Fair Fights?: Evaluating Theories of Democracy and Victory

In "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters," Michael Desch criticizes the methods and results of several studies, mine included, that find that democracies tend to win the wars they fight. ¹ After raising a number of empirical and research design issues, Desch concludes that "on balance, democracies share no particular advantages or disadvantages in selecting and waging wars. In other words, regime type hardly matters for explaining who wins and loses wars" (p.8).

Desch does the discipline a service by challenging extant findings— skepticism is, after all, the most important trait of a social scientist. A careful review of theory and method, however, confirms the finding that democracies tend to be victorious in war. In his article, Desch separates research design from theory and thus does not provide the fair test that he claims. Scholars cannot evaluate empirical relationships outside of their theoretical context. Similarly, the concept of causality cannot be understood apart from a prior theory. Correlation may or may not exist, but causation can only be inferred. Even as the historical record highlights the distinctive nature of democracies, researchers conclude that democracy causes (at least in part) victory in war only because theory implies that it should.

The literature on the democratic peace in general, and the theory and findings on democracy and victory in particular, have contributed to a new generation of research on war as a process. With fresh attention to how war outcomes affect strategic bargaining before and during crises, scholars are moving in the direction of more synthetic and productive theories of conflict that show how attributes of states, such as democracy, interact with their choices to explain war and peace. This is one of the most promising avenues of research in contemporary security studies—and one that reinforces the need to bind empirical research to theory. ² It would be unfortunate if ill-conceived critiques of the democracy and victory literature were to abort this fruitful line of inquiry.

In this article, I review the theory that originally gave rise to the hypothesis that democracies will tend to win the wars they fight. I then discuss how Desch errs in divorcing his empirical tests from this theory, and the implications of this research strategy for his conclusions. Following this, I survey further tests of the causal mechanism propelling democracies to victory. The conclusion outlines directions for future research.

Powerful Pacifists Revisited

Desch characterizes those of us researching the relationship between regime type and victory in war as "democratic triumphalists." Contrary to the suggestion implied in this label, demonstrating the superiority of democracy wasnot part of my original intent in writing "Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War." ³ Instead, in the late 1980s I began work on a theory of state rent-seeking, with a particular emphasis on how different political regimes influence grand strategy. The key idea behind this theory is that the state is a local monopolist in producing public services and, as such, will seek to extract rents or "excess profits" from its citizens through higher than necessary taxes, bribes, or nonpecuniary transfers. Democracy, in turn, is a primary means through which society constrains the state's rent-seeking abilities. Because democratic leaders can be removed from office at less cost to citizens than autocratic leaders, they are more responsive to public opinion and less able to extract monopoly rents for themselves or their supporters. As democratic states receive smaller returns from each additional unit of territory they control, it follows that democracies possess a smaller optimal size. Conversely, because autocrats earn greater monopoly rents and receive larger returns from each unit of territory, they possess a larger optimal size and an imperialist bias in their grand strategies.

It was immediately apparent that this theory contained within it an explanation of the democratic peace, just then coming into prominence. ⁴ In the mutual absence of this imperialist bias, two democracies would have fewer reasons to...