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Domestic Institutions and International Conflict

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Domestic Institutions and International Conflict

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Domestic Institutions and
International Conflict
GIACOMO CHIOZZA

Abstract
From the democratic peace to the current wave of research on political leaders, the
study of the connection between domestic politics and international conflict has been
one of the most dynamic areas of study in International Relations in the past 25
years. This essay takes stock of the past 25 years of research on how domestic politics
underpins the dynamics of war and peace in the international arena. It reviews the
foundational arguments envisioned by Kant in 1795 and later grounded in the scientific canon by Russett and Oneal. The essay then argues that research that evaluates
how political leaders make decisions under different institutional arrangements is
likely to be one of the most fruitful lines of research in International Relations in the
years to come. It illustrates this claim with a review of two alternative perspectives
on leaders and international conflict.

INTRODUCTION
The past 25 years have witnessed a major transformation in the study of
international relations. Long regarded as an ancillary factor (Waltz, 1959),
domestic politics has now become a major explanatory mechanism for world
politics. We have reached a point whereby “Today almost every important
dependent variable in the international arena is explored through the lens of
domestic politics.” (Bueno de Mesquita & Smith, 2012, p. 162).
As the policy agenda changed from containment to democracy enlargement at the end of the Cold War, scholars started to recognize that, while
countries with all possible forms of domestic political institutions fought
wars, a specific regime–democracy–defied the logic of anarchy and steered
a peaceful course through the perilous waters of world politics (Maoz &
Abdolali, 1989). This recognition sparked an enormous research agenda that
sought to discover what made democracy special in the international arena
(Schultz, 2013).
In this review, I take stock of the knowledge accumulated over 25 years
of research on domestic politics and international conflict and identify
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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emerging trends in the scholarly agenda. I argue that research that focuses
on political leaders, their incentives and their characteristics, will emerge as
a dynamic field in the study of international conflict.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
From the early propositions in Kant’s (1983) philosophical project for a
Perpetual Peace (Doyle, 1986), two major lines of investigation emerged
to explain democracies’ international behavior: explanations that emphasize the normative aspects of democratic polities and explanations that
emphasize their institutional and decision-making features (Russett, 1993).
The cultural and institutional explanations were presented as competing
explanations in early studies (Maoz & Russett, 1993). However, attempts to
disentangle them have been inconclusive (Morgan & Campbell, 1991; Dixon,
1993; Owen, 1997; Rousseau, 2005).
The findings by Mansfield and Snyder (2005), who have shown that democratizing countries are more likely to get embroiled in militarized disputes
because fledgling democratic institutions are unable to restrain the articulation of nationalist and bellicose demands, give credence to the importance of
norms over the domestic institutions of electoral democracy. While it is easier to establish formal institutions than the ethos that is embodied in those
institutions (Veblen, 1915; Putnam, Leonardi, & Nanetti, 1993), as democracies consolidate, norms and institutions should go hand in hand. Moreover,
this should be reflected in the way we account for democracies’ international
behavior.
Many challenges have been mounted to the logic and the empirical foundations of the democratic peace. However, even in the face of sharp criticism from a posse of seasoned skeptics, the democratic peace, and its ancillary propositions, have fared very well: the finding still stands, while those
of the critics’ have been found wanting (for arguments and counterarguments, see Brown, Lynn-Jones, & Miller, 1996; Reiter & Stam, 2002; Brown,
Coté, Lynn-Jones, & Miller, 2011; Schneider & Gleditsch, 2013). “In a subject
of study where reliable insights are rare,” Dafoe, Oneal, and Russett (2013,
p. 213) conclude, “the robust finding that democracies are more peaceful
toward each other remains an important empirical regularity for future scholarship to build upon.”
In the wake of the democratic peace revolution, war can no longer be seen as
a permanent feature of international politics whose origin lies in cold wars
brought about by the anarchic ordering of the international arena (Waltz,
1979). Rather, war becomes a possible outcome in a pattern of strategic interactions, which begins with a conflict of interest. Therefore, goals, perceptions,
and decision-making processes in the domestic arena cannot be excluded

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from the study of world politics. International constraints and opportunities,
on the one hand, and domestic costs and benefits, on the other, enter into the
decision calculus of political leaders who act in the name of the state on the
world stage. As new theories emerge to explain world politics, this is likely to
be the enduring legacy of the research pioneered by Babst (1964) and brought
to maturity by Russett and Oneal (2001).
EARLY WORK ON LEADERS AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT
A second line of analysis provides a foundation for the study of the connection between domestic politics and international conflict, the diversionary
war proposition, which contends that domestically embattled leaders would
resort to war to shore up their domestic support and remain in power (Hazelwood, 1975; James, 1987; Miller, 1995). Unlike the democratic peace literature,
however, the diversionary war proposition is an embattled field of research
that has generated an enormous amount of theoretical and empirical work,
but little consensus. To this date, the scope conditions and the empirical manifestations of the theory are contested (Levy, 1989; Oakes, 2012).
Despite its shortcomings, however, the diversionary war literature has
served as the springboard for a wave of research that explicitly seeks to
connect the incentives of leaders, the institutions within which they rule their
countries, and the patterns of war and peace. Both for the democratic peace
and for the diversionary war propositions, a fruitful theoretical development
has come from the scholars who built their theories on the conceptualization
of democracy in Riker’s (1982) political theory (Fearon, 1994; Bueno de
Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, & Morrow, 2003; Debs & Goemans, 2010). In
Riker’s perspective, democratic institutions favor political accountability by
allowing voters to replace the political leaders they do not like (anymore).
Conversely, authoritarian institutions insulate leaders from political failure
by raising the costs of replacing the incumbent leaders.
The implication of this conceptualization is that leaders would make
choices on the international arena with the knowledge that they might pay
a price if they fail. Therefore, scholars who study the connection between
domestic politics and international conflict evaluate the impact of international political outcomes on leaders’ chances of staying in power. Voters
would reward or punish leaders on the basis of their past performance. Non
democratic leaders, on the other hand, would need to make sure they would
have enough resources to pay off supporters, should they suffer a political
or military defeat (Goemans, 2000).
This logic underpins one of the most prominent arguments about domestic
politics and international conflict, Fearon’s (1994) audience cost theory. The
theory argues that in political regimes where leaders can be easily removed
from power, coercive threats are more credible. This occurs because leaders in

