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The Dividends of Diversion: Mature Democracies’ Proclivity to Use Diversionary Force and the Rewards They Reap from It

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2009

Abstract

The diversionary proclivities of democratic and autocratic regimes have been debated in the empirical literature. This new theoretical synthesis on the subject builds upon the insights of the institutional approach, rational choice literature on voting and research on audience costs. It is contended that leaders in mature democracies have more incentive to use diversionary force than leaders in other regimes, and they are more likely to gain domestic political and economic benefits from it. To test this, dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) models are used to ascertain the reciprocal relationships between domestic political unrest, domestic economic performance and foreign military intervention in 140 countries in 1950–96. The theory is supported since, collectively, mature democracies are more prone to use diversionary force and to benefit from it than non-democracies. Interesting nuances appear when specific types of presidential or parliamentary democracies are analysed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 David Sanders, Hugh Ward and David Marsh, ‘Macroeconomics, the Falklands War, and the Popularity of the Thatcher Government: A Contrary View’, in Helmut Norpoth, Michael S. Lewis-Beck and J. D. Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 161–82, at p. 165.

2 Willem Buiter and Marcus Miller, ‘Changing the Rules: Economic Consequences of the Thatcher Regime’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, (1983), 305–65, and 307–9.

3 For an overview of the contending arguments on this issue, see The Times (London), ‘Letters to the Editor’ (31 March 1981); and Geoffrey Maynard, The Economy under Mrs. Thatcher (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

4 Helmut Norpoth, ‘The Popularity of the Thatcher Government: A Matter of War and Economy’, in Norpoth, Lewis-Beck and Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics, pp. 141–59; Harold D. Clarke, William Mishler and Paul Whiteley, ‘Recapturing the Falklands: Models of Conservative Party Popularity, 1979–1983’, British Journal of Political Science, 20 (1990), 63–81; Harold D. Clarke, Karl Ho and Marianne Stewart, ‘Major’s Lesser (not Minor) Effects: Prime Ministerial Approval and Government Party Support in Britain since 1979’, Electoral Studies, 19 (2000), 255–73. Other authors disagreed and argued that changing public perceptions of the economy caused Thatcher’s surge in the polls, not the Falklands War: see Sanders, Ward and Marsh, ‘Macroeconomics, the Falklands War, and the Popularity of the Thatcher Government’. However, David Sanders seems to have changed his mind about the impact of the Falklands on Thatcher’s approval levels (see David Sanders, ‘Pre-Election Polling in Britain’, Electoral Studies, 22 (2003), 1–20).

5 See the seminal work of Charles W. Ostrom and Brian L. Job, ‘The President and the Political Use of Force’, American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 554–66. Several authors have built on Ostrom and Job’s groundbreaking work and presented empirical evidence that US, British or Israeli leaders use diversionary force. See Patrick James and John R. Oneal, ‘The Influence of Domestic and International Politics on the President’s Use of Force’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35 (1991), 307–32; Clifton T. Morgan and Kenneth W. Bickers, ‘Domestic Discontent and the External Use of Force’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 36 (1992), 25–52; Patrick James and Athanasios Hristoulas, ‘Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy: Evaluating a Model of Crisis Activity for the United States’, Journal of Politics, 56 (1994), 327–48; Benjamin O. Fordham, ‘Partisanship, Macroeconomic Policy, and US Uses of Diversionary Force, 1949–1994’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 42 (1998), 418–39; Clifton T. Morgan and Christopher J. Anderson, ‘Domestic Support and Diversionary External Conflict in Great Britain, 1950–1992’, Journal of Politics, 61 (1999), 799–814; Karl J. DeRouen Jr, ‘Presidents and the Diversionary Use of Force: A Research Note’, International Studies Quarterly, 44 (2000), 317–28; Benjamin O. Fordham, ‘Another Look at “Parties, Voters and the Use of Force Abroad” ’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46 (2002), 572–96; Christopher Sprecher and Karl J. DeRouen Jr, ‘Israeli Military Actions and Internationalization-Externalization Processes’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46 (2002), 244–59; David Brulé, ‘Congressional Opposition, the Economy, and US Dispute Initiation’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50 (2006), 463–83. The field has not reached consensus on the phenomenon of diversion by powerful democracies, however. For recent empirical work which challenges the claim that US leaders divert, see Joanne Gowa, ‘Politics at the Water’s Edge: Parties, Voters, and the Use of Force Abroad’, International Organization, 52 (1998), 307–25; James Meernik, ‘Modeling International Crises and the Political Use of Military Force by the USA’, Journal of Peace Research, 37 (2000), 547–62; James Meernik, ‘Domestic Politics and the Political Use of Military Force by the United States’, Political Research Quarterly, 54 (2001), 889–904; Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Will H. Moore, ‘Presidential Uses of Force During the Cold War: Aggregation, Truncation, and Temporal Dynamics’, American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2002), 438–52; Will H. Moore and David J. Lanoue, ‘Domestic Politics and US Foreign Policy: A Study of Cold War Conflict Behavior’, Journal of Politics, 65 (2003), 376–96.

