Abstract

John Ishiyama, Ryan Conway and Katherine Haggans

This paper examines conflict proneness of authoritarian states and tests whether the monadic democratic peace argument can be extended to explain the conflict behavior of authoritarian states. Previous works have examined the propensity of authoritarian states to engage in conflict in dyadic relations with other states, rather than directly examining the conflict propensity of these states using monadic analysis (or who uses violent force first). Further, little empirical work has examined how different types of transitions from authoritarian rule affect the conflict propensity of states. Using Caprioli’s and Trumbore’s (2004) First use of Violent Force (FuVF) dataset for 1980 - 2002, we find little support for the monadic argument that authoritarian regimes that have more institutional checks on executive authority are less likely to first use military force than are regimes that have fewer such checks; however, we find that the type of transition is a more important a variable than the type of authoritarian regime in explaining the conflict proneness of the state.