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high audience costs regimes face punishment if they engage their countries in
an international dispute and then back down. Thus, because of the attached
cost of a failed escalation, leaders get involved in crises only when they are
willing to stand firm and fight. This mechanism, therefore, yields credibility
to the foreign policy messages that leaders in high audience cost countries use
in crisis diplomacy. Consequently, states with high audience costs are able to
conduct their affairs in the international arena effectively and peacefully.
Theoretically and empirically, audience cost theory raises many questions
(Schultz, 2001; Snyder & Borghard, 2011; Trachtenberg, 2012). Why should
the audience always punish leaders who back down in a crisis? As a strategic
agent itself, the audience would assess alternatives: on the one hand, the
audience could punish the leader who backed down but, in so doing,
the audience would run the risk that “the dreaded communists” would
come to power; on the other hand, the audience could forgive the leader
who tarnished the national honor by backing down and, in so doing, keep
“the dreaded communists” out of power. In other words, the conditions
under which the punishment of leaders would be an equilibrium strategy
in the subgame that occurs after the leader backed down in a crisis are
undertheorized.
In its original formulation, the choices of the audience are outside the
theoretical purview of Fearon’s model. Building upon Fearon’s logic,
however, Smith (1998) demonstrates that voters who cast their votes on the
basis of past performance and assess candidates only on the basis of their
competence–that is, voters who do not consider partisan positions in foreign
policy because foreign policy is seen as a public good – would always
punish the leaders who back down after an escalation. In Smith’s model, an
escalation followed by a retreat is the behavior of incompetent leaders.
Empirically, the question becomes what political regimes impose higher
audience costs on their leaders. Fearon (1994, p. 582) posited it as “a plausible working hypothesis” that it would be democracies. Indeed, the electoral
mechanism makes it easier to replace leaders. However, few authoritarian
leaders are so insulated from their supporters to be immune from audience
costs (Weeks, 2008).
As an empirical matter, the impact of foreign policy outcomes on leaders’
hold on power was a question with no clear answers in the literature in the
mid-1990s. In a pioneering effort, Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson (1995)
investigated how war outcomes affected leaders’ time in office in both
democratic and non democratic countries. Starting from the assumption
that leaders only care about staying in power, the Bueno de Mesquita and
Siverson (1995) study shows that democratic leaders that engage their countries in war subject themselves to an increased hazard of losing power. Thus,
Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson (1995) find a linchpin that connects leaders’

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personal motivation and the pursuit of policies that enhance the security
of the state. Failure in the international arena is political ammunition for
the domestic opposition. This was a major finding because it demonstrated
that the joint assessment of both domestic and international conditions was
central to any foreign-policy decision-making process. Even while they
are involved in the high politics of the international arena, policy-makers
always have an eye on the consequences their actions might have on their
own domestic power positions.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Where does the literature on domestic politics and international conflict stand now? I identify two strands in the literature that focus on
the question of how forward looking, and politically motivated, agents
make choices in the international arena. The first strand is a minimalist,
Milton-Friedman-esque approach (Friedman, 1953; Stigler & Becker, 1977),
that eschews the task of measuring leaders’ preferences and evaluates the
consequences of alternative institutional arrangements; the second strand
seeks to measure leaders’ policy preferences in a more descriptively detailed
manner and, from that, to derive hypotheses on leaders’ foreign policy
choices.
THE MINIMALIST APPROACH
The two most encompassing statements of how leaders provide a theoretically grounded microfoundation for the connection between domestic politics and international conflict are by Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) and
Chiozza and Goemans (2011). Both theories share a minimalist approach to
leaders’ preferences, that is, they postulate a specific set of goals as a reasonable approximation for what motivates leaders in power. The theories differ
in terms of their explanatory mechanisms: coalition building and the balance
of private and public goods for Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003); the effects of
international conflict on the personal fate of leaders out of office for Chiozza
and Goemans (2011).
Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) build a comprehensive theory of politics
that explains not only the variation between war and peace but also economic prosperity and political freedom. Theirs is a leaders theory of politics, insofar as it posits leaders as the key decision-making agents. However,
what explains politics are not leaders per se, but the institutions within which
they rule. All that pertains to leaders is summarized in the assumption that
they seek to remain in power. Leaders’ choices are, therefore, instrumental to
that goal.

