Audience cost and history prove democracy’s a conflict dampener.

While many democratic peace scholars stress the importance of normative in addition to institutional factors (Doyle, 1986; Maoz and Russett, 1993; Mitchell, 2002; RisseKappen, 1995), research on autocratic aggression focuses almost exclusively on institutional constraints (or lack thereof). A sizable body of scholarship maintains that personalist regimes are more hostile because they lack institutional constraints on the executive (Peceny and Beer, 2003; Peceny and Butler, 2004; Reiter and Stam, 2003; Weeks, 2012).2 Peceny and Butler (2004) use Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s (2003) selectorate theory to explain personalist belligerence: since in personalist regimes the winning coalition (regime insiders that state leaders rely upon for their survival) is small relative to the selectorate (individuals involved in selecting the state leaders), there is strong incentive for the winning coalition to remain loyal to the leader irrespective of their behavior in office.3 Other scholars forward similar explanations for autocratic belligerence. Jessica Weeks (2012) attributes personalist belligerence to the regime’s lack of a domestic audience that can punish the leader for their belligerence.4 According to this argument, personalist regimes lack predictable mechanisms for restraining or removing belligerent leaders.

Common to these theories is exclusive focus on the institutional factors leading to conflict. One reason why institutional explanations for personalist belligerence are necessarily incomplete is that lacking institutional constraints cannot account for willingness to initiate conflict. Scholars in this area are acutely aware of the dilemma. Weeks (2012: 329) writes that where “no powerful audience exists, we must focus instead on individual leader’s preferences and perceptions.” We are thus left with heterogenous individual-level causes to explain the leap to conflict when executive constraints are low. An expanding literature explores these individual-level contributors to conflict. One robust finding is that revolutionary leaders are especially belligerent, since revolutions select leader that are risk averse and aggressive on average (Colgan, 2013). Unconstrained executives are most belligerent when leaders are selected for individual personality traits that increase their propensity to start conflict (Colgan and Weeks, 2015). The argument in this article similarly combines institutional factors with another set of individual-level traits: leader commitment to democratic norms regarding the appropriateness of conflict.

Democratic Breakdown and Interstate Conflict

If democratic peace is explained through institutional and normative mechanisms, then studies explaining autocratic belligerence solely through institutional factors miss an important piece of the puzzle.5 While empirical research on autocratic belligerence largely eschews noninstitutional explanations, philosophical treatises on the democratic peace since at least Schumpeter (1955: 24) conjecture that “warlike instincts” contribute to autocratic belligerence.6 Starting from the theoretical perspective that noninstitutional factors partly account for democratic peace, this article maintains that leaders’ normative commitments help explain autocratic belligerence. Norms are typically defined as “standard[s] of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity” (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998: 891). According to the normative argument, liberal democratic states hold the belief that peaceful conflict resolution mechanisms, such as third-party mediation, are the appropriate response to international disputes (Mitchell, 2002).

This article argues that leaders impatient with democratic norms have a greater propensity to initiate conflict. Leaders that deliberately dismantle democracy tend to harbor distrust of or impatience with democratic norms. Following the literature in behavioral economics, impatience is defined as the preference for small gains in the present over more substantial gains in the future (Benjamin et al., 2013; Dohman et al., 2010). For leaders that suspend democracy, democratic norms are often an encumbrance to reaping the potential short-term rewards of decisive action in both domestic and international politics. Central to this argument is the importance of leader selection for interstate relations. “Selection” refers to fact that democratic breakdown places leaders with unique personal characteristics into office, since only leaders with limited commitment to democratic ideals, if not outright hostility toward them, will suspend the democratic process. By focusing on the influence of democratic breakdown on conflict, this study follows recent research maintaining that “which way in” matters for international security because it selects for leaders with particular traits (Colgan, 2013: 661). Personality traits, demographic characteristics, and personal experience shape leader behavior (Colgan, 2013; Horowitz et al., 2005; Horowitz and Stam, 2014), although a relatively overlooked feature in existing research is leaders’ normative commitments (Shannon and Keller, 2007). In arguing that democratic breakdown selects for leaders uncommitted to democratic norms, this article contributes the understudied phenomena of how selecting leaders with certain normative commitments influences conflict.7

While democratic breakdown selects leaders impatient with democratic restrictions on their executive authority, this begs an important question: why should post-democratic leaders behave more aggressively than other autocracies? One reason is straightforward. Unlike other autocratic leaders, post-democratic ones explicitly seek to circumvent the democratic norms that limit decisive action. This cannot necessarily be generalizable to all autocracies, since some evidence suggests that autocracies behave more like democracies internationally as the proportion of democracies in the international system increases due to norm externalization; thus, many autocracies adhere to international norms otherwise characteristic of democracies (Mitchell, 2002; see Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998 on norm diffusion).8 Overturning democracy where it already exists, however, indicates at the very least an impatience with democratic norms and procedures that are viewed as unnecessarily restrictive. While conflict is necessarily costly, impatient individuals deviate from the assumptions of rationality by choosing suboptimal outcomes in the present rather than outcomes with a guaranteed higher payoff in the future (Benjamin et al., 2013; Dohmen et al., 2010).

