Do Democratic Institutions Constrain or Inform? Contrasting Two Institutional Perspectives on Democracy and War

How do domestic political institutions affect the way states interact in international crises? In the last decade we have witnessed an explosion of interest in this question, thanks largely to the well-known claim that democratic states do not Ž ght wars with one another. Work on the ‘‘democratic peace’’ has generated a number of theoretical arguments about how practices, values, and institutions associated with democracy might generate distinctive outcomes.1Although the level of interest in this topic has focused much-needed attention on the interaction between domestic and international politics, the proliferation of competing explanations for a single observation is not entirely desirable. Progress in this area requires that researchers devise tests not only to support different causal stories but also to discriminate between them. In this article I construct an empirical test that can help discriminate between two sets of arguments that have emerged in this literature. The Ž rst set of arguments is generally referred to as the ‘‘institutional constraints’’ approach. Scholars in this tradition have argued that institutions promoting accountability and competition tend to increase the political risks associated with waging war.2 The second set of arguments shares this institutional perspective but focuses, not on the constraining role of democracy, but on its informational properties. Scholars in this tradition have argued that democratic institutions help reveal information about the government’s political incentives in a crisis by increasing the transparency of the political process and/or by improving a government’s ability to send credible signals.3 According to this logic, democracy facilitates peaceful con ict resolution by overcoming informational asymmetries that can cause bargaining to break down.