6 Jack S. Levy and Lily Vakili, ‘Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes: Argentina and the Falklands/Malvinas Case’, in Manus I. Midlarsky, ed., The Internationalization of Communal Strife (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 118–46.

7 Jeffrey Pickering and Emizet F. Kisangani, ‘Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention: Reassessing Regime Type and the Diversionary Hypothesis’, International Studies Quarterly, 49 (2005), 23–44; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Alastair Smith and Randolph M. Siverson, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). The rational choice and audience cost literatures are outlined later in the text.

8 Audience costs were originally conceived in the signalling literature as an explanation for the credibility of democratic leaders’ signals. The term has taken on a broader meaning in the international relations literature. It often refers to the wrath that leaders may face from relevant audiences for policy mis-steps. For the original conceptualization, see James Fearon, ‘Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Conflict’, American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 577–92. For examples of the broader definition, see Jon C. Pevehouse, ‘With a Little Help from My Friends? Regional Organizations and the Consolidation of Democracy’, American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2002), 611–25, p. 614; Susanne Lohmann, ‘Why Do Institutions Matter? An Audience Cost Theory of Institutional Commitment’, Governance, 16 (2003), 95–110, p. 100. Colaresi also emphasizes the public’s ability to punish leaders for foreign policy mistakes, though he does not utilize the term ‘audience costs’ (see Michael Colaresi, ‘The Benefit of the Doubt: Testing an Informational Theory of the Rally Effect’, International Organization, 61 (2007), 99–143, p. 111.

9 Michael W. Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 1151–69, p. 1164.

10 According to the political business cycle hypothesis, rational voters may conclude that the incumbent government manipulated the economy to create a boom so as to increase its chances of re-election. For an excellent summary and analysis of the political business cycle hypothesis, refer to Kenneth A. Schultz, ‘The Politics of the Political Business Cycle’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 79–99.

11 Gelpi, Davies, Pickering and Kisangani, Oneal and Tir have found that democracies tend to use diversionary force significantly more often than authoritarian governments. Miller, Enterline, Gleditsch, Mitchell and Prins come to the opposite conclusion. Heldt finds no relationship between regime type and the use of diversionary force in response to economic deprivation. See Christopher Gelpi, ‘Democratic Diversions: Governmental Structure and the Externalization of Domestic Conflict’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41 (1997), 255–82; Graeme A. Davies, ‘Domestic Strife and the Initiation of International Conflicts’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46 (2002), 672–92; Pickering and Kisangani, ‘Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention’; John R. Oneal and Jaroslav Tir, ‘Does the Diversionary Use of Force Threaten the Democratic Peace? Assessing the Effect of Economic Growth on Interstate Conflict, 1921–2001’, International Studies Quarterly, 50 (2006), 755–80; Ross A. Miller, ‘Domestic Structures and the Diversionary Use of Force’, American Journal of Political Science, 39 (1995), 760–85; Ross A. Miller, ‘Regime Type, Strategic Interaction, and the Diversionary Use of Force’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 43 (1999), 388–402; Andrew J. Enterline and Kristian S. Gleditsch, ‘Threats, Opportunity, and Force: Repression and Diversion of Domestic Pressure, 1948–1992’, International Interactions, 26 (2000), 21–53; Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Brandon C. Prins, ‘Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 48 (2004), 937–61; Birger Heldt, ‘Domestic Politics, Absolute Deprivation, and the Use of Armed Force in Interstate Territorial Disputes, 1950–1990’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 43 (1999), 451–78.

