Reevaluating Foreign-Imposed Regime Change

To the Editors (William G. Nomikos writes)

Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten’s article “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization” offers important contributions to the study of foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC).¹ The authors should be commended for their use of advanced empirical methods to tackle such an important substantive question. According to Downes and Monten, past research on the democratizing effect of foreign-imposed regime change has overemphasized the characteristics of the intervener and underemphasized the existing preconditions for democracy in the state targeted for intervention. Rather than the FIRC itself, it is these preconditions, Downes and Monten suggest, that explain whether a given state will or will not democratize. That is, their argument posits that targets of FIRC that democratize would have done so independently of the foreign intervention.

Although Downes and Monten offer promising results in support of their hypotheses, two factors should make scholars skeptical of the conclusions drawn from their interpretation of the evidence. First, even though Downes and Monten duly explore the efficacy of varieties of FIRC, they omit the most critical analytical category related to the dependent variable. In evaluating the ability of FIRC to produce democracy, one should focus on cases of foreign-imposed democratization (FID) where the intervener intended to replace a nondemocratic regime with a democratic one. Second, the nature of FIRC operations has changed over time in ways unaccounted for by Downes and Monten. For historical and theoretical reasons outlined in this letter, FIRC carried out before World War I looks significantly different from FIRC carried out since 1918. A closer examination of the targets of FID after World War I reveals a fairly remarkable success rate: thirteen out of seventeen targets transitioned to consolidated democracies within ten years of the intervention (see table 1). Such a record should give us pause before concluding that FIRC has little or no independent effect on a state’s democratization prospects.

Table 1.

Total Number of FIRC, FIRC Successes (Polity score of the target is 17 or higher on a 21-point scale), and Rate of Success, by Type

Foreign-Imposed Democratization

To evaluate the ability of an intervening state to impose democracy in another state, one should look only at FIRCs in which the intervener intended to promote democracy. To this end, Downes and Monten offer two analytical categories—democracy-led FIRC and institutional FIRC—which are, respectively, too broad and too narrow.² Downes and Monten differentiate all FIRCs initiated by democracies from those initiated by nondemocracies (p. 111), but they also code a FIRC as institutional “if an intervener either assisted local authorities in organizing or conducting elections, or made holding elections a condition for recognizing a successor government” (p. 112). At one extreme, then, democracy-led FIRC includes all cases of FID as well as operations in which the intervener had no interest in promoting democracy. For example, Downes and Monten consider the U.S. interventions to overthrow the democratically elected governments of Salvador Allende in Chile and Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran to be democracy-led FIRCs. In both of these cases, however, the intervener aimed to overthrow, not to promote, democracy.

At the other extreme, the institutional FIRC designation misses a set of censored observations in which the intervener clearly intended to promote democratic change. As noted above, Downes and Monten include in this category all FIRCs in which “an intervener either assisted local authorities in organizing or conducting elections, or made holding elections a condition for recognizing a successor government” (ibid.). The category, however, excludes cases in which the intervener would have stayed to supervise the holding of free-and-fair elections but did not do so for reasons unrelated to the execution of the regime change operation. For example, consider Allied interventions in France and Germany after World War II. Both states constructed similar, democratic institutions with no institutional backsliding into dictatorship. The Allies retained a military presence in Germany but not in France. As such, Downes...