William J. Dixon

Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict.

The research reported here develops an explanation for the often-noted absence of international war between democratic states. This explanation is derived from a theoretical rationale centered on universal democratic norms for reconciling competing values and interests. I argue that democratic states locked in disputes are better equipped than others with the means for diffusing conflict situations at an early stage before they have an opportunity to escalate to military violence. Not only is this explanatory logic consistent with the published findings on democracy and war, but it also entails the novel empirical proposition that disputes between democracies are more amenable than are other disputes to peaceful settlements, the hypothesis I examine here. Analyses of contemporary interstate disputes reveal that even when potentially confounding factors are controlled, democratic opponents are significantly more likely to reach peaceful settlements than other types of disputants.

Democracy and the Management of International Conflict

The research reported here extends investigation of the democracy-war hypothesis by focusing on the norms of dispute resolution integral to the democratic process. If we extend these norms to the international arena, then it becomes reasonable to expect democratic states to adopt compromise solutions to international problems. One implication of this logic is that democracies are likely to be more amenable than others to efforts of third parties to resolve or ameliorate interstate disputes. This hypothesis is examined in the present study. A sample of strictly interstate disputes acquired from the Alker-Sherman disaggregated conflict set provide the basis for this inquiry. Democracy is assessed for each disputant party with the composite index from the Polity II data collection. In order to control for extraneous effects on the probability of management, the author develops a baseline model consisting of prior management activity, the costs of conflict, and the power of the disputants. Because the dependent variable in this analysis is a binary indicator, the author employs probit regression to estimate the effects of democracy while partialling out the controls. The empirical results show that democracy does carry the systematic positive influence on the probability of conflict management expected of it.

Third-party techniques for preventing conflict escalation and promoting peaceful settlement

Although agents employ a wide range of conflict management techniques in practice, scholars have evaluated only a few of these. A more complete empirical analysis of the spectrum of third-party procedures used to manage international crises reveals that two techniques in particular are most effective: mediation efforts and third-party activities to open or maintain lines of communication. The endpoints of preventing escalation and promoting peaceful settlement take into account the notion of conflict as a dynamic evolutionary process, consisting of several phases, which in turn affect the outcome of third-party management. Crisis management methods that have proved successful in a bipolar world may be similarly successful in the post-cold war environment, an issue future work must address.

Political Similarity and American Foreign Trade Patterns

International economic flows have become an increasingly prominent component of both international relations and domestic politics over the last two decades. Even though politically motivated governments have played a growing role in shaping these transactions, empirical studies have largely ignored the political determinants of international trade patterns. This study addresses that important gap in our understanding of the international political economy with particular reference to United States trade. We theorize that two aspects of the relations between nations should predict enhanced trade levels: similarity in political system and similarity in foreign policy orientation. We test this proposition for U.S. exports to 76 importing nations over an 18-year period in a pooled time- series design that controls for known influences on trade flows. Our results suggest that these two political factors have a substantial and predictable impact on U.S. export patterns. We consider some possible criticisms of our results along with some suggestions for future research.

Models of State High Court Decision Making in Sex Discrimination Cases

This paper examines state high court decision making on sex discrimination cases for the period 1971-81. Using logistic regression, several policy models drawn from the comparative state policy and judicial behavior literatures are employed to predict court votes on sex discrimination appeals. The final model emphasizes the importance of policy type, selection system, court reputation, sex of the appellent, and the presence of at least one woman on the court.

Democracy, Disputes, and Negotiated Settlements:

The argument that democracies are less belligerent toward one another because of their experience with mediation, negotiation, and compromise at the domestic level suggests that negotiated dispute settlements are more likely between relatively democratic states than other conflicting pairs. Militarized Interstate Dispute data and Polity IIId and Freedom House ratings of democracy are used to examine the propensities of disputants to resolve their grievances through negotiated means. Findings suggest a strong positive influence for mutual democracy. Specifically, the more democratic the less democratic member of a conflictual dyad, the more likely it is their dispute will be resolved through a negotiated settlement. This finding also holds across varying degrees of dyadic relative power and supports existing literature that chronicles the pacific conditioning power of democratic norms for several areas of interstate relations.

The Military Burden and Basic Human Needs

This study examines ways in which military factors influence the provision of basic human needs once the effects of aggregated social wealth and certain political aspects of the state are removed. Three channels of influence are examined: the defense burden on the economy, the scope of military participation in society, and military control of the ruling regime. We analyze these influences by regressing an index of physical well-being, the PQLI, on measures of each factor for a sample of 116 contemporary national societies. Our findings indicate that military attributes do indeed have some impact on the provision of basic needs even with other important influences removed. Military participation is found to make a positive contribution to welfare performance; military spending, on the other hand, appears to inhibit welfare outcomes, but only when controlling for the size of the military establishment. Military control of the government has no discernible effect on our measure of welfare performance.

Third-party intermediaries and negotiated settlements, 1946-2000

Past studies regarding the success and/or failure of conflict management activities have brought about a wide range of results. In this paper we attempt to gain more definitive conclusions about effectiveness by accomplishing two tasks. First, using a basic theoretical framework we identify expectations of efficacy as they relate to differences between states, coalitions, and IGOs. Second, we also examine the utility of different conflict management techniques in an effort to place in greater perspective the effectiveness of mediation, the most utilized technique of third party intermediaries. Using a new dataset on third-party intermediary behavior in militarized disputes from 1946 to 2000, we find that while all conflict managers are useful in assisting belligerents in reaching a negotiated settlement, IGOs are the most effective. Additionally, while mediation is an effective technique to produce settlements, military intermediary actions, such as peacekeeping, are much more useful.

Reciprocity in United States-Soviet Relations: Multiple Symmetry or Issue Linkage?*

This study examines two alternative process models of reciprocal interaction in post-war United States-Soviet relations. The multiple symmetry model holds that each dimension of interaction is evaluated and acted on independently so that an accurate portrayal one nations responsiveness to another must be specified at the micro level of individual issues or sectors. By contrast, the issue-linkage model admits the possibility of cross-sector matching of behavior and in so doing requires a speciflcation of responsiveness to encompass behavior on several dimensions simultaneously. An empirical analysis using COPDAB events for the period between 1953 and 1978 revealed that both models are operative but in different issue domains. The implications of these results are discussed in the concluding section.

Basic needs and growth-welfare trade-offs

Can nations achieve both growth and equity or must one value be sacrificed to attain the other? The controversy over trade-offs between aggregate economic performance and social welfare lies at the heart of recent debates on development policy. This study reviews these debates, identifies the specific forms of likely trade-offs, and examines the evidence over a twenty-five-year period for a sample of 104 nations. We employ a cross-national panel design to ask two questions: (1) Does basic needs achievement compromise future growth? (2) Does rapid growth undermine future needs achievement? We find no evidence for the orthodox view that basic needs fulfillment or improvement compromise growth. To the contrary, we find that basic needs attainment facilitates long-term economic growth. The evidence is somewhat less clear regarding the second question, although it appears that rapid growth does not produce substantial basic needs improvements.