12 Jack S. Levy, ‘The Diversionary Theory of War: A Critique’, in Manus I. Midlarsky, ed., Handbook of War Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), pp. 259–88, at p. 268.

13 DeRouen, ‘Presidents and the Diversionary Use of Force’; Karl J. DeRouen Jr and Jeffrey Peake, ‘The Dynamics of Diversion: The Domestic Implications of Presidential Use of Force’, International Interactions, 28 (2002), 191–211.

14 Manuel Arellano and Stephen Bond, ‘Some Tests of Specification for Panel Data: Monte Carlo Evidence and an Application to Employment Equations’, Review of Economic Studies, 58 (1991), 277–97. For an evaluation of GMMs, see Badi Baltagi, Econometric Analysis of Panel Data (Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), pp. 136–61.

15 On MIDs and the analysis of diversionary force, see Benjamin O. Fordham and Christopher C. Sarver, ‘Militarized Interstate Disputes and United States Uses of Force’, International Studies Quarterly, 45 (2001), 455–66; Frederic S. Pearson and Robert A. Baumann, ‘International Military Intervention, 1946–1988’, ICPSR, Data Collection 6035, University of Michigan, 1993–1994.

16 Arthur Banks, Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive, CD-Rom (Binghamton, Mass.: Center for Social Analysis, 2004). A number of authors also use Banks’s data to operationalize domestic unrest. For a recent survey, refer to Pickering and Kisangani, ‘Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention’.

17 Lewis A. Croser, Functions of Social Conflict (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956); George Simmel, Conflict, translated by K. Wolff (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956).

18 See Levy and Mabe on the political window of opportunity a brief rally effect provides for political leaders. Mueller, Brody, Parker and DeRouen are among the authors who find evidence of a rally effect following US presidential involvement in high-profile foreign policy events. Lai and Reiter extend research on the rally effect beyond the United States by finding brief, but rare, rally effects in post-war Britain. Baker and Oneal dispute the political significance of the rally effect by demonstrating that it often increases the president’s popularity by less than a single percentage point, a result which builds on findings by Oneal and Bryan and Lian and Oneal of limited increases in presidential popularity during international crises and when presidents use force abroad. The most direct evidence contradicting the rally effect is provided by James and Rioux, who demonstrate that the use of US military force during international crises actually suppresses a rally effect which would have occurred had force not been used. By refining theory on the rally effect, Baum’s research helps explain such divergent findings. He shows that the rally effect has a discernible impact on US public opinion but it is nuanced, having its greatest impact on opposition party supporters, independents and individuals with limited political awareness. Baum also demonstrates that US presidents will only attempt to generate a rally effect when they are confident the United States will succeed in the foreign operation. Scholars should consequently only look for the rally effect after certain types of events (particularly when the president purposely calls attention to overseas operations) and among specific domestic audiences. See Jack S. Levy and William F. Mabe, ‘Politically Motivated Opposition to War’, International Studies Review, 6 (2004), 65–84; John E. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: Jon Wiley, 1973); Richard A. Brody, Assessing the President: The Media, Elite Opinion, and Public Support (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); Suzanne L. Parker, ‘Toward an Understanding of “Rally” Effects: Public Opinion in the Persian Gulf War’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 59 (1995), 526–46; DeRouen, ‘Presidents and the Diversionary Use of Force’; Brian Lai and Dan Reiter, ‘Rally ’Round the Union Jack? Public Opinion and the Use of Force in the United Kingdom, 1948–2001’, International Studies Quarterly, 49 (2005), 255–72; William D. Baker and John R. Oneal, ‘Patriotism or Opinion Leadership? The Nature and Origins of the “Rally ’Round the Flag” Effect’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45 (2001), 661–87; Bradley Lian and John R. Oneal, ‘Presidents, the Use of Military Force, and Public Opinion’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 37 (1993), 277–300; John R. Oneal and Anna L. Bryan ‘The Rally ’Round the Flag Effect in U.S Foreign Policy Crises, 1950–1985’, Political Behavior, 17 (1995), 379–401; Patrick James and Jean Sebastien Rioux, ‘International Crises and Linkage Politics: The Experiences of the United States, 1953–1994’, Political Research Quarterly, 51 (1998), 781–812; Matthew A. Baum, ‘The Constituent Foundations of the Rally ’Round the Flag Phenomenon’, International Studies Quarterly, 46 (2002), 263–98; Matthew A. Baum, ‘Going Private: Public Opinion, Presidential Rhetoric, and the Domestic Politics of Audience Costs in US Foreign Policy Crises’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 48 (2004), 603–31.