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The fundamental innovation in Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s (2003) theory is
the claim that all leaders need to maintain the support of a winning coalition
within the selectorate, that is, “the set of people with a say in choosing leaders and with a prospect of gaining access to special privileges doled out by
leaders.” (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003, p. xi) Depending on the relative size
of the winning coalition and the selectorate, leaders will find it more advantageous for their survival goals to provide different combinations of public
goods, that is, goods that benefit all the members of the political community,
and private goods, that is, goods that only benefit specific beneficiaries in the
leaders’ winning coalition.
From parsimonious premises, Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) derive an
overall characterization of politics, whereby “Democratic politics in our theory is a competition in competence to produce public goods; autocratic politics centers on the purchase of the loyalty of key supporters.” (Morrow, Bueno
de Mesquita, Siverson, & Smith, 2008, p. 394) Specifically, for the study of
international conflict, Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s (2003, p. 250) theory claims
additional empirical content beyond the democratic peace propositions with
respect to wars of imperial or colonial expansion, concession in negotiations,
and levels of war effort. However, as it stands, the theory has received a
major empirical challenge from Clarke and Stone (2008), who questioned the
measurement and modeling of Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s key explanatory
variable, the ratio between the winning coalition and the selectorate. In this
respect, Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s theory is still awaiting for a more definitive test based on better measures, a task to which Morrow et al. (2008, p. 399)
themselves are attending.
The question of the costs and benefits of international conflict for office
seeking leaders was also taken up by Chiozza and Goemans (2003, 2004)
who asked how, compared to staying at peace, conflict involvement and conflict outcomes would affect leaders’ hold on power. In so doing, Chiozza
and Goemans (2003, 2004) engaged the findings in Bueno de Mesquita and
Siverson (1995) and started to place the survival implications of international
conflict behavior on a firmer foundation. Specifically, Chiozza and Goemans
(2004) showed that, in the case of democratic leaders, conflict outcomes do
not significantly affect the risk of losing office, while, in the case of authoritarian leaders, a defeat in either an international crisis or a war significantly
increases the hazard of office removal. The findings in Chiozza and Goemans
(2004) support the idea that war is not necessarily costly for leaders, contrary
to the foundational proposition in Fearon (1995). However, at the same time,
it raised the question of how leaders would then respond to the potential benefits of international conflict. Why would authoritarian leaders start a war
if that implies higher risks of losing office? Why would leaders start a war

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when they are more secure in office if involvement in a crisis as a challenger
reduces the risk of removal from office?
Chiozza and Goemans (2011) answer these questions by considering two
components in leaders’ utility functions. They posit that leaders not only
care about staying in power, but they also worry about their fates when out of
office. They then distinguish two alternative ways through which leaders can
be deposed from power: through regular, constitutional, means or through
forcible, violent, means. Leaders who lose power through regular means
rarely suffer personal punishment in the form of exile, imprisonment or
death, while leaders who lose power through forcible means almost always
suffer personal punishment. With a simple innovation in the specification
of leaders’ objectives, Chiozza and Goemans (2011) are able to derive novel
propositions about why and when leaders would initiate international
conflict. Specifically, Chiozza and Goemans (2011) show that leaders who
rule in countries where the mechanisms of leadership replacement are
institutionalized and peaceful have much to lose and not much to gain from
international conflict. As a consequence, they would initiate conflict when
they are secure in power. Conversely, for leaders who face the prospect
of a forcible removal, and the attendant consequences on their lives and
freedoms, international conflict offers the opportunity to disrupt the conspirators’ plots against their rule. Such leaders, therefore, would be more
likely to initiate international conflict. Such leaders, in other words, would
be fighting for their survival. Empirically, Chiozza and Goemans (2011)
find ample support for their argument by using a multi-method approach
that combines statistical modeling and a detailed historical examination of
Central American leaders between 1840 and 1918.
LEADERS AS INDIVIDUALS
A second strand in the literature takes a closer look at leaders, their ideas,
preferences, beliefs, experiences, cognitive styles, and proclivities. This
approach, which harks back to the pioneering work on leaders in world
politics by Hermann (1977, 1980), and to the work on leadership in political
psychology (Post, 2005), claims that leaders, as the key decision makers
in a country, can steer the course of history in different directions. As a
consequence, leaders can potentially become the major explanatory force
behind the dynamics of war and peace.
Chiozza and Goemans’s (2011, p. 201) hierarchical model of international
conflict shows that about one third of the empirical variation between peace
and international conflict can be attributed to the characteristics of the
leaders in power. However, how to capture that variation in a systematic
and theoretically grounded manner has remained a vexing problem. Careful
process tracing has provided insightful explanations in specific cases, such

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as the ideas of the new leaders that came to power in the Soviet Union in the
mid-1980s (Breslauer, 2002), the psychological orientation of leaders who
pursue nuclear weapons (Hymans, 2006), and US military interventions
(Saunders, 2011). However, is it all idiosyncratic, or is there any systematic
pattern that connects the features of leaders to international conflict?
Three major data collection efforts are currently under way aimed at
answering this question. The first, by Horowitz and Stam (2011), codes the
military, educational, occupational, and family characteristics of leaders; the
second, by Leeds and Mattes, codes the partisan sources of support for the
leaders in power (Carroll, Leeds, & Mattes, 2012); the third, by Colgan (2013),
codes whether the incumbent leader acquired power through revolutionary
means. A fourth line of investigation assesses the extent to which the
presence of women in decision-making positions affects conflict dynamics
(Regan & Paskeviciute, 2003; Hudson, Ballif-Spanvill, Caprioli, & Emmett,
2012). In all these instances, the underlying hypothesis is that leaders with
different backgrounds and with different sources of partisan support have
systematically different preferences on matters of foreign policy.
This strand in the literature, therefore, has taken seriously Moravcsik’s
(1997) plea to take preferences seriously. However, while it is plausible
to attribute to leaders different foreign policy preferences on the basis of
their backgrounds, this approach faces a major modeling challenge. As we
have known since the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, leaders do not
make choices as they please, but they make them under specific historical
conditions (Marx, 1926). If we translate Marx’s argument in the language of
experimental research, leaders with different preferences are not distributed
randomly over time and across countries. They emerge for specific reasons,
which would need to be modeled ex-ante to make valid causal inferences
about how preferences explain the variation between war and peace.
In other words, why would a leader with military experience or a woman
gain power at a specific time in the history of a country? Pinker (2011, pp.
685–686) makes this point with respect to gender: “To be sure, a shift from
male to female influence in decision-making may not be completely exogenous. In a society in which rapacious invaders may swoop in at any moment,
the costs of defeat to both sexes can be catastrophic, and anything short of
the most truculent martial values may be suicidal. A female-tilted value system may be a luxury enjoyed by a society that is already safe from predatory invasion.” As the scholars grapple with this methodological challenge
through clever research design (Dafoe & Caughey, 2011), the fact remains that
domestic politics, and its institutional context, would continue to underpin
the analysis of the determinants of world politics.

