Research by political scientists has established, fairly conclusively, that democratically governed states rarely go to war against each other. There is also evidence to suggest that democracies tend not to become embroiled in militarized disputes short of war. The policy implications of this body of scholarly research seem clear: one path to a more peaceful world is by encouraging, pressuring, even forcing autocratic governments to embrace democracy. Not so fast, say Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder in Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, for a glaring exception to the “democratic peace” is their finding that societies undergoing democratic transitions may in fact be rather warlike.
The argument is that the process of democratization opens up the arena of political competition and requires elites to appeal to large constituencies if they hope to acquire or maintain political power. Nationalist themes are especially tempting because they strike a chord with a broad cross-section of society. Unfortunately, nationalism frequently goes hand in hand with belligerency, and whether this belligerency is intentionally stirred up by elites or simply a by-product of their nationalist appeals, there is a danger that hostility will be directed outward to neighbouring states. In mature democracies, where political competition is more fully institutionalized, elites who embark on unwise and costly foreign adventures can expect to be held accountable by the public. Where democratic institutions are weak, as they are in the early phases of democratic transitions, elites are less likely suffer the same consequences; demagoguery goes a long way to insure political survival in the context of institutional underdevelopment. For Mansfield and Snyder, it is this explosive combination—electoral mobilization alongside weakly institutionalized elite accountability—that makes democratization a threat to peace.
Electing to Fight presents the argument carefully and persuasively. The book then goes on to report the findings of a series of statistical tests designed to evaluate hypotheses drawn from their theory linking democratization to war. The analysis is impressively thorough. The authors examine four different indicators of democratization—based on competitiveness of political participation, openness of executive recruitment, constraints on the chief executive, and a composite index—and estimate the effects on the probability of both war involvement (as initiator or target) and war initiation. They control for other causes of war identified in the literature and take various methodological precautions designed to guard against erroneous inferences. Their procedures surely will not satisfy everyone within the community of democratic peace researchers, but Mansfield and Snyder have gone some way to address critics of their earlier quantitative research. Readers will not be surprised to learn that the authors' statistical findings generally confirm their hypotheses, and those not interested in wading through the long discussion of data, model building, and estimation can skip these chapters without fear of missing the bottom line.
The final chapters of the book consist of several brief case studies undertaken to illuminate the causal processes identified by the authors' theory, especially those that the statistical analyses are ill-suited to test. The case studies pay special attention to nationalist appeals by elites, both civic nationalism (the good kind) and exclusionary nationalism (the dangerous kind), as well as the threats perceived by elites during the democratization process and the strategies they employ to maximize their chances of political survival. Mansfield and Snyder examine democratizing states that initiated war (e.g., France after the revolution, Serbia prior to the Balkan Wars, Argentina prior to the Falklands War), because the causal mechanisms identified by the theory should be observable in these cases. The authors also take a look at the involvement of democratizing states in wars during the 1990s (e.g., between Ecuador and Peru, Ethiopia and Eritrea), a period of time not covered by their statistical analysis. The case studies serve to add flesh to the bones of the quantitative findings, but the latter are what properly constitute a test of the theory.
Although previous work by Mansfield and Snyder has been viewed as a challenge to the democratic peace thesis, their most recent findings, including those reported in Electing to Fight, do not in fact refute that thesis, as the authors point out in the book's conclusion. They show that incomplete democratic transitions—those that stall after states have become only partially democratized—present the greatest danger to their neighbours (and to scapegoated groups within the transitioning state's own population). Thus, what Mansfield and Snyder really demonstrate is a link between war and “anocratization.” Complete democratic transitions—from autocracy to democracy or from anocracy to democracy—generally do not increase the risk of war, and some results in Electing to Fight suggest that they reduce the risk. Moreover, by highlighting the institutional restraints that operate in mature democracies but are slow to emerge in states undergoing democratic transitions, Mansfield and Snyder reinforce the institutional explanations found in democratic peace theory. Nor are the authors alone among democratic peace researchers in cautioning policymakers that while the spread of democracy may lead to a more peaceful world, imposing superficially democratic reforms on societies may well be counterproductive when democratic accountability is weakly institutionalized.