19 Rudolph Rummel, ‘Dimensions of Conflict Behavior within and between Nations’, Yearbook of the Society for General Systems, 8 (1963), 1–50; Raymond Tanter, ‘Dimensions of Conflict Behavior within and between Nations’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 10 (1966), 41–64. James provides a nice summary of diversionary literature from the 1960s to the 1980s (see Patrick James, ‘Conflict and Cohesion: A Review of the Literature and Recommendations for Future Research’, Confict and Cooperation, 22 (1987), 21–33). Ostrom and Job, ‘The President and the Political Use of Force’, provides the most notable exception to empirical literature casting doubt on diversionary theory in the 1980s.

20 Morgan and Bickers ‘Domestic Discontent and the External Use of Force’; Morgan and Anderson, ‘Domestic Support and Diversionary External Conflict in Great Britain, 1950–1992’; Fordham, ‘Partisanship, Macroeconomic Policy, and US Uses of Diversionary Force’.

21 See fn. 5 for research on powerful democracies’ use of diversionary force. Russett, Hess and Orphanides provide evidence that democratic leaders use diversionary force in periods leading up to an election, while Gaubatz’s research suggests that democratic leaders are more likely to use military force in the period immediately following an election victory. See Bruce Russett, ‘Economic Decline, Electoral Pressures, and the Initiation of International Conflict’, in C. Gochman and A. Sabrosky, eds, Prisoners of War? Nation-States in the Modern Era (Lexington, Ky.: Lexington Press, 1990), pp. 123–240; Gregory D. Hess and Athanasios Orphanides, ‘War Politics: An Economic, Rational Voter Framework’, American Economic Review, 85 (1995), 451–78; Gregory D Hess and Athanasios Orphanides, ‘War and Democracy’, Journal of Political Economy, 109 (2001), 776–810; Kurt Taylor Gaubatz, ‘Election Cycles and War,’ Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35 (1991), 212–44.

22 Gowa, ‘Politics at the Water’s Edge’; Meernik, ‘Modeling International Crises’; Mitchell and Moore, ‘Presidential Uses of Force’.

23 See fn. 11.

24 Meernik, ‘Domestic Politics and the Political Use of Military Force’; Brett Ashley Leeds and David Davis, ‘Domestic Political Vulnerability and International Disputes’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41 (1999), 814–34; Alastair Smith, ‘Diversionary Foreign Policy in Democratic Systems’, International Studies Quarterly, 40 (1996), 133–53.

25 Leeds and Davis, ‘Domestic Political Vulnerability and International Disputes’.

26 David H. Clark, ‘Can Strategic Interaction Divert Diversionary Behavior? A Model of U.S. Conflict Propensity’, Journal of Politics, 65 (2003), 1013–39; Benjamin O. Fordham, ‘Strategic Conflict Avoidance and the Diversionary Use of Force’, Journal of Politics, 67 (2005), 132–53.

27 Mitchell and Prins, ‘Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force’.

28 Pickering and Kisangani were not the first to use the institutional approach to develop hypotheses about the use of force by entrenched and less developed democracies. They are the first to apply it to diversionary theory, however. See especially Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Brandon C. Prins, ‘Beyond Territorial Contiguity: Issues at State in Democratic Militarized Interstate Disputes’, International Studies Quarterly, 43 (1999), 169–83.

29 Mitchell and Prins, ‘Beyond Territorial Contiguity’; Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, ‘Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength, and War’, International Organization, 56 (2002), 297–337; Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, ‘Incomplete Democratization and the Outbreak of Military Disputes’, International Studies Quarterly, 46 (2002), 529–49; Michael Mousseau, ‘Market Prosperity, Democratic Consolidation, and Democratic Peace’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44 (2000), 472–507.

30 Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival.

31 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, ‘Political Institutions, Policy Choice and the Survival of Leaders’, British Journal of Political Science, 32 (2002), 559–90, p. 560.

