Domestic Politics and Interstate Rivalry

Most large-N research on recurrent conflict and rivalry has downplayed the role of domestic politics, either overlooking the domestic political context within states entirely or mentioning domestic politics only implicitly. This paper focuses explicitly on the domestic political actors and processes that may be relevant to processes of conflict recurrence, in order to develop a more domestically-grounded model of recurrent conflict and rivalry. Putnam's two-level game framework and Hagan's research on political oppositions are used to develop a general model of how domestic political actors contribute to the evolution of rivalry, and to reformulate past hypotheses on rivalry. The resulting model and hypotheses are examined through a plausibility probe using the example of the rivalry between Bolivia and Paraguay. Most large-N empirical research on recurrent conflict or rivalry has minimized or ignored the possible impact of domestic political factors in the outbreak, evolution, or ending of rivalries. As Mor (1997: 198) notes, most research on rivalries has followed a state-as-unitary-actor assumption, leaving no room for domestic factors. Where domestic factors have been considered in relation to rivalries, these factors have typically been treated only implicitly, and have been assigned a secondary role behind the international influences of the rivalry itself. The present paper reformulates the study of rivalry by considering the impact of domestic political pressures and constraints on foreign policy making. I develop a general two-level model of rivalry that considers the role of states' political leadership, non-executive governmental actors, public opinion, and politically active opinion leaders. This discussion of domestic politics is used to reformulate past hypotheses on rivalry, as well as to generate additional hypotheses not considered explicitly in past research. Although the resulting hypotheses are not tested directly in this paper, they are consistent with the results of a plausibility probe using the Bolivia-Paraguay rivalry. Adding Domestic Politics to Recurrent Conflict and Rivalry Moravcsik (1993: 9) argues that "the question facing international relations theorists today is not whether to combine domestic and international explanations into a theory of 'double-edged' diplomacy, but how best to do so." The first section of this paper proposes a way to study interstate rivalry through both domestic and international lenses. This examination begins with Putnam's (1988) notion of the twolevel game, which is then extended by identifying specific types of domestic actors and processes that might be involved in making foreign policy. It should be noted that these domestic political factors are very general and are expected to apply in any type of political system, whether democratic or authoritarian, parliamentary or presidential. As Hagan (1993) suggests, both democratic and authoritarian governments face important domestic political constraints; it is misleading to argue that all democratic ("open") systems offer equal constraints or that all authoritarian ("closed") systems are free from constraints. Putnam (1988: 436-437) emphasizes that the domestic portion of his model is meant to apply for both democratic and authoritarian states. Similarly, the arguments of Bueno de Mesquita, et al., (1992, 1995, 1997) are applied to democracies, monarchies, or autocracies, all of which are characterized by some type of domestic constituency that must be addressed. Thus, while there may be some differences in the effects of public opinion between democratic and monarchic systems (for example), for now these systems are treated together -although future work