Disarmed Democracies: Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force

by David P. Auerswald

Overview

In Disarmed Democracies: Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force, David P. Auerswald examines how the structure of domestic political institutions affects whether democracies use force or make threats during international disputes. Auerswald argues that the behavior of democracies in interstate conflict is shaped as much by domestic political calculations as by geopolitical circumstance. Variations in the structure of a democracy's institutions of governance make some types of democracies more likely to use force than others. To test his theory, Auerswald compares British, French, and U.S. behavior during military conflicts and diplomatic crises from the Cold War era to the present. He discusses how accountability and agenda control vary between parliamentary, presidential, and premier-presidential democracies and shows how this affects the ability of the democracy to signal its intentions, as well as the likelihood that it will engage in military conflict. His findings have implications for the study of domestic politics and the use of force, as well as of U.S. leadership during the next century.
This study will interest social scientists interested in the domestic politics of international security, comparative foreign policy, or the study of domestic institutions. It will interest those concerned with the exercise of U.S. leadership in the next century, the use of force by democracies, and the future behavior of democratizing nations.
David P. Auerswald is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472111206
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	03/08/2000
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

David P. Auerswald is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University.

Read an Excerpt

Disarmed Democracies
Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force

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By David P. Auerswald
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2000
University of Michigan
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-472-11120-6

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Chapter One Introduction: Domestic Institutions and Military Confrontations

Flexibility is a key component of militarized dispute behavior, yet its effects are often confusing. On the one hand, flexibility is advantageous during military conflicts because it allows decision makers to adapt policy to changing circumstances. This is not a modern realization. In the classic The Art of War, Sun Tzu repeatedly stressed the importance of flexibility for combat success. Sun Tzu's arguments on flexibility and success were not limited to the behavior of military units on the battlefield. When he discussed the necessity of flexibility, he included the flexible thinking of political elites, a flexible command structure, and political support for military operations. Given the appropriate military capabilities, a flexible leader can react to emerging circumstances by changing strategy or escalating or de-escalating at will. Such a leader can respond quickly to altered external events. The record of World War I supports Sun Tzu's conclusion that excessive rigidity can lead to battlefield disaster. Flexibility is thus often a key to combat success.

Flexibility has another, less sanguine face. Flexibility weakens the credibility of foreign policy commitments. In that sense, flexibility is disadvantageous to a state making coercive diplomacy threats. To borrow from Thomas Schelling, the key to coercive diplomacy success is to surrender one's own flexibility. Schelling called this the doctrine of the last clear chance: "a process of surrendering and destroying options that we might have been expected to find too attractive in an emergency," leaving an opponent with the final decision to avoid disaster. Schelling's intuition was that general knowledge that you can painlessly back down from the costly implementation of a threat decreases that threat's credibility. Flexibility in this sense is detrimental.

In this book I argue that the structure of domestic institutions of governance has a tremendous effect on the flexibility of democracies contemplating military conflicts. Domestic institutions and the intragovernmental bargaining they produce are critical for understanding democratic-state conflict behavior. A democracy's choices to initiate or refrain from conflict, to escalate or de-escalate once conflict begins, and to internationally signal its intentions are all affected by its domestic institutional structure.

Specifically, the use of force by democracies is in large part a product of the domestic circumstances confronting their chief executives, at least when the resulting conflict does not threaten the democracy's national survival. Those domestic circumstances vary predictably across democracies based on the structure of their domestic institutions. For example, U.S. presidents must garner public support before elections and maintain widespread congressional support if they involve the country in long-term military conflicts. Conflicts are domestic political risks without either of these prerequisites. Consider President Lyndon Johnson's decision to escalate in Vietnam. Johnson and his advisors reached their decision in 1964 but waited until early 1965, after the November 1964 national election, to announce this decision publicly and implement it on the ground. This was despite the fact that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave them congressional authorization to use force. George Bush's 1990 decision to double the number of troops deployed to the Persian Gulf and move from deterring an attack on Saudi Arabia to compelling an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was made in a similar manner. The Bush administration decided on their new policy in early October but announced that decision only after Congress recessed and the midterm elections were completed.

My argument is relatively straightforward. I first examine what domestic circumstances affect a democratic executive's decision to use force or make international threats. If we assume that chief executives want to maintain office, one important part of the executive's calculus will be how those entities with the power to directly terminate office tenure will react to actual or threatened military conflict. Depending on the democracy, executives are accountable to the public through elections, to the legislature through confidence votes, or both. Assuming that international failure or stalemate risks domestic punishment, an executive will become less adventuresome as its accountability to other domestic actors increases. Flexibility decreases as accountability increases, with possible benefits for coercive diplomacy at the expense of combat success.