32 For examples, see Miller, ‘Domestic Structures’; Gelpi, ‘Democratic Diversions’; Davies, ‘Domestic Strife and the Initiation of International Conflicts’; Pickering and Kisangani ‘Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention’; Brulé, ‘Congressional Opposition’; and Russett, ‘Economic Decline, Electoral Pressure, and the Initiation of International Conflict’.

33 Gelpi, ‘Democratic Diversions’.

34 Among others, see George Tsebelis, ‘Decision Making in Political Systems: Veto Players in Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, Multicameralism, and Multipartyism’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 289–325; Andrew MacIntyre, The Power of Institutions: Political Architecture and Governance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); Mark Hallenberg, ‘Veto Players and the Choice of Monetary Institutions’, International Organization, 56 (2002), 775–802.

35 Michael Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).

36 This argument is developed in more detail by Dennis M. Foster, ‘An “Invitation to Struggle?” The Use of Force Against Legislatively Vulnerable American Presidents’, International Studies Quarterly, 50 (2006), 421–44, p. 426.

37 Jeffrey S. Peake, ‘Presidential Agenda Setting in Foreign Policy’, Political Research Quarterly, 54 (2001) 69–86; Paul Brace and Barbara Hinckley, Follow the Leader (New York: Basic Books, 1992). James Morrow provides evidence that a different foreign policy option, securing sought-after international agreements, may boost a leader’s chances of re-election as well (see James D. Morrow, ‘Electoral and Congressional Incentives and Arms Control’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35 (1991), 245–65).

38 Michelle Garfinkel, ‘What Is the “Acceptable” Rate of Inflation?’ Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, 71 (1989), 3–15.

39 Alastair Smith, Election Timing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

40 Alastair Smith suggests that we can assume that most voters in advanced democracies are sophisticated. Even if many voters do not fit perfectly into the sophisticated category, they often act as if they were sophisticated by following well-defined cues (see Smith, Election Timing).

41 We borrow heavily from Alt, ‘Ambiguous Intervention’, pp. 244–6, and added Figure 1(b) (see James E. Alt, ‘Ambiguous Intervention: The Role of Government Action in Public Evaluation of the Economy’, in Norpoth, Lewis-Beck and Lafay, eds, Economics and Politics, pp. 239–63, at p. 243).

42 Sophisticated voter models are a counterargument to political business cycle models.

43 CBI is both political and economic. Political independence refers to the central bank’s ability to make policy decisions without interference from the incumbent government (see Robert Elgie, ‘Democratic Accountability and Central Bank Independence: Historical and Contemporary, National and European Perspectives’, West European Politics, 21 (1998), 53–76). On the other hand, economic independence is its ability to use the full range of monetary instruments without restrictions from the government (see Alberto Alesina and Lawrence Summers, ‘Central Bank Independence and Macroeconomic Performance: Some Comparative Evidence’, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 25 (1993), 151–62, p. 153). CBI has been tied to the institutional structure of democracies and the number of veto players in recent literature, such as Hallenberg, ‘Veto Players and the Choice of Monetary Institutions’, but we do not pursue these details here.

44 A number of studies have also indicated that economic systems and regime types do not matter as far as producing price stability is concerned. This is the issue of the time-inconsistency problem. Thus, a monetary policy announced for some future period is no longer optimal when it is time to implement it. See, for example, Robert Barro and David Gordon, ‘Rules, Discretion, and Reputation in a Model of Monetary Policy’, Journal of Monetary Economics, 12 (1983), 101–21.

45 Fearon, ‘Domestic Political Audiences’; Alastair Smith, ‘International Crises and Domestic Politics’, American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 623–38; Kenneth A. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

46 Fearon, ‘Domestic Political Audiences’; Smith, ‘International Crises’.

47 Smith, ‘International Crises’; Alexandra Guisinger and Alastair Smith, ‘Honest Threats: The Interaction of Reputation and Political Institutions in International Crises’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46 (2002), 175–200.

