Empirics prove no transition wars

Third, there are no instances of an incomplete democratizer with weak institutions participating in, let alone initiating, an external war since World War I. To the extent that the configuration of the international system post–World War I, and certainly post–World War II, is different from the pre–World War I era, these six empirical observations suggest little about the likelihood of incomplete democratizers with weak institutions either participating in or initiating wars in the contemporary international era. This is particularly noteworthy because, of the seventy-eight instances in which states with weak institutions have experienced an incomplete democratization between 1816 and 1992 as measured by the composite index, sixty-three of these, or 80 percent, have occurred between 1945 and 1992, after decolonization and during the so-called third wave of democratization. 25 Out of these sixty-three states with weak institutions that have undergone incomplete democratic transitions since 1945, not a single one has either initiated or participated in the outbreak of an external war.26 Indeed, some cases that are prime candidates for logic of the theory, such as Russia in 1991–92, which is coded as an incomplete democratizer with weak institutions, were plagued by fragmentation; but none initiated or participated in external wars. Thus, according to the empirical data, wars initiated by, or even involving, democratizing states with weak institutions are hardly a “chronic danger in history;” 27 instead, wars involving incomplete democratizers occur extremely rarely, both in absolute numbers and relative to other types of states, whether transitioning or stable. So how do Mansfield and Snyder find such strong correlations between incomplete democratization and war participation? It is to this question that we now turn.