Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper I confront a burgeoning conventional wisdom among foreign policy scholars which holds that the US should tend to succeed in efforts to engage autocratic rogue states, such as North Korea, Iran, and Syria. Rather, I argue that domestic political pressures in the US and domestic political opportunities in the autocratic taget state will impel US administrations to oversell and overcommit to engagement, and impel the target state to reciprocate US engagement with merely cosmeticor tactical behavioral concessions. I proceed to test this theory in the "hard case" of the US engagement of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Owing to the highly asymmetric bilateral balances of power and interests that grossly favored the US during this engagement attempt, domestic political pressures mitigated the Reagan Administration's inclination to conditionally engage the embattled Baathist regime in Baghdad so as to reform troublesome Iraqi behavior in such issue-areas as Iraq's continued support for terrorism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Previous research on transitions and regime change has examined only changes between democratic and non-democratic regime. Although democratic regimes are a relatively well defined category, non-democracy is essentially a residual category that lumps together both stable autocratic regimes and cases where different autocratic regimes replace one another in irregular transfers of power. In this paper, we develop a series of hypotheses on conditions affecting the likelihood that autocratic regimes will break down and be replaced by either new autocratic regimes or democratic regimes. We devise a new approach to identifying regimes and regime changes among non-democratic states, and estimate the conditional probabilities of transitions to new autocratic regimes and democracy among non-democracies. We find strong evidence suggesting that although some common factors are more likely to make autocratic re-gimes break down and can make both transitions to autocracy and democracy more likely, many factors influence the two types of transitions in quite different ways and some transitions are relatively more likely under different circumstances. Whereas domestic economic factors have a strong influence on the stability of autocratic regimes, international factors and prior experiences with democracy are strongly associated with the likelihood of transitions to democracy in the wake of the fall of a dictatorship. Lump-ing together �non-democracies� aggregates a very heterogeneous set of outcomes, and the factors affect-ing the prospects that a given autocratic regime will remain in power are quote different from the factors increasing the probability of irregular regime changes to new autocracies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Scholars tend to argue that the durability of autocratic regimes depend upon the regime type: a military regime usually endures longer than a one party or personalist regime. Scholars also find economic and ethnic fractionalization factors influence an autocratic regime’s ability to survive. Our paper examines the impact of an ignored but important factor, the size of public sector employment. It not only provides a good proxy for the size of vested interest groups, but reflects the social structure per se. Our hypothesis is autocratic states that have a higher percentage of their population employed in the public sector will have higher levels of regime durability. By building a cross national OLS model, we will test whether and how our hypothesis holds across autocratic regime types. We will also compare this factor’s impact upon democratic regimes.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The relationship between democratic and autocratic countries is like that of cats and dogs (Oneal and Ray 1997).This paper outlines the explanation of conflict escalation between democratic and non-democratic dyads once they have disputes. At the core of this analysis is the expectation that a similarity of national preferences (national affinity) and power parity are two key sources of conflict escalation. Because democratic leaders are constrained by internal politics, there will be more deliberations once democrats in disputes with autocrats. I argue that the differences of policy preferences and power parity will influence the conflict escalation between democratic and non-democratic dyads. These also represent the models of “willingness” and “opportunity” respectively._x000d_I simply reproduce the four levels of hostility in MID 3 between 1946 and 2000, regress with three main predictor variables, affinity between nations, power parity, and interaction term between affinity and power parity. By adopting the ordered probit model, I found that dissimilarity of policy preferences interacted with power parity and needs to be considered as the critical explanatory component for conflict escalations between democrats and autocrats.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Whereas a democratic public assess casualties heavily in determining a war’s costs, a similar intra-war assessment takes place in autocracies. Autocracies by definition have restricted franchise and this relatively small “selectorate” determines who will lead the state. Because elites in these regimes enjoy positions of influence with access to private goods and face the prospect of removal or punishment if the regime should fall, the costs of the failure of war policies can be very great. Using an original dataset of over 500 observations, several major interstate wars are examined in order to determine if an intra-war assessment is made by a dictator’s constituents. The findings indicate that elites in an autocracy who begin to assess military defeats or popular revolution as threats to the regime’s survival attempt to coerce changes in war policies or remove the executive from office. Typically an executive has invested personal prestige in a war, but under duress from his principals a leader might countenance demands for reduced mobilization and/or a more efficient use of resources mobilized for the war. As with democracies, autocracies might also have domestic political factors that condition their military efficacy.