48 Baum, ‘Going Private’, pp. 604–5.

49 The diversionary literature has long presumed that leaders choose low-scale types of force with high probabilities of military success to divert. See Levy, ‘The Diversionary Theory’, p. 281; Morgan and Bickers, ‘Domestic Discontent’, p. 32; and Fordham, ‘Another Look’, p. 576. The audience cost argument provides a coherent, parsimonious rationale for this presumption. On democracies’ tendency to select winnable wars, see especially Dan Reiter and Alan Stam III, ‘Democracy, War Initiation and Victory’, American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 377–91. Studies on leadership tenure by Chiozza, Goemans and Colaresi support this argument. Chiozzi and Goemans demonstrate that, in contrast to leaders in other regimes, democratic leaders do not have shorter terms in office following a war loss or a failure in an international crisis. They argue that this is because of the selection effects involved when democratic leaders choose to get involved in a war or crisis. Colaresi adds an international element to these results, showing that democratic leaders are less likely to lose office after a defeat in war if they are involved in an ongoing rivalry. See Giacomo Chiozza and H. E. Goemans, ‘International Conflict and the Tenure of Leaders: Is War Still Ex Post Inefficient?’ American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004), 604–19; Michael Colaresi, ‘When Doves Cry: International Rivalry, Unreciprocated Cooperation, and Leadership Turnover’, American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004), 555–79.

50 Tsebelis, ‘Decision Making in Political Systems’; George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

51 For information on ‘majoritarian’ systems, see Arend Lipjhart, Patterns of Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). In Lipjhart’s conceptualization, majoritarian systems typically feature electoral processes that produce decisive majorities for the ruling party. ‘Consensual governments’, in contrast, emerge from electoral systems which emphasize broad representation across society. They tend to feature multi-party coalitions in government.

52 See Michael Ireland and Scott S. Gartner, ‘Time to Fight: Government Type and Conflict Initiation in Parliamentary Systems’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45 (2001), 547–68; Dan Reiter and Erik R. Tillman, ‘Public, Legislative, and Executive Constraints on the Democratic Initiation of Conflict’, Journal of Politics, 64 (2002), 810–26; and Glenn Palmer, Tamar R. London and Patrick M. Regan, ‘What’s Stopping You? The Sources of Political Constraints on International Conflict Behavior’, International Interactions, 30 (2004), 1–24. All three articles adopt arguments that maintain executive leaders’ policy autonomy decreases as the number of veto players increases. Since they do not analyse diversionary force specifically, however, they do not couple the veto player framework with the policy availability argument. They argue that decreasing the number of veto players increases the likelihood the executive will use force abroad. Consistent with the policy availability approach, we maintain that decreasing the number of veto players increases the executive’s ability to find domestic policy solutions to domestic problems, thus reducing the need to resort to diversionary force (see Brulé, ‘Congressional Opposition’, for an argument similar to ours for the United States).

53 Tsebelis, ‘Decision Making in Political Systems’, p. 303; Kaare Strøm, Minority Government and Majority Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Michael J. Laver and Norman Schofield, Multiparty Government: The Politics of Coalition in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

54 There is a substantial, mixed literature on the relationship between the structure of democratic institutions and the use of military force. See Ireland and Gartner, ‘Time to Fight’; Reiter and Tillman, ‘Public, Legislative, and Executive Constraints’; Palmer, London and Regan, ‘What’s Stopping You?’; Brandon Prins and Christopher Sprecher, ‘Institutional Constraints, Political Opposition, and Interstate Dispute Escalation: Evidence from Parliamentary Systems’, Journal of Peace Research, 36 (1999), 271–87; David P. Auerswald, Disarmed Democracies: Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); David Leblang and Steve Chan, ‘Explaining Wars Fought by Established Democracies: Do Institutional Constraints Matter?’ Political Research Quarterly, 56 (2003), 385–400; David H. Clark and Timothy Nordstrom, ‘Democratic Variants and Democratic Variance: How Domestic Constraints Shape Interstate Conflict’, Journal of Politics, 67 (2005), 250–70.

55 For the inadequacy of using MID to operationalize IMI, refer to Fordham and Sarver, ‘Militarized Interstate Disputes and United States Uses of Force’.

56 Pearson and Baumann, ‘International Military Intervention’, p. 1.

57 For the update of IMI to 1996, see Jeffrey Pickering, ‘The Structural Shape of Force: Interstate Intervention in the Zones of Peace and Turmoil, 1946–1996’, International Interactions, 25 (1999), 363–91. Several authors have recently used IMI, including Pickering and Kisangani, ‘Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention’; Dan Reiter, ‘Does Peace Nurture Democracy?’ Journal of Politics, 63 (2001), 935–48; Matthew Krain, ‘International Intervention and the Severity of Genocides and Politicides’, International Studies Quarterly, 49 (2005), 363–87.