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GOING FORWARD
For 25 years, the study of domestic politics and international conflict has been
a dynamic research agenda in International Relations. As we have taken stock
of the main lines of research, we may wonder how it is going to progress. If we
proceed inductively, we might note how some scholars are seeking to provide
better specifications, and better measures, of the institutional arrangements
of authoritarian leaders (Svolik, 2012; Weeks, 2012). Other scholars are seeking to evaluate the trade-offs between military and welfare spending and
the concomitant costs of military mobilization under different institutional
arrangements (Carter, 2014). Still others focus on the consequences of leadership change for intrawar dynamics (Croco, 2011). In other words, there is
more “out there” we do not know than there is in our theories and empirical
findings that we know to be true.
Even more provocatively, the study of international conflict from the
perspective of leaders might provide a new way to engage the logic of
the dominant model in the study of war: the bargaining model (Wagner,
2000; Reiter, 2003). Originally sketched by Clausewitz (1976), popularized by
Blainey (1988), and formalized by Fearon (1995), the bargaining model of war
posits that three, and only three, mechanisms explain why rational agents
are unable to solve a conflict of interests in a mutually satisfactory manner
that would avoid the costs of war: asymmetric information, commitment
problems, and issue indivisibility. Not only can each of these mechanisms be
(re)-assessed from the point of view of leaders, as is the case in Goemans’s
(2000) theory of war termination or in Wolford (2012) strategic models of
leadership turnover and crisis bargaining. But also, if war is not negative sum,
as assumed in the bargaining model, and leaders can reap private benefits
(Chiozza & Goemans, 2004), the field opens up for new theories of war and
peace.
If a bet needs to be made, research that explores the connection between
leaders and international outcomes in different institutional settings, which
we may call leader-centric research, is going to be a rewarding endeavor for
practical and intellectual reasons. Practically, the availability of systematic
data on leaders (Goemans, Gleditsch, & Chiozza, 2009) allows scholars to
test alternative leader-centric theories of international conflict. Intellectually,
by placing leaders at the center of the analysis, leader-centric research makes
politics, and the struggle for power and control, the central focus of analysis.
Leader-centric research is, therefore, doable and relevant.
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Post, J. M. (Ed.) (2005). The psychological assessment of political leaders: With profiles of
Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Putnam, R. D., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. Y. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic
traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Regan, P. M., & Paskeviciute, A. (2003). Women’s access to politics and peaceful
states. Journal of Peace Research, 40(3), 287–302.
Reiter, D. (2003). Exploring the bargaining model of war. Perspectives on Politics, 1(1),
27–43.
Reiter, D., & Stam, A. C. (2002). Democracies at war. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Riker, W. H. (1982). Liberalism against populism: A confrontation between the theory of
democracy and the theory of social choice. Prospect Hights, IL: Waveland Press.
Rousseau, D. L. (2005). Democracy and war: Institutions, norms, and the evolution of international conflict. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Russett, B. (1993). Grasping the democratic peace: Principles for a post-cold war world.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Russett, B., & Oneal, J. R. (2001). Triangulating peace: Democracy, interdependence, and
international organizations. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Saunders, E. N. (2011). Leaders at war: How presidents shape military interventions.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Schneider, G., & Gleditsch, N. P. (Eds.) (2013). Assessing the capitalist peace. New York,
NY: Routledge.
Schultz, K. (2013). Domestic politics and international relations. In W. Carlsnaes, T.
Risse & B. A. Simmons (Eds.), Handbook of international relations (2ndChapter 19,
ed., pp. 478–502). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Schultz, K. A. (2001). Looking for audience costs. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45(1),
32–60.
Smith, A. (1998). International crises and domestic politics. American Political Science
Review, 92(3), 623–638.

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Snyder, J., & Borghard, E. D. (2011). The cost of empty threats: A penny, not a pound.
American Political Science Review, 105(3), 437–456.
Stigler, G. J., & Becker, G. S. (1977). De gustibus non est disputandum. American Economic Review, 67(2), 76–90.
Svolik, M. W. (2012). The politics of authoritarian rule. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Trachtenberg, M. (2012). Audience costs: An historical analysis. Security Studies,
21(1), 3–42.
Veblen, T. (1915). The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. New
York, NY: Macmillan.
Wagner, R. H. (2000). Bargaining and war. American Journal of Political Science, 44(3),
469–484.
Waltz, K. N. (1959). Man, the state, and war: A theoretical analysis. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press.
Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of international politics. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Weeks, J. L. (2008). Autocratic audience costs: Regime type and signaling resolve.
International Organization, 62(1), 35–64.
Weeks, J. L. (2012). Strongmen and straw men: Authoritarian regimes and the initiation of international conflict. American Political Science Review, 106(2), 326–347.
Wolford, S. (2012). Incumbents, successors, and crisis bargaining: Leadership
turnover as a commitment problem. Journal of Peace Research, 49(4), 517–530.

