Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: 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.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: None. I am only offering my help as a discussant or a panel chair

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, we explore the effects of previous democratic experience on the conflict behavior of autocratic states. We find that these reversed democracies – autocratic states with prior periods of democratic governance – are less likely to go to war against democracies than other autocratic states. To explain this result, we develop a theoretical framework that integrates the institutional and normative legacies of previous governance, what we call the “footprint,” and the strength of the international democratic community. These two factors combine to constrain states’ conflict behavior, exerting a particularly strong effect on autocracies with previous democratic experience. The findings have important implications for the democratic peace literature, highlighting the need for better micro-level theory building to identify the causal mechanisms that produce the separate peace among democracies. Furthermore, our argument contributes to the emerging literature on the conflict behavior of autocratic states, providing an analytically useful means of distinguishing among different types of autocracies in order to better explain their varying behavior on the international scene.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: With the rise of new communication technologies, including digital cameras that enabled the world to see inside the U.S military prison at Abu Ghraib, news organizations have greater opportunities to independently document events. The question is whether leading news organizations can use such independent event documentation to build interpretations of events that challenge official framing. The data presented in this study show that despite available evidence and sources to support a counter-framing of the Abu Ghraib story in terms of a policy of torture, the leading national news organizations did not produce a frame that strongly challenged the Bush administration’s claim that Abu Ghraib was an isolated case of appalling “abuse” perpetrated by low-level soldiers. The press struggled briefly and in limited fashion with the question of whether events at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere constituted an administration policy of torture, and then largely dropped the torture question. Later events, such as the Senate confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, brought the issue of “torture” briefly back into the news, but the term was embedded in a memo connected to Gonzales, while references to Abu Ghraib continued to employ the frame of abuse. The case of Abu Ghraib offers a critical test of agreement and differences among theories of event-driven news, cascading activation, and indexing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Social transfer programs are thought to generate beneficiary groups who will act politically to defend "their" programs from retrenchment. But very little empirical research has been conducted to either verify or disconfirm the micro-foundations of this hypothesis, which lies at the heart of Pierson's "new politics of the welfare state" thesis as well as many more economistic analyses of welfare state politics. This paper tests empirically whether benefiting from pension systems leads individuals to greater support of the pension system status quo, net of other factors. It uses cross-dataset imputation to combine for the first time cross-nationally comparable individual-level data on reliance on public pensions with political attitudes towards pension programs. The hypothesis that public pension systems create policy feedbacks of self-interested beneficiaries supporting further pension spending is not supported in any of eleven European countries in either 1992 or 2001.