58 Our operationalization of elite and mass unrest follows Pickering and Kisangani, ‘Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention’. Arthur Banks defines these events as follows: (1) government crisis as ‘any rapidly developing situation that threatens to bring the downfall of the present situation – excluding situations of revolt aimed at such overthrow’; (2) purges: ‘any systematic elimination by jailing or execution of political opposition’; (3) general strikes: ‘any strike of 1,000 or more industrial or service workers … that is aimed at national governmental policies or authority’; (4) anti-government demonstrations: ‘any peaceful public gathering of at least 100 people for the primary purpose of displaying … their opposition to government policies’; and (5) riots: ‘any violent demonstration or clash of more than 100 citizens involving the use of physical force’. See Banks, Cross-National Time-Series Data.

59 Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001).

60 International Monetary Fund, International Financial Statistics (Washington, D.C.: IMF Publications, 1983, 2000).

61 William R. Thompson, ‘Identifying Rivals and Rivalries in World Politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 45 (2001), 557–86.

62 See Thompson, ‘Identifying Rivals’ on the conceptual and operational differences between his strategic rivalry collection and Gary Goertz and Paul Diehl’s enduring rivalry collection. Data on enduring rivals are from Thompson, ‘Identifying Rivals’.

63 Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

64 Banks, Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive.

65 Gaubatz, ‘Election Cycles and War’. See fn. 21 for more sources on this subject.

66 Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 19501990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

67 Refer to R. Barro and X. Sala-I-Martin, Economic Growth (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995).

68 Data on population are from COW and data on investment are from the IMF.

69 Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’.

70 Chiozza and Goemans, ‘International Conflict and the Tenure of Leaders’; Keith Jagger and Ted Robert Gurr, ‘Tracking Democracy’s Third Wave with the Polity III Data’, Journal of Peace Research, 32 (1995), 469–82.

71 We would like to point out that our measure of well-established or mature democracies differs from the Polity variables durable and persist. Durable counts regime change since 1800 or the date of independence if that event occurred after 1800, while persist counts regime persistence after change in any one of the six component variables of polity.

72 Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984) and Bingham Powell Jr, Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability, and Violence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

73 The advantage of the GMM estimator (Π matrix estimator) is that it allows the transformation of the variables to achieve orthogonality between the country fixed effects and the regressors. Thus, in the absence of autocorrelation, the Π matrix GMM estimator is efficient and consistent (see Baltagi, Econometric Analysis of Panel Data).

74 The consistency of our estimation depends on the stochastic properties of the error term ω given in Equation 5 or . More importantly, the orthogonality condition between our regressors and the stochastic term ωit will not be satisfied because of the endogeneity among our dependent variables and the inclusion of lagged intervention and lagged political unrest. Thus, neither a generalized least squares estimator nor a fixed effect estimator can satisfy the orthogonality condition. The solution to achieve orthogonality is to measure all the variables as deviations from their period means and then first difference them to remove ϕi and λt from the error term. Equation 6 is estimated by a dynamic GMM estimator to achieve both goals. The GMM estimator is an instrumental variable estimator equivalent to an efficient three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimator. Despite its virtues, the GMM has two minor drawbacks. First, differencing the variables implies that all time invariant dummies and country constant terms drop from the system. Secondly, because we estimate the model with first differences for the variables and we include lagged values of some endogenous variables, three years have been dropped from the sample. We end up with usable observations from 1953 to 1996 for our 150 countries (see Baltagi, Econometric Analysis of Panel Data).

75 See Arellano and Bond, ‘Some Tests of Specification for Panel Data’, p. 282. The statistic computed from a one-step homoscedastic model shows that all the instrument sets are uncorrelated with residuals, because the assumptions of the test are unknown under a robust estimator.

76 Bear F. Braumoeller, ‘Hypothesis Testing and Multiplicative Interaction Terms’, International Organization, 58, (2004), 807–20; Thomas Brambor, William Roberts Clark and Matt Golder, ‘Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses’, Political Analysis, 14 (2006), 63–82.