FURTHER READING
Readers interested in pursuing the study of domestic politics and international conflict will benefit from reading Kant’s treatise on the Perpetual Peace.
In a nutshell, Kant elaborated the key arguments for why institutions that
are responsive to the public will create the conditions for peace in the international arena. All modern treatments of the connection between domestic
politics and international conflict owe a huge intellectual debt to Kant. Triangulating Peace, the book by Russett & Oneal published in 2001, is the modern
pinnacle of the line of analysis triggered by Kant and also an exemplar manifesto of the scientific study of politics. From such a vantage point, readers
can then explore models of strategic interaction such as Fearon’s theory of
the audience costs and the more recent treatments by Bueno de Mesquita
et al. (2003) and Chiozza & Goemans (2011). To keep things into perspective,
readers will also benefit from reading the foremost statement of the skeptics,
namely Waltz’s 1959 treatise, Man, the State, and War.
GIACOMO CHIOZZA SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Giacomo Chiozza is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt
University. He earned his undergraduate degree at the Università degli Studi

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

di Milano in 1997 and his PhD. in Political Science at Duke University in 2004.
Since then, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic
Studies at Harvard University and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of expertise include
anti-Americanism, international conflict, and statistical modeling. He is the
author of Anti-Americanism and the American World Order (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and Leaders and International Conflict, with H.E. Goemans
(Cambridge University Press, 2011), which won the Joseph S. Lepgold Book
Prize in 2012. In 2008/09, he was a member of the American Political Science
Association Presidential Taskforce on US Standing in World Affairs. For more
information, please access his website at http://www.chiozza.org.
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Domestic Institutions and
International Conflict
GIACOMO CHIOZZA

Abstract
From the democratic peace to the current wave of research on political leaders, the
study of the connection between domestic politics and international conflict has been
one of the most dynamic areas of study in International Relations in the past 25
years. This essay takes stock of the past 25 years of research on how domestic politics
underpins the dynamics of war and peace in the international arena. It reviews the
foundational arguments envisioned by Kant in 1795 and later grounded in the scientific canon by Russett and Oneal. The essay then argues that research that evaluates
how political leaders make decisions under different institutional arrangements is
likely to be one of the most fruitful lines of research in International Relations in the
years to come. It illustrates this claim with a review of two alternative perspectives
on leaders and international conflict.

INTRODUCTION
The past 25 years have witnessed a major transformation in the study of
international relations. Long regarded as an ancillary factor (Waltz, 1959),
domestic politics has now become a major explanatory mechanism for world
politics. We have reached a point whereby “Today almost every important
dependent variable in the international arena is explored through the lens of
domestic politics.” (Bueno de Mesquita & Smith, 2012, p. 162).
As the policy agenda changed from containment to democracy enlargement at the end of the Cold War, scholars started to recognize that, while
countries with all possible forms of domestic political institutions fought
wars, a specific regime–democracy–defied the logic of anarchy and steered
a peaceful course through the perilous waters of world politics (Maoz &
Abdolali, 1989). This recognition sparked an enormous research agenda that
sought to discover what made democracy special in the international arena
(Schultz, 2013).
In this review, I take stock of the knowledge accumulated over 25 years
of research on domestic politics and international conflict and identify
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

emerging trends in the scholarly agenda. I argue that research that focuses
on political leaders, their incentives and their characteristics, will emerge as
a dynamic field in the study of international conflict.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
From the early propositions in Kant’s (1983) philosophical project for a
Perpetual Peace (Doyle, 1986), two major lines of investigation emerged
to explain democracies’ international behavior: explanations that emphasize the normative aspects of democratic polities and explanations that
emphasize their institutional and decision-making features (Russett, 1993).
The cultural and institutional explanations were presented as competing
explanations in early studies (Maoz & Russett, 1993). However, attempts to
disentangle them have been inconclusive (Morgan & Campbell, 1991; Dixon,
1993; Owen, 1997; Rousseau, 2005).
The findings by Mansfield and Snyder (2005), who have shown that democratizing countries are more likely to get embroiled in militarized disputes
because fledgling democratic institutions are unable to restrain the articulation of nationalist and bellicose demands, give credence to the importance of
norms over the domestic institutions of electoral democracy. While it is easier to establish formal institutions than the ethos that is embodied in those
institutions (Veblen, 1915; Putnam, Leonardi, & Nanetti, 1993), as democracies consolidate, norms and institutions should go hand in hand. Moreover,
this should be reflected in the way we account for democracies’ international
behavior.
Many challenges have been mounted to the logic and the empirical foundations of the democratic peace. However, even in the face of sharp criticism from a posse of seasoned skeptics, the democratic peace, and its ancillary propositions, have fared very well: the finding still stands, while those
of the critics’ have been found wanting (for arguments and counterarguments, see Brown, Lynn-Jones, & Miller, 1996; Reiter & Stam, 2002; Brown,
Coté, Lynn-Jones, & Miller, 2011; Schneider & Gleditsch, 2013). “In a subject
of study where reliable insights are rare,” Dafoe, Oneal, and Russett (2013,
p. 213) conclude, “the robust finding that democracies are more peaceful
toward each other remains an important empirical regularity for future scholarship to build upon.”
In the wake of the democratic peace revolution, war can no longer be seen as
a permanent feature of international politics whose origin lies in cold wars
brought about by the anarchic ordering of the international arena (Waltz,
1979). Rather, war becomes a possible outcome in a pattern of strategic interactions, which begins with a conflict of interest. Therefore, goals, perceptions,
and decision-making processes in the domestic arena cannot be excluded

