Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Democracy and War: An Experiment

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Empirical research has found that democracies are more likely than any other regime type to win the wars that they enter. The causal relationships underpinning this finding remain unclear. Several arguments have been put forward to explain this pattern, including the claim that democracies can organize and share information better than autocracies can, which leads democracies to have battlefield advantages. It is contended as well that soldiers fight harder for democracies. An institutional line of reasoning posits that democratic leaders do not wage the most difficult wars because their hold on power depends more heavily on their population's approval than is the case for leaders of other types of regimes; losing wars hurts the re-election chances of democratic leaders, and matters little for the survival in power of leaders in autocracies. This project examines why democracies win a higher percentage of the wars they enter than do autocracies. To weigh contending arguments in the literature, the project proposes a theoretical model and tests it in experimental work. First, the researcher presents a model of domestic decision making and interstate conflict. The model ties together the risks involved with interstate war, the distribution of resources domestically, and the desire of leaders to accumulate spoils of office. In the model, democracies are defined as groups where the leader needs a majority of votes to win the bonus of resources, and autocracies are defined as groups where the leader can win the bonus with the support of only one player in addition to the leader. Without communication, autocracies are predicted to win a higher percentage of wars than democracies. It is also possible, however, for a democracy that can communicate to organize itself efficiently and win a higher percentage of conflicts than non-democracies or democracies without communication. This is possible because non-leaders in a democracy have the incentive to reveal their private information if the leader commits to investing in public goods. Autocrats cannot commit to investing in public goods, so members that do not benefit from private goods provided by the autocrat have no incentive to reveal their private information. Second, to test if democratic groups can organize efficiently in the face of uncertainty; the researcher proposes to carry out small-group experiments, one of the first sets of group-based conflict-related laboratory experiments. The experiment will be performed at New York University's Center for Experimental Social Science (CESS). This project has several broader implications of relevance to the public policy community and military decision makers. Whereas the model in this project is framed with interstate conflict in mind, the underlying theme of how to incentivize the flow of information from the bottom up is widely applicable.