome, she extends her dataset back through the interwar period, again finding that Machines are comparable to democracies in their success in war, that Juntas are slightly less successful, and that personalists are particularly unsuccessful. S. foreign policy is obvious and timely as the United States grapples with several different types of authoritarian governments in China, Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and elsewhere.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society. Moreover, it is important to note that Galtieri’s fear of removal at the hands of fellow military officers for failing to invade the Falklands does not distinguish my explanation from that of Goemans.

Regimes in which leaders are vulnerable to removal fall into two types depending on whether both actors are civilians ( machines) or military officers ( juntas). In short, I argue that there are two types of civilian-led authoritarian regimes with audiences that vary depending on whether civilians control the military. Weeks makes the most convincing case yet that, like leaders of democracies, many autocratic leaders are accountable to domestic audiences who rein in riskier behavior and thus help prevent many of the worst foreign policy mistakes. In her view, such audiences by and large restrain leaders from going to war or initiating a dispute (22-23). The integration of institutional and dispositional variables is a nice contribution that helps to advance the now well-established literature on the independent effect of leaders on foreign policy.It could be argued that personalist regimes, in particular Bosses like Saddam Hussein or Stalin, make decisions in such isolation that information about their preferences and calculations is limited to a very few individuals, leaving the dictator with more private information than other authoritarian leaders.