Domestic Institutions and International Conflict

3

from the study of world politics. International constraints and opportunities,
on the one hand, and domestic costs and benefits, on the other, enter into the
decision calculus of political leaders who act in the name of the state on the
world stage. As new theories emerge to explain world politics, this is likely to
be the enduring legacy of the research pioneered by Babst (1964) and brought
to maturity by Russett and Oneal (2001).
EARLY WORK ON LEADERS AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT
A second line of analysis provides a foundation for the study of the connection between domestic politics and international conflict, the diversionary
war proposition, which contends that domestically embattled leaders would
resort to war to shore up their domestic support and remain in power (Hazelwood, 1975; James, 1987; Miller, 1995). Unlike the democratic peace literature,
however, the diversionary war proposition is an embattled field of research
that has generated an enormous amount of theoretical and empirical work,
but little consensus. To this date, the scope conditions and the empirical manifestations of the theory are contested (Levy, 1989; Oakes, 2012).
Despite its shortcomings, however, the diversionary war literature has
served as the springboard for a wave of research that explicitly seeks to
connect the incentives of leaders, the institutions within which they rule their
countries, and the patterns of war and peace. Both for the democratic peace
and for the diversionary war propositions, a fruitful theoretical development
has come from the scholars who built their theories on the conceptualization
of democracy in Riker’s (1982) political theory (Fearon, 1994; Bueno de
Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, & Morrow, 2003; Debs & Goemans, 2010). In
Riker’s perspective, democratic institutions favor political accountability by
allowing voters to replace the political leaders they do not like (anymore).
Conversely, authoritarian institutions insulate leaders from political failure
by raising the costs of replacing the incumbent leaders.
The implication of this conceptualization is that leaders would make
choices on the international arena with the knowledge that they might pay
a price if they fail. Therefore, scholars who study the connection between
domestic politics and international conflict evaluate the impact of international political outcomes on leaders’ chances of staying in power. Voters
would reward or punish leaders on the basis of their past performance. Non
democratic leaders, on the other hand, would need to make sure they would
have enough resources to pay off supporters, should they suffer a political
or military defeat (Goemans, 2000).
This logic underpins one of the most prominent arguments about domestic
politics and international conflict, Fearon’s (1994) audience cost theory. The
theory argues that in political regimes where leaders can be easily removed
from power, coercive threats are more credible. This occurs because leaders in

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

high audience costs regimes face punishment if they engage their countries in
an international dispute and then back down. Thus, because of the attached
cost of a failed escalation, leaders get involved in crises only when they are
willing to stand firm and fight. This mechanism, therefore, yields credibility
to the foreign policy messages that leaders in high audience cost countries use
in crisis diplomacy. Consequently, states with high audience costs are able to
conduct their affairs in the international arena effectively and peacefully.
Theoretically and empirically, audience cost theory raises many questions
(Schultz, 2001; Snyder & Borghard, 2011; Trachtenberg, 2012). Why should
the audience always punish leaders who back down in a crisis? As a strategic
agent itself, the audience would assess alternatives: on the one hand, the
audience could punish the leader who backed down but, in so doing,
the audience would run the risk that “the dreaded communists” would
come to power; on the other hand, the audience could forgive the leader
who tarnished the national honor by backing down and, in so doing, keep
“the dreaded communists” out of power. In other words, the conditions
under which the punishment of leaders would be an equilibrium strategy
in the subgame that occurs after the leader backed down in a crisis are
undertheorized.
In its original formulation, the choices of the audience are outside the
theoretical purview of Fearon’s model. Building upon Fearon’s logic,
however, Smith (1998) demonstrates that voters who cast their votes on the
basis of past performance and assess candidates only on the basis of their
competence–that is, voters who do not consider partisan positions in foreign
policy because foreign policy is seen as a public good – would always
punish the leaders who back down after an escalation. In Smith’s model, an
escalation followed by a retreat is the behavior of incompetent leaders.
Empirically, the question becomes what political regimes impose higher
audience costs on their leaders. Fearon (1994, p. 582) posited it as “a plausible working hypothesis” that it would be democracies. Indeed, the electoral
mechanism makes it easier to replace leaders. However, few authoritarian
leaders are so insulated from their supporters to be immune from audience
costs (Weeks, 2008).
As an empirical matter, the impact of foreign policy outcomes on leaders’
hold on power was a question with no clear answers in the literature in the
mid-1990s. In a pioneering effort, Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson (1995)
investigated how war outcomes affected leaders’ time in office in both
democratic and non democratic countries. Starting from the assumption
that leaders only care about staying in power, the Bueno de Mesquita and
Siverson (1995) study shows that democratic leaders that engage their countries in war subject themselves to an increased hazard of losing power. Thus,
Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson (1995) find a linchpin that connects leaders’