77 James Jaccard, Robert Turrisi and Choi K. Wan, Interaction Effects in Multiple Regression (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1990), pp. 25–6.

78 Because our table indicates multiple two-way interactions, a regression coefficient associated with a given product term reflects the impact of the interaction effect, holding all other interaction and main effects constant. See especially Braumoeller, ‘Hypothesis Testing’.

79 Because we do not analyse a polynomial form, this number is obtained by trial and error.

80 Mitchell and Prins, ‘Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force’.

81 William R. Thompson, ‘A Streetcar Named Sarajevo: Catalysts, Multiple Causation Chains, and Rivalry Structures’, International Studies Quarterly, 47 (2003), 453–74.

82 Gaubatz, ‘Election Cycles and War’.

83 DeRouen, ‘Presidents and the Diversionary Use of Force’; Fordham, ‘Another Look’; Meernik, ‘Modeling International Crises’.

84 Oneal and Tir, ‘Does the Diversionary Use of Force Threaten the Democratic Peace?’; Pickering and Kisangani, ‘Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention’; Davies, ‘Domestic Strife and the Initiation of International Conflicts’.

85 Leeds and Davis, ‘Domestic Vulnerability’; Mitchell and Prins, ‘Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force’.

86 Morgan and Bickers, ‘Domestic Discontent’; Morgan and Anderson, ‘Domestic Support and Diversionary External Conflict in Great Britain’.

87 Chiozza and Goemans, ‘International Conflict and the Tenure of Leaders’.

88 DeRouen, ‘Presidents and the Diversionary Use of Force’, p. 324.

89 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘On Economic causes of Civil War’, Oxford Economic Papers, 50 (1998), 563–73; Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler and Nicolas Sambanis, ‘The Collier–Hoeffler Model of Civil War Onset and the Case Study Project Research Design’, in Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler and Nicolas Sambanis, eds, Understanding Civil War. Volume 1: Africa (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2005), pp. 1–33.

90 William R. Thompson, ‘The Consequences of War’, International Interactions, 19 (1993), 125–47.

91 DeRouen and Peake, ‘The Dynamics of Diversion’.

92 Brock S. Blomberg and Gregory D. Hess, ‘The Temporal Links between Conflict and Economic Activity’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46 (2002), 74–90.

93 All democracies estimated in Table 4 satisfy Doyle’s criteria for mature democracies (Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government; and Powell Jr, Contemporary Democracies).

94 Since insignificant estimates for interaction variables can be misleading, we calculate marginal effects for 119 and 165 year old democracies for all interaction variables in Table 4. See Brambor, Clark and Golder, ‘Understanding Interaction Models’. For example, the results for 119 and 165 year old presidential democracies are: elite unrestt (−1.4389 and −2.0678), mass unrestt (−0.0224 and −0.0394), economic growtht (0.0198 and 0.0274), and economic growtht −1 (0.0798 and 0.1148).

95 The coefficients for mass unrestt −1 and the interaction term (mass unrestt −1 × democracyt −1) are both statistically significant and provide the following marginal effects for 119 and 165 year old majoritarian democracies, respectively: 0.0578 and 0.0839. Mature majoritarian states need only be 14 years old before the substantive threshold of a 1 per cent increase in contemporaneous intervention is reached.

96 Meernik, ‘Modeling International Crises’; Moore and Lanoue, ‘Domestic Politics and US Foreign Policy’.

97 Most main effects are statistically significant and are included in the computation of interaction effects.

98 Leeds and Davis, ‘Domestic Vulnerability’; Mitchell and Prins, ‘Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force’; DeRouen, ‘Presidents and the Diversionary Use of Force’; Fordham, ‘Partisanship, Macroeconomic Policy’; Fordham, ‘ “Another Look” ’; James and Oneal, ‘The Influence of Domestic’.

99 Fordham, ‘Partisanship, Macroeconomic Policy, and US Uses of Diversionary Force’.

100 Levy, ‘The Diversionary Use of Force’.

101 Tsebelis maintains that majoritarian and minority governments behave similarly, a view supported by our results (Tsebelis, ‘Decision Making in Political Systems’).

102 Mark Peceny, Caroline C. Beer and Shannon Sanchez-Terry, ‘Dictatorial Peace?’ American Political Science Review, 37 (2002), 15–26.