A similar process occurs as the domestic impediments to conflict increase. The greater the chance of legislative input in conflict policy, the less chance there is for the executive to do what it sees as necessary to ensure international success and retain office tenure. An executive will be increasingly reluctant to initiate conflict or make threats as the executive's control of the domestic conflict agenda declines. In combination, accountability and agenda control allow us to predict that domestically strong executives-those who are rarely accountable and whose initiatives cannot be overturned by the legislature-will be more likely to make threats or use force than weak executives when involved in an international dispute. At the same time, however, their coercive diplomacy signals may suffer, which in itself may increase the chance of conflict.

Whether an executive is domestically strong or weak depends on its country's domestic institutional structure-the established rules of interaction between an executive, a legislature, and the public. Domestic institutions affect an executive's calculus by establishing the rules of accountability within democracies. Rules of accountability affect an executive's willingness to risk office tenure by participating in international conflicts. Domestic institutions also empower particular elites with decision-making authority during military conflicts while limiting others. Institutions thus determine the extent to which the legislature can challenge the executive's conflict decisions, with further implications for conflict success, the executive's office tenure, and decisions to use force. Finally, domestic institutional structure in large part determines whose signals are transmitted to the international community. In these three ways-by selecting decision makers and determining how they make decisions, by influencing decisional content, and by determining whose signals reach the international community-domestic institutional structure should have a large effect on democratic conflict behavior.

As domestic institutions change, so too should the executive's calculus of the domestic risks involved in using force or making threats. Comparing executives by democratic regime-type, I find that domestically strong presidents are more likely to use force or make coercive diplomacy threats than are weaker presidents or premiers in majority parliamentary governments, who in turn are more likely to use force or make threats than are premiers in coalition parliamentary governments. At the same time, domestically strong executives are less likely to strongly signal their intent than are domestically weak executives, further increasing the likelihood of conflict involving such states, though the next chapter discusses some significant exceptions to this rule. In sum, there is a great risk that strong executives will use force, with a somewhat lesser risk that weak executives will do so.

This argument has particularly stark implications for U.S. leadership during the coming century. As the world's sole remaining superpower, the United States is not likely to be challenged by a peer competitor for the foreseeable future. In particular, the United States will not face a serious threat to its national survival except possibly through nuclear accidents or environmental degradation. Instead, the United States is likely to face a series of local challenges from dissatisfied regimes, rogue states, or terrorist organizations. These noncritical threats are the types of challenges where the domestic institutional structure of the United States (or any other democracy) will affect its ability to respond with actual or threatened military force.

The question remains as to whether the United States can exercise full hegemonic leadership given the domestic institutional constraints in which its executive operates. One implication from this study is that the U.S. president is in a relatively weak position vis-à-vis the legislature compared to the situation in some of the country's democratic counterparts. This results in the United States' being severely hampered domestically when responding to international challenges. The solution is not to fundamentally revise U.S. institutions of governance. Rather, my findings should be a clarion call for U.S. leaders to take particular care when deciding to use force or make coercive diplomacy threats. Using force may be an attractive international option but impossible for domestic reasons. Therefore, U.S. leaders must recognize that the United States cannot respond militarily to every international dispute and should instead devise alternative means for hegemonic leadership. There are limits to U.S. military influence, and these should be recognized.

There are also dramatic implications for those instances when the U.S. president chooses to use force. As we will see in later chapters, presidents often worry that legislative interference will decrease their chances of combat success. To avoid legislative input, presidents use overwhelming force when entering into conflicts. Massive force increases the chances of a quick victory and gives the legislature little time to mobilize opposition, much less signal the international community about such disagreement. Moreover, a quick victory undercuts any motivation for legislative opposition because it maintains electoral support for the president. From a domestic institutional perspective, we should therefore expect U.S. presidents to use massive amounts of force or refrain from conflict altogether. This is indeed what we see (Auerswald and Cowhey 1997).