Domestic Institutions and International Conflict

5

personal motivation and the pursuit of policies that enhance the security
of the state. Failure in the international arena is political ammunition for
the domestic opposition. This was a major finding because it demonstrated
that the joint assessment of both domestic and international conditions was
central to any foreign-policy decision-making process. Even while they
are involved in the high politics of the international arena, policy-makers
always have an eye on the consequences their actions might have on their
own domestic power positions.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Where does the literature on domestic politics and international conflict stand now? I identify two strands in the literature that focus on
the question of how forward looking, and politically motivated, agents
make choices in the international arena. The first strand is a minimalist,
Milton-Friedman-esque approach (Friedman, 1953; Stigler & Becker, 1977),
that eschews the task of measuring leaders’ preferences and evaluates the
consequences of alternative institutional arrangements; the second strand
seeks to measure leaders’ policy preferences in a more descriptively detailed
manner and, from that, to derive hypotheses on leaders’ foreign policy
choices.
THE MINIMALIST APPROACH
The two most encompassing statements of how leaders provide a theoretically grounded microfoundation for the connection between domestic politics and international conflict are by Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) and
Chiozza and Goemans (2011). Both theories share a minimalist approach to
leaders’ preferences, that is, they postulate a specific set of goals as a reasonable approximation for what motivates leaders in power. The theories differ
in terms of their explanatory mechanisms: coalition building and the balance
of private and public goods for Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003); the effects of
international conflict on the personal fate of leaders out of office for Chiozza
and Goemans (2011).
Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) build a comprehensive theory of politics
that explains not only the variation between war and peace but also economic prosperity and political freedom. Theirs is a leaders theory of politics, insofar as it posits leaders as the key decision-making agents. However,
what explains politics are not leaders per se, but the institutions within which
they rule. All that pertains to leaders is summarized in the assumption that
they seek to remain in power. Leaders’ choices are, therefore, instrumental to
that goal.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The fundamental innovation in Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s (2003) theory is
the claim that all leaders need to maintain the support of a winning coalition
within the selectorate, that is, “the set of people with a say in choosing leaders and with a prospect of gaining access to special privileges doled out by
leaders.” (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003, p. xi) Depending on the relative size
of the winning coalition and the selectorate, leaders will find it more advantageous for their survival goals to provide different combinations of public
goods, that is, goods that benefit all the members of the political community,
and private goods, that is, goods that only benefit specific beneficiaries in the
leaders’ winning coalition.
From parsimonious premises, Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) derive an
overall characterization of politics, whereby “Democratic politics in our theory is a competition in competence to produce public goods; autocratic politics centers on the purchase of the loyalty of key supporters.” (Morrow, Bueno
de Mesquita, Siverson, & Smith, 2008, p. 394) Specifically, for the study of
international conflict, Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s (2003, p. 250) theory claims
additional empirical content beyond the democratic peace propositions with
respect to wars of imperial or colonial expansion, concession in negotiations,
and levels of war effort. However, as it stands, the theory has received a
major empirical challenge from Clarke and Stone (2008), who questioned the
measurement and modeling of Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s key explanatory
variable, the ratio between the winning coalition and the selectorate. In this
respect, Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s theory is still awaiting for a more definitive test based on better measures, a task to which Morrow et al. (2008, p. 399)
themselves are attending.
The question of the costs and benefits of international conflict for office
seeking leaders was also taken up by Chiozza and Goemans (2003, 2004)
who asked how, compared to staying at peace, conflict involvement and conflict outcomes would affect leaders’ hold on power. In so doing, Chiozza
and Goemans (2003, 2004) engaged the findings in Bueno de Mesquita and
Siverson (1995) and started to place the survival implications of international
conflict behavior on a firmer foundation. Specifically, Chiozza and Goemans
(2004) showed that, in the case of democratic leaders, conflict outcomes do
not significantly affect the risk of losing office, while, in the case of authoritarian leaders, a defeat in either an international crisis or a war significantly
increases the hazard of office removal. The findings in Chiozza and Goemans
(2004) support the idea that war is not necessarily costly for leaders, contrary
to the foundational proposition in Fearon (1995). However, at the same time,
it raised the question of how leaders would then respond to the potential benefits of international conflict. Why would authoritarian leaders start a war
if that implies higher risks of losing office? Why would leaders start a war

Domestic Institutions and International Conflict

7

when they are more secure in office if involvement in a crisis as a challenger
reduces the risk of removal from office?
Chiozza and Goemans (2011) answer these questions by considering two
components in leaders’ utility functions. They posit that leaders not only
care about staying in power, but they also worry about their fates when out of
office. They then distinguish two alternative ways through which leaders can
be deposed from power: through regular, constitutional, means or through
forcible, violent, means. Leaders who lose power through regular means
rarely suffer personal punishment in the form of exile, imprisonment or
death, while leaders who lose power through forcible means almost always
suffer personal punishment. With a simple innovation in the specification
of leaders’ objectives, Chiozza and Goemans (2011) are able to derive novel
propositions about why and when leaders would initiate international
conflict. Specifically, Chiozza and Goemans (2011) show that leaders who
rule in countries where the mechanisms of leadership replacement are
institutionalized and peaceful have much to lose and not much to gain from
international conflict. As a consequence, they would initiate conflict when
they are secure in power. Conversely, for leaders who face the prospect
of a forcible removal, and the attendant consequences on their lives and
freedoms, international conflict offers the opportunity to disrupt the conspirators’ plots against their rule. Such leaders, therefore, would be more
likely to initiate international conflict. Such leaders, in other words, would
be fighting for their survival. Empirically, Chiozza and Goemans (2011)
find ample support for their argument by using a multi-method approach
that combines statistical modeling and a detailed historical examination of
Central American leaders between 1840 and 1918.
LEADERS AS INDIVIDUALS
A second strand in the literature takes a closer look at leaders, their ideas,
preferences, beliefs, experiences, cognitive styles, and proclivities. This
approach, which harks back to the pioneering work on leaders in world
politics by Hermann (1977, 1980), and to the work on leadership in political
psychology (Post, 2005), claims that leaders, as the key decision makers
in a country, can steer the course of history in different directions. As a
consequence, leaders can potentially become the major explanatory force
behind the dynamics of war and peace.
Chiozza and Goemans’s (2011, p. 201) hierarchical model of international
conflict shows that about one third of the empirical variation between peace
and international conflict can be attributed to the characteristics of the
leaders in power. However, how to capture that variation in a systematic
and theoretically grounded manner has remained a vexing problem. Careful
process tracing has provided insightful explanations in specific cases, such

