ECONOMY

872 democracy, peace, and war
The need for policy success may introduce perverse incentives. Leaders facing
dwindling political fortunes due to failing policies may feel impelled to resort to war
or adopt suboptimal military strategies, “gambling for resurrection,” since winning
might increase their chances of retaining power, while a loss would not matter for
domestic political fortunes because the leader would lose power or face even greater
sanction anyway (Smith 1996; Goemans 2000). Others argue that leaders of newly
formed democracies may initiate conflicts with their neighbors to consolidate their
domestic political support (Mansfield and Snyder 2002).
A third line of research concerns the stakes of war. Most public constraint theories
do not proposethatdemocraciesaremoreorlesslikelytofightwarsofempireor
genocide. Sometimes those wars are profitable and popular (Bueno de Mesquita et al.
2003; ReiterandStam2002; Henderson2002). One model predicts that democracies
are more likely to pursue war aims best characterized as public goods, while autocracies
are more likely to pursue aims more easily translated into private goods (Bueno
de Mesquita et al. 2003).
Public constraints arguments have attracted substantial empirical support. The
popularity of elected leaders declines as casualties mount (Gartner and Segura 1998),
though publics are willing to accept casualties for important stakes and when victory
seems likely (Feaver and Gelpi 2004). Anticipation of the electoral consequences of
declining support for war in the face of mounting casualties also affects the nature
of war. Democracies fight shorter wars (Bennett and Stam 1996) in part because
of the strategies they fight with (Reiter and Meek 1999) and in part because of the
type of wars they choose to fight in the first place (Slantchev 2004). In these wars,
democracies suffer fewer casualties (Siverson 1995; Goemans 2000, 65) andmore
readily compromise in longer wars (Bennett and Stam 1998).
Studies show that leaders understand how political institutions shape the domestic
political consequences of military defeat. This leads elected leaders to be much more
likely to win the international crises (Rioux 1998; Gelpi and Griesdorf 2001) and
wars (Reiter and Stam 2002) they start. Dictators are less likely to win the crises and
wars they start because they are more likely to launch risky ventures with ex ante
lower probabilities of victory. These findings are quite robust (Reed and Clark
2000; Clark and Reed 2003; ReiterandStam2003a). Consistent with the rational
expectations view, because democracies anticipate the electoral consequences of war,
they avoid disastrous wars and, as a result, we do not observe that elected leaders
lose power faster than non-elected leaders after wars (Chiozza and Goemans
2004). Some theoretical models that extend the public opinion logic in a strategic
setting predict that authoritarian states may seek to exploit this democratic cost
sensitivity, and may be especially likely to initiate international disputes against
democracies, hoping the democracy will back down rather than risk war (Filson and
Werner 2004).
Though democracies are less likely to fight each other, the evidence on whether
democracies are generally more peaceful is mixed. Recognizing that publics may be
motivated to fight for nationalistic reasons, Braumoeller (1997) argues that liberalism