Jeff Carter

Social Revolution, the State, and War How Revolutions Affect War-Making Capacity and Interstate War Outcomes

Democracy has been the primary focus of our efforts to understand the impact of domestic institutions on processes of international conflict. In this article, we examine how a particular nondemocratic regime type, postrevolutionary states, affects military capabilities and war outcomes. Drawing on scholarship that conceptualizes revolutions as a unique class of modernizing events that result in stronger state structures, we argue that postrevolutionary states should be better able to mobilize populations and economic resources for military purposes. Tests performed on a comprehensive sample of twentieth-century states and interstate wars confirm our predictions: postrevolutionary states have larger, better funded militaries and achieve more successful war outcomes.

The Political Cost of War Mobilization in Democracies and Dictatorships

Recent research concludes fighting or losing an interstate war is not costlier for democratic leaders than dictators, which implies most of our institutional explanations for differences in conflict behavior across regime type rest on empirically tenuous assumptions. I argue military mobilization, a fundamental but often overlooked aspect of war, should be costlier for democrats than dictators. Waging interstate war is associated with higher military spending and, often, lower social spending. Variation across regime type in the representation of the general public, civilian elite, and military in leaders’ winning coalitions should make democrats more likely than dictators to lose power given wartime patterns of government spending. This argument finds support during the period from 1950 to 2001. My findings provide microfoundations for a number of existing empirical results and suggest that differences in the conflict behavior of democracies and dictatorships should be largest when waging war requires a significant mobilization effort.

Communist Legacies and Democratic Survival in a Comparative Perspective Liability or Advantage

The literature on the legacies of communism for democratization has focused almost exclusively on explaining variation in the democratic experiences within the postcommunist space. While this is useful in many ways, it says little about a communist legacy in comparison to other types of antecedent regimes. We take a different approach, looking at the question by comparing postcommunist legacies to those of other states through the prism of democratic survival. One key implication of this shift in perspective is that the literature on democratic survival highlights a range of social and economic factors that are likely to help postcommunist democracies survive, which stands in stark contrast to the postcommunist democratic performance literature that emphasizes potential disadvantages. We assess these competing and contradictory implications by analyzing the relative likelihood of democratic survival using a sample of all third-wave democracies from 1970 to 2010. We find that postcommunist democracies are neither systematically more nor less likely to fail than other democracies. Further, we find no evidence that the prospects of failure are significantly affected by past membership in the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc, the type of communist regime, or the number of years under communist rule. These findings provide little evidence that the problems of postcommunist democratization pose a more difficult set of conditions for democratic survival.

Birth Legacies, State Making, and War

International relations researchers study the interactions of states in the international system. Excluded from almost all such analyses is any consideration of how those states became members of the international system in the first place. State making researchers, in contrast, focus on the formation experiences of states. Drawing on insights from both approaches, we argue that states with positive birth legacies should be more successful at state making and achieve more favorable outcomes than states without positive birth legacies. As fighting and winning wars are a common pathway to political development, states with positive birth legacies should be more likely to participate in and win interstate and civil wars. Statistical analyses of all states in the international system from 1816 to 2002 support our expectations.