Explaining patterns in the onset of interstate war
| Author | Christopher Schwarz |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221108343 |
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Explaining patterns in the onset
of interstate war
Christopher Schwarz
New York University
Abstract
Over the past 30 years empirical international relations has discovered a number of conflict pat-
terns which are variously considered to be competing, contradictory, or emanating from unique
processes. I present a simplified and corrected selectorate model of war which unifies four
such lines of research: the autocratic, democratic, and capitalist peaces with diversionary war.
It is shown that domestic political competition, as understood within the selectorate approach,
contains microfoundations for context conditional risk preference as a rationalist explanation
for war. This novel mechanism, in turn, coherently explains the main findings from these various
areas of enquiry. And so the discoveries of these four lines of enquiry can be understood not as
apparently accidental or competing patterns but as aspects of the same mechanism operating
under different empirical contexts.
Keywords
Bargaining, conflict, selectorate
As eloquently put by Houthakker (1967), “Laws [in empirical sciences] are in the first
instance empirical regularities which may have been observed without much theoretical
basis…it is not until much later that these empirical regularities could be incorporated
into a theoretical framework.”International relations is no exception. Since the end of
the Cold War the field has seen a rapid increase in the quantity and quality of empirical
research driven, in large part, by the use of empirically oriented middle range theorizing
(Lake, 2013).
1
The result of this process has been the collection of a large number of
Corresponding author:
Christopher Schwarz, New York University.
Email: cschwarz@nyu.edu
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2022, Vol. 34(3) 333–356
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/09516298221108343
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stylized facts discovered by what Mearsheimer and Walt (2013) call “simplistic hypoth-
esis testing”or “tests derived not from precise, theoretically deduced expectations but
from general correlational speculations or deductions that ultimately can be interpreted
in myriad ways”(Mousseau, 2021: 141).
2
These empirical findings, as a result, generally
stand in opposition to each other as apparently accidental phenomena, being either iso-
lated or contradictory, rather than as aspects of an increasingly cumulative and unified
understanding of the target patterns.
The purpose of this work is to theoretically unify four such lines of research for which
this characterization is particularlyapt: the democratic, autocratic,and capitalist peaces with
diversionary war. Theprimary empirical findings from these four closely related and com-
peting strandsof literature are shown to be impliedby a simple game theoretic modelwhich
combines a simplified selectorate model (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 1999, 2003), corrected
in light of recent criticisms (Debs and Goemans, 2010; Arena and Nicoletti, 2014), with a
standard bargaining model of war (i.e. Fearon (1995)). The amended theory is shown to
provide microfoundations for context conditional risk preference as a novel rationalist
explanation for war, demonstrating how domestic political competition may give rise to
international conflict even in the absence of incomplete information, dynamic credible
commitment issues, or other known rationalist mechanisms. The mechanism, in turn, pro-
duces produces aspropositions statements which closely comport with the aforementioned
empirical literature, amending or supplanting previous theoretical characterizations.
3
In this
way, the democratic, autocratic, and capitalist peaces are not separate phenomena from
diversionary war nor each other. Rather, they may be understood as aspects of the same
mechanism operating under different conditions. The way in which political institutions,
resource endowments, relative power, material costs, and shocks to preferences combine
to produce or inhibit bargaining failure mirror the following central findings from these
four lines of literature, discussed in greater detail below:
1. The coexistence of the democratic and autocratic peace.
2. That economic development is generally pacifying, yet
3. the democratic peace is particularly conditioned by economic development.
4. That there is no general monadic democratic peace.
5. That democracies are more sensitive to ‘diversionary’pressures.
6. That leaders facing domestic problems will target more powerful states.
4
The remainder of the paper has the following structure. I first review the above empirical pat-
terns and some theoretical difficulties with existing accounts. I then present the formal frame-
work, deriving the target empirical patterns as propositions. I then conclude by discussing
how these results may be interpreted and pointing towards novel empirical implications.
Existing Literature
What is to be explained?
For sometimes being called the closest thing international relations has to an empirical
law, the democratic peace remains subject to lively and inconclusive debate (Hegre,
334 Journal of Theoretical Politics 34(3)
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