ECONOMY

838 international conflict
states: security or control over the “rules of the game.” Although the power transition
assumes that different states have different policy goals in mind (i.e. different rules),
its predictions are not driven by the substantive differences in goals. Thus, domestic
political competition over national policy plays no part in either power transition
theory or neorealism.
The empirical record does not support the main claims of neorealism and only
partially supports the core claims of power transition theory. One apparently wellestablished
empirical regularity in particular—the democratic peace—has raised serious
doubts about the centrality of these and other theories concerned with system
structure or with theories that treat the state as a unitary actor. Several empirical
regularities are associated with what has come to be called the democratic peace. Foremost
among these is the observation that democracies rarely, if ever, fight wars with
each other while democracies and autocracies fight with one another (and autocracies
with other autocracies) with regularity. The evidence for these and other democratic
peace regularities highlights the realization that domestic characteristics of regimes
lead to sharply different patterns of foreign policy behavior, a fact that cannot be
true if states are rational unitary actors whose patterns of behavior are determined by
factors outside the domestic politics of the state as argued by structuralists.
3 Domestic Politics and International
Relations
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The state-centric view has been challenged by those who contend that international
politics is a product of the normal pulls and tugs of domestic affairs; that leaders—
not nations—make policy decisions and do so to maximize their prospects of staying
in office. Leaders’ decisions are therefore strategic and, taking into account expected
responses by adversaries and supporters, designed to maximize the leader’s (not
the state’s) welfare. In this perspective, the motivations, interests, and constraints
imposed on individual decision-makers are what shape how political leaders, acting
in the name of their states, interact with one another.
This research ties together international politics, foreign policy, and domestic
politics; as such, it leads to implications incompatible with the received wisdom
of realism or the power transition. The various models that tie domestic politics
directly to international relations, for instance, provide little basis for believing that
the distribution of power is crucial for understanding the likelihood, severity, or
resolution of disputes. Domestic approaches give scant attention to whether alliances
are organized to create a bipolar or multipolar international environment. And such
an approach dismisses the tenet that states seek to maximize power, security, control
over the rules governing international interactions, or the national interest.