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as the ideas of the new leaders that came to power in the Soviet Union in the
mid-1980s (Breslauer, 2002), the psychological orientation of leaders who
pursue nuclear weapons (Hymans, 2006), and US military interventions
(Saunders, 2011). However, is it all idiosyncratic, or is there any systematic
pattern that connects the features of leaders to international conflict?
Three major data collection efforts are currently under way aimed at
answering this question. The first, by Horowitz and Stam (2011), codes the
military, educational, occupational, and family characteristics of leaders; the
second, by Leeds and Mattes, codes the partisan sources of support for the
leaders in power (Carroll, Leeds, & Mattes, 2012); the third, by Colgan (2013),
codes whether the incumbent leader acquired power through revolutionary
means. A fourth line of investigation assesses the extent to which the
presence of women in decision-making positions affects conflict dynamics
(Regan & Paskeviciute, 2003; Hudson, Ballif-Spanvill, Caprioli, & Emmett,
2012). In all these instances, the underlying hypothesis is that leaders with
different backgrounds and with different sources of partisan support have
systematically different preferences on matters of foreign policy.
This strand in the literature, therefore, has taken seriously Moravcsik’s
(1997) plea to take preferences seriously. However, while it is plausible
to attribute to leaders different foreign policy preferences on the basis of
their backgrounds, this approach faces a major modeling challenge. As we
have known since the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, leaders do not
make choices as they please, but they make them under specific historical
conditions (Marx, 1926). If we translate Marx’s argument in the language of
experimental research, leaders with different preferences are not distributed
randomly over time and across countries. They emerge for specific reasons,
which would need to be modeled ex-ante to make valid causal inferences
about how preferences explain the variation between war and peace.
In other words, why would a leader with military experience or a woman
gain power at a specific time in the history of a country? Pinker (2011, pp.
685–686) makes this point with respect to gender: “To be sure, a shift from
male to female influence in decision-making may not be completely exogenous. In a society in which rapacious invaders may swoop in at any moment,
the costs of defeat to both sexes can be catastrophic, and anything short of
the most truculent martial values may be suicidal. A female-tilted value system may be a luxury enjoyed by a society that is already safe from predatory invasion.” As the scholars grapple with this methodological challenge
through clever research design (Dafoe & Caughey, 2011), the fact remains that
domestic politics, and its institutional context, would continue to underpin
the analysis of the determinants of world politics.

Domestic Institutions and International Conflict

9

GOING FORWARD
For 25 years, the study of domestic politics and international conflict has been
a dynamic research agenda in International Relations. As we have taken stock
of the main lines of research, we may wonder how it is going to progress. If we
proceed inductively, we might note how some scholars are seeking to provide
better specifications, and better measures, of the institutional arrangements
of authoritarian leaders (Svolik, 2012; Weeks, 2012). Other scholars are seeking to evaluate the trade-offs between military and welfare spending and
the concomitant costs of military mobilization under different institutional
arrangements (Carter, 2014). Still others focus on the consequences of leadership change for intrawar dynamics (Croco, 2011). In other words, there is
more “out there” we do not know than there is in our theories and empirical
findings that we know to be true.
Even more provocatively, the study of international conflict from the
perspective of leaders might provide a new way to engage the logic of
the dominant model in the study of war: the bargaining model (Wagner,
2000; Reiter, 2003). Originally sketched by Clausewitz (1976), popularized by
Blainey (1988), and formalized by Fearon (1995), the bargaining model of war
posits that three, and only three, mechanisms explain why rational agents
are unable to solve a conflict of interests in a mutually satisfactory manner
that would avoid the costs of war: asymmetric information, commitment
problems, and issue indivisibility. Not only can each of these mechanisms be
(re)-assessed from the point of view of leaders, as is the case in Goemans’s
(2000) theory of war termination or in Wolford (2012) strategic models of
leadership turnover and crisis bargaining. But also, if war is not negative sum,
as assumed in the bargaining model, and leaders can reap private benefits
(Chiozza & Goemans, 2004), the field opens up for new theories of war and
peace.
If a bet needs to be made, research that explores the connection between
leaders and international outcomes in different institutional settings, which
we may call leader-centric research, is going to be a rewarding endeavor for
practical and intellectual reasons. Practically, the availability of systematic
data on leaders (Goemans, Gleditsch, & Chiozza, 2009) allows scholars to
test alternative leader-centric theories of international conflict. Intellectually,
by placing leaders at the center of the analysis, leader-centric research makes
politics, and the struggle for power and control, the central focus of analysis.
Leader-centric research is, therefore, doable and relevant.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Blainey, G. (1988). The causes of war (3rd ed.). New York, NY: The Free Press.
Breslauer, G. W. (2002). Gorbachev and Yeltsin as leaders. New York, NY: Cambridge
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FURTHER READING
Readers interested in pursuing the study of domestic politics and international conflict will benefit from reading Kant’s treatise on the Perpetual Peace.
In a nutshell, Kant elaborated the key arguments for why institutions that
are responsive to the public will create the conditions for peace in the international arena. All modern treatments of the connection between domestic
politics and international conflict owe a huge intellectual debt to Kant. Triangulating Peace, the book by Russett & Oneal published in 2001, is the modern
pinnacle of the line of analysis triggered by Kant and also an exemplar manifesto of the scientific study of politics. From such a vantage point, readers
can then explore models of strategic interaction such as Fearon’s theory of
the audience costs and the more recent treatments by Bueno de Mesquita
et al. (2003) and Chiozza & Goemans (2011). To keep things into perspective,
readers will also benefit from reading the foremost statement of the skeptics,
namely Waltz’s 1959 treatise, Man, the State, and War.
GIACOMO CHIOZZA SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Giacomo Chiozza is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt
University. He earned his undergraduate degree at the Università degli Studi

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

di Milano in 1997 and his PhD. in Political Science at Duke University in 2004.
Since then, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic
Studies at Harvard University and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of expertise include
anti-Americanism, international conflict, and statistical modeling. He is the
author of Anti-Americanism and the American World Order (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and Leaders and International Conflict, with H.E. Goemans
(Cambridge University Press, 2011), which won the Joseph S. Lepgold Book
Prize in 2012. In 2008/09, he was a member of the American Political Science
Association Presidential Taskforce on US Standing in World Affairs. For more
information, please access his website at http://www.chiozza.org.
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