Variation in the International Conflict Behavior of Democracies: The Role of Domestic Institutions.

Does international conflict behavior vary between democracies? A great deal of recent literature has begun to examine this question. This literature has stressed the importance of domestic institutions but a consensus has yet to be reached as to what factors account for variation in behavior. The current paper examines the international conflict behavior of parliamentary democracies from 1946-1989. The paper attempts to make two contributions to the existing literature. First, the paper separates domestic institutions into structural and partisan and argues that these two types of institutional constraints have varied impacts on conflict behavior. Structural constraints will lead to more pacific behavior whereas partisan constraints will lead to more aggressive behavior. Second, the paper develops separate indices to measure structural and partisan constraints. These indices allow for more precise measurement between countries and account for more variation than dichotomous variables. The hypotheses are tested using logit analysis with robust standard errors and on two dependent variables drawn from the MIDS dataset. The paper looks at whether the parliamentary democracy initiated the dispute, and whether force was used. The results of the analysis offer support for the basic theory laid out in the paper when looking at the two dependent variables. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]