The Impact of American Hegemony on the Probability of Intervention in Interstate War: Reassessing Our Explanations for Third Party Joining.

Much of the quantitative conflict literature employs data sets that draw a large portion of their cases from 1945-1990. This historical period coincides with the U.S.-Soviet bipolar competition and security arrangements associated with that competition. A debate within the democratic peace literature has emerged between those who view the democratic peace as a general phenomenon, and those who see democracy?s effect on international conflict as largely a function of the particular circumstances of the Cold War alignment. The critics of a general relationship between democracy and war focus specifically on the role of the United States as a leader of one of the bi-polar alliance blocks The possibility that observed relationships between democracy and war could be dependent on the particular historical circumstances of the Cold War raises the question: To what extent are other empirical findings about international conflict also a function of the hegemonic influence exercised by the superpowers during period? Using ordinal logistic regression to examine the pattern of third party joining this paper re-examines the extent to which the relationship between democracy and intervention as well as the relationships between variables commonly used to explain third party interventions in the conflict literature, such as proximity, power status, democracy, trade and alliances, are a function of the intervention choices of the United States during the Cold War. The paper finds that the intervention choice of the United States is by far the most important predictor of the intervention choices of other third parties to interstate wars. And that accounting for the intervention choices of the United States ?explains? away much of the general relationships observed in earlier studies. Interestingly enough though reduced in substantive importance, a statistical the relationship between shared democracy and joining remains even after accounting for U.S. intervention choice in this period. This finding suggests that the relationship between shared democracy and third party joining is not entirely dependent upon the exercise of American leadership during the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]