Is Some Better Than None? Previous Democratic Experience and the Democratic Peace.

In this paper, we examine whether the war propensity of reversed democracies ? those autocratic regimes with previous experience as democracies ? differs from the behavior of other authoritarian states. If the normative explanations for the democratic peace are accurate, then the conflict-inhibiting principles inherent to democracy ought to survive, at least to a certain extent, the transition to authoritarianism. If this is indeed the case, these norms should continue to exert a pacifying effect in interactions between democracies and reversed democracies. As such, our argument constitutes a test of an important and heretofore overlooked observable implication of normative explanations of the democratic peace. After reviewing the institutional and normative theories of the democratic peace, we develop our theory concerning reversed democracies and devise testable hypotheses from it. Then, examining the expected probabilities for war in dyads with at least one democracy and using the rare-effects logistic regression technique, we test our theory. The results, particularly in the post-World War II era, are supportive of the claim that prior democratic experience and residual democratic norms continue to lessen the war propensity of reversed democracies. To explore our primary causal claims further, we conclude with two brief case studies of reversed democracies in Weimar Germany and Imperial Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]