As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, my argument is generalizable beyond the United States to other great power democracies. Great power democracies vary predictably in their likelihood of using force. It is worth noting here that my argument is also generalizable to militarily weaker democracies with only modest assumptions regarding the emerging international order. Considering only their international imperatives, we might initially expect behavioral similarities across all militarily weaker powers, regardless of their domestic institutions, because military conflicts are more likely to threaten their national survival. Except in very unusual circumstances, we would expect these weak democracies to respond militarily to a threat to their survival and escalate when conflict begins in order to ensure victory-regardless of their institutional structure-because democratic leaders probably care more about national survival than any threat to office tenure resulting from the domestic institutional structure in which they operate. We also would expect militarily weak democracies to avoid potential conflicts and crises if those conflicts eventually might threaten their national survival. In either case, we might expect all militarily weaker democracies to behave identically because they are confronted with similar international dilemmas, a conclusion at odds with the behavioral variations I expect of their great power cousins.

Yet that conclusion depends on our assumptions regarding the international environment in which these weaker democracies operate. In recent years the United States has provided an often explicit and sometimes implicit security commitment to an increasing number of democracies. By that guarantee, military threats to the national survival of weaker democracies are arguably lower now than they have been at any time since World War II. Most armed conflicts or instances of coercive diplomacy are not likely to threaten the continued existence of these democracies. Therefore, we should expect their domestic institutional structures to produce the same varied conflict behavior as we see in their more powerful democratic cousins. A domestic institutional argument should be applicable to most conflicts involving weaker democracies for the foreseeable future.

My argument is also applicable to alliance behavior. The debate surrounding the inclusion of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) raised the question of what makes for a good alliance partner. My argument suggests that this question can be answered in large part by studying a prospective alliance partner's domestic institutional structure. Some domestic institutional structures, such as coalition parliamentary governments, should be good choices for preserving intra-alliance stability because of the inherent restraint on using force provided by their institutional structure. Domestically insulated presidential governments, on the other hand, represent the exact opposite extreme, making them bad choices for an alliance whose purpose is intra-alliance stability. The concluding chapter discusses these implications at length.

These policy predictions have implications for academic debates regarding the relative weight of domestic and international causes of conflict behavior. The more a leader's incentives are determined by domestic institutional pressures, the less likely that leader is to respond solely to international concerns. Leaders with strong domestic incentives to refrain from conflict will be more willing to do so despite countervailing international circumstances. The reverse is also true. Yet those democratic institutions that empower multiple elites may constrain their leader's ability to use force, regardless of that leader's actual willingness to do so. Those constrained leaders may believe that force is a useful instrument of statecraft-for whatever reason, be it for normative, balance of power, electoral, or personal concerns-but be unable or unwilling to use force due to domestic institutional impediments. Domestic restraints often take precedence over international imperatives in such institutional systems.

By extension, my domestic institutional approach has implications for how we think about the interaction of systemic- and domestic-level theories of international relations, despite this book not being directly concerned with relative international power, changing identity, or the transmission of international norms. This in no way denies that systemic-level theories are not important explanations of international behavior in their own right. They are. Yet in order for changing identity, norms of behavior, or concerns over relative power to affect state policy, they must be channeled through domestic institutional actors. By identifying when domestic political calculations are the prime determinant of executive behavior, domestic institutions help determine when conceptions of identity, norms of behavior, or relative power concerns are incorporated into conflict behavior. Domestic institutional analysis therefore answers questions prior to those of the reflectivist, realist, or liberal schools of thought: who are decision makers, how do they bargain over policy, how do they signal the international community, and what relative weight do they give international versus domestic incentives when deciding policy?

Explaining Democratic Conflict Behavior

Societal Pressure

My domestic institutional analysis represents the convergence of three very different literatures in international relations. One antecedent is state-level theory. Originally focused on the interaction of state-societal relations and international economic policy, applications in the security field have addressed the role of public opinion, pressure groups, and culture as a cause of variation in the conflict behavior of democracies. Where system-level theorists assume away domestic politics, state-level theorists frequently characterize domestic political analysis as an examination of the relationship between a unified state and the body politic, and when they do disaggregate the state, they do so in ways that miss a crucial effect of domestic politics on conflict behavior-that of intragovernmental interactions between domestic institutional actors. Intragovernmental interactions are an important component of conflict behavior precisely because state behavior often does not conform to recognized international imperatives, nor does it always follow the dictates of public pressure.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Disarmed Democracies by David P. Auerswald
Copyright © 2000 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents List of Tables....................ix
Acknowledgments....................xi
Chapter 1. Introduction: Domestic Institutions and Military Confrontations....................1
Chapter 2. A Theory of Domestic Institutions....................17
Chapter 3. The 1956 Suez Canal Crisis....................47
Chapter 4. The 1995 Bosnian War....................67
Chapter 5. Coercive Diplomacy Signals....................87
Chapter 6. Conclusions and Implications....................113
Appendix....................139
Notes....................143
References....................165
Index....................177