Yet, there is a more potent reason that post-democratic leaders are more belligerent than other autocrats: they are able to harness nationalism and mass politics fostered during the democratic era. Research on democratization and war maintains that democracies, especially nascent ones, galvanize nationalism and mass mobilization due to democratic competition (Mansfield and Snyder, 1995, 2002). Such forces do not dissipate immediately upon suspension of the democratic process. Rather than having only a contemporaneous effect on political outcomes, democracy is a stock variable whose history exerts continued influence on contemporary events (Gerring et al., 2005). Some democratic features can persist into the post-democratic era. Post-democratic leaders can use nationalist rhetoric and mobilize mass movements—reserves carried over from the democratic period—to ensure their political survival. Suspending democracy presents considerable risks to leaders, since democratic breakdown precludes competing elites from future opportunities to exercise power. Harnessing nationalist fervor and mass political movements is one means by which leaders impatient with democratic norms can secure their political survival and ward off internal challengers after suspending democracy. This theory therefore draws upon the modernist school of nationalism, since it considers nationalism an instrument that elites can leverage for their personal interests (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Schrock-Jacobson, 2012: 828; Smith, 1991: 71).9

Eliminating democratic constraints and nationalist coalition building gives leaders impatient with democratic norms increased opportunity to pursue aggressive foreign policies. Given that nationalists perceive certain territories as integral to their national identity, and the tight connection between nationalist and irredentist movements (Smith 1991: 75–76; Toft, 2002), nationalism is especially useful for leaders seeking territorial expansion. Leaders with nationalistic constituencies thus have greater potential, due to popular support, to undertake territorial conflicts against neighbors, conditional again on a leader who evinces impatience with peaceful bargaining strategies. Strategically positioned territory confers additional capability to states that secure it via the ability to fight on it in the future (Carter, 2010), meaning that impatient leaders have incentive to initiate territorial disputes even when they use nationalism instrumentally (i.e., they do not personally hold affective attachments to the territory).

Similar to theories of democratization and war (Mansfield and Snyder, 2002: 303), this account of democratic breakdown and war has commonalities with diversionary theories of war (see Tir, 2010 on diversionary territorial conflict).10 Conflict initiation may indeed have the effect of further rallying nationalist constituencies around the leader, which post-democratic leaders can use to ensure their survival against potential dissenters.11 However, if the concern is unifying the country behind the leader to avoid backlash against overturning democracy, the incentive would be to launch a diversionary conflict prior to or immediately following democratic breakdown. The most prominent cases of democratic breakdown and international aggression—including the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands, and Russia’s more recent annexation of Crimea—do not follow the process entailed by this causal logic, since they occurred at least several years following democratic breakdown.

Examples of the devastating implications that leader selection through democratic breakdown have on international security are plentiful. For instance, the Argentinian junta launched a coup to initiate the “Dirty War” against the Triple A guerrillas and its sympathizers in large part because the democratic government was perceived as incapable of addressing the insurgent threat. The junta leaders, it turned out, also evinced extreme impatience with international mediation, a hallmark democratic norm, of the Beagle dispute with Chile; instead, the junta rejected previous commitments to allow an international tribunal to arbitrate the dispute and launched Operation Soberanía, thereby invading the neighboring state (Romero, 2002: chap. 6). Beliefs that democratic norms, including international norms of compromise and peaceful conflict resolution, inhibit strong and decisive foreign policy behavior increase the likelihood that leaders initiate military conflict.

The starkest examples of the connection between democratic breakdown and war, however, come from the history of fascism. Scholars of the subject aver that “the term fascism” should not be “used for predemocratic dictatorships” and include the abandonment of “democratic liberties” into its definition (Paxton, 2004: 216–218). This is sensible because both Hitler and Mussolini, leaders of the two historical fascist states, established their regimes by suspending the democratic process. It is abundantly clear that “[f]ascists despised . . . democratic institutions” and regarded parliament as “a place where unending inconclusive debates took place and where politicians were held in contempt because of their weakness” (Laqueur, 1996: 18). Clark (2012: 68) notes that Hitler’s experience of viewing Czech theatrical filibustering in 1909 eradicated his “youthful admiration for the parliamentary system.” Democratic breakdown in preWWII Italy and Germany thus selected for leaders with normative commitments consciously opposed to democratic norms of cooperation and peaceful conflict resolution, or at least leaders who viewed democratic norms as needlessly inhibitive. And while fascism is perhaps applied only anachronistically or pejoratively to contemporary regimes, there are certainly contemporary analogs (Laqueur, 1996).12

Furthermore, fascist leaders clearly leveraged nationalism and mass mobilization cultivated during the democratic era to pursue their international ambitions. Mann (2004: 3), who uses extensive evidence from Nazi Germany to support his argument, writes that mass violence is the “dark side of democracy,” since the vitriolic nationalism that fuels genocide and mass killing “represents the perversion of modern aspirations to democracy.” Nazi Germany also used paramilitary forces formed during the Weimar era, which saw an upsurge in popular mobilization into locally organized armed groups, to suppress opposition and pave the way for the invasion of Poland.13 Fritzsche (1998: 199–202) further claims that what set the Nazis apart from their electoral competition was their ability to recreate “the spectacle of the resurgent nation,” and that many working-class voters, who would otherwise be anticipated to join left-leaning parties, were attracted in part by the Nazi message of “national solidarity.” Hitler’s successes, leading up to and after the suspension of democracy, are thus partly attributable to his ability to use nationalism to mobilize potential supporters. Note that while nationalization and mass politics are typically viewed as negatives, the argument here is that they only have negative consequences internationally when harnessed by post-democratic leaders. A similar argument is implied in the literature on civic associationism. While associationism is largely viewed as important to the growth and stability of democracy, there is evidence that it can undermine democracy when leveraged by fascist movements (Berman, 1997; Riley, 2005).