All International Politics Is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration, and Democratization

4. Do Zones of Democracy and Peace Coevolve?

CHAPTER 4 Do Zones of Democracy and Peace Coevolve? In chapter 1, I showed that democracy and autocracy as well as armed conflict and peace cluster in regional zones. In chapter 2, I argued that a regional perspective provides a more useful approach to linkages between domestic institutions and conflict than purely monadic or dyadic perspectives do. In this chapter, I test whether zones of democracy and autocracy go together with differences in regional conflict and peace. I first examine whether the incidence of armed conflict varies with whether a country is democratic and the composition of institutions in its regional context. In chapter 2, I further argued that evidence from relationships among levels of democracy and conflict does not necessarily translate into evidence on the effects of democratization or political transitions. In this chapter, I examine these dynamic effects on the likelihood of conflict directly. Finally, I explore whether zones of peace and conflict coevolve with zones of democracy and autocracy by means of tests for cointegration or joint trending over time. To anticipate the conclusions, the empirical findings suggest that both higher levels of democracy in a country and higher levels of democracy in its surrounding regional context decrease the likelihood of conflict . However, the composition of political structures in the regional context turns out to be more important and exert larger substantive effects than a country's own political institutions. I will also show how incorporating regional context and disaggregating different types of conflict help us to reconcile the stylized facts of "dangerous democratization " with the finding that democratization reduces the likelihood of interstate war. Finally, I present evidence of cointegration suggesting that zones of democracy and peace trend together over time. 89 90 All International Politics Is Local Are Zones of Democracy and Zones of Peace Related? To probe whether regional conflict and peace covary with the regional composition of political institutions, I first estimate a logistic regression with armed conflict as a function of an actor's own level of democracy as well as the extent of democracy prevailing within its proximate interaction environment. I delineate the regional composition of authority structures in a country's localized interaction context by a threshold of minimum distances less than 950 kilometers between states. The probability that a country i will experience conflict at time t can be expressed as a logistic regression equation, [ 1 J . c = R p( I,,) 1 + exp-la+,8D;.I+,82D;.,) , (4.1) where p denotes the estimated probability of conflict, Di" indicates a country i's level of democracy at time t, and D~, denotes the regional context of democracy as defined in chapter 3. If democratic states are able to reduce the extent of perceived threats and rivalry in security in their interactions, we should see a negative relationship between the extent of democracy in a country's regional context and the likelihood that a country will experience violent conflict. Countries do not control their regional contexts and neighbors, so whether a country is a democracy in and of itself should not be as strongly associated with differences in conflict and peace. When differences in the regional context of individual states are taken into account, however, we may find that the country's own level of democracy has a clearer and more consistent negative effect on conflict. The results of estimating equation 4.1 on data for the period 18751996 are presented in table 4.1. The leftmost column of the table displays the estimated results with the conflict variable limited to interstate wars. The rightmost column displays the results for all wars. The significant likelihood ratio chi-square tests indicate that model 4.1 yields a significant improvement over the null model for both of the conflict measures. The coefficient estimates for both a country's own level of democracy and the regional context of democracy are negative, suggesting that these factors reduce the likelihood of conflict. The coefficient estimates are statistically significant and consistent with expectations for both conflict variables. Do Zones of Democracy and Peace Coevolve? 91 The negative signs for the coefficients for an actor's own level of democracy indicate that the more democratic a country, the lower the likelihood that it will experience armed conflict. However, these results indicate that higher levels of democracy in a country's regional context decrease the likelihood that a state will experience conflict to a greater extent...