Regime Types and Appeals for UN Involvement in International Crises 1945-1994

8/13/2019 Regime Types and Appeals for UN Involvement in International Crises 1945-1994

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Joining the Legs of the Kantian Tripod For Peace:Regime Type and Appeals for UN I nvolvement

in I nternational Crises, 1945-1994

Holger Schmidt

Ph.D. Candidate

Columbia University

Dept. of Political Science

420 West 118th Street

New York, NY 10027

[email protected]

Paper prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political

Science Association, Boston, MA, August 29 - September 1, 2002.

[Comments welcome, but please do not cite without authors permission]


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1. Introduction

For more than two centuries, liberal theorists of international relations have stressed the pacifying

effects of democracy and international organizations. Along with economic interdependence,

these two elements constitute the legs of the Kantian tripod for peace, whose role in world

politics has been the subject of extensive empirical investigation.1 Although the literature

examining the effects of democracy and international organizations on states dispute behavior is

vast, however, the question of how these two variables affect each other has received

comparatively little attention to date.2

The relative neglect of this issue is somewhat surprising given that liberal arguments

about the effects of democracy on states propensity for acting through international

organizations have been in circulation for a very long time. Perhaps most famously, Immanuel

Kant himself suggested in his essay on Perpetual Peace that democracies are especially likely

to follow international law and form what Kant called afoedus pacificum, or pacific federation.3

Echoing Kant, contemporary liberals contend that democracies are more prone than other types

of states to form so-called pluralistic security communities, in which realpolitik dynamics are

replaced by feelings of mutual trust and identification.4 In addition, democracies are also said to

1For a comprehensive treatment, see Bruce Russett and John R. Oneal, Triangulating Peace:

Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations(New York: W. W. Norton,

2001).2Again, perhaps the most comprehensive discussion is provided by Russett and Oneal,

Triangulating Peace, esp. chp. 6.3Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, inKant: Political Writings, ed.

Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).4Among others, see Thomas Risse-Kappen, Cooperation among Democracies: The European

Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995),esp. 29-34;

and Bruce Russett, A Neo-Kantian Perspective: Democracy, Interdependence, and

International Organizations in Building Security Communities, in Security Communities in

Comparative and Historical Perspective, ed. Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998).


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be more likely to utilize international organizations to manage and resolve those disputes that do

arise among them.5

Although widely accepted, the last of these claims in particular has yet to be confirmed

through rigorous empirical research. While several important studies have investigated the

connection between regime type and third-party involvement, most do not distinguish between the

role played by international organizations and other types of agents, such as allied or hegemonic

states.6 Others address the synergistic effects of democracy and international organizations

directly but focus their attention on the joint effect of these variables on dispute onset rather than

dispute management.7 And the few studies that do examine the behavior of democracies toward

international organizations once a conflict is underway have not only yielded rather mixed results

but also suffer from significant shortcomings in terms of their research design.8 Finally, virtually

no attention has been paid to whether the stipulated relationship between democracy and

disputants resort to international organizations is monadic or dyadic in nature (or both).

This paper seeks to contribute to filling this gap in the literature through a quantitative

examination of states attitudes toward United Nations (UN) involvement in a set of 128

international crises between 1945 and 1994. The results of this analysis strongly support the

liberal view that democratic states have a special propensity for utilizing international

5Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace, 164.

6Among others, see William J. Dixon, Democracy and the Management of International

Conflict,Journal of Conflict Resolution37, no. 1 (1993); Dixon, Dyads, Disputes, and the

Democratic Peace, in ThePolitical Economy of War and Peace, ed. Murray Wolfson

(Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998); Gregory A. Raymond, Democracies, Disputes,

and Third-Party Intermediaries,Journal of Conflict Resolution38, no. 1 (1994); and

Raymond, Demosthenes and Democracies: Regime Types and Arbitration Outcomes,

International Interactions 22, no. 1 (1996).7Bruce Russett, John R. Oneal, and David R. Davis, The Third Leg of the Kantian Tripod for

Peace: International Organizations and Militarized Disputes, 1950-85,International

Organization52, no. 3 (1998); and Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace.


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organizations when engaged in a militarized confrontation. Even after controlling for the

potentially confounding impact of a series of other variables (including dispute severity, Security

Council membership, and relative power), democracies are significantly more likely to refer a

dispute to the UN than are non-democracies. Somewhat unexpectedly, however, the effects of

democracy appear to be monadic rather than dyadic in nature. Whereas democracies in general

are more prone to resort to the UN than non-democracies, this tendency declines as their

opponents become more democratic, raising interesting questions about the nature of the causal

nexus between regime type and international organization involvement.

The paper is organized as follows. The next section offers a brief summary and critique

of existing empirical research on the subject. Section 3 explains the research design employed in

the empirical part of the paper and presents the main hypotheses to be tested. Section 4

discusses factors other than regime type that can be expected to influence states decisions

concerning whether to seek UN involvement and formulates a set of propositions about the likely

effects of these control variables. Section 5 describes the dataset used in this study and

addresses issues of operationalization and measurement. Section 6 presents my main findings.

Section 7 concludes by highlighting some limitations of the present study and identifying possible

directions for future research.

2. Existing Studies

To date, there are only two major empirical studies that directly examine the link between

democracy and the tendency of conflict actors to employ international organizations. The first

8See Section 2 below for details on this point.


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one is William Coplin and Martin Rochesters 1972 analysis of the conflict management role

played by the UN, the League of Nations, the Permanent Court of International Justice, and the

International Court of Justice.

9

Examining a sample of 121 dyadic disputes considered by at least

one of these four institutions over the time period 1920-1968, Coplin and Rochester found only

limited support for liberal arguments regarding the relationship between regime type and resort to

international organizations. While cases before the two courts were substantially more likely to

involve contestants with open (i.e., democratic) political systems, no such association was

found for disputes considered by the UN and only a very slight one for conflicts addressed by the

League of Nations.10

Similarly ambiguous findings emerge from the second major study of the subject. As part

of a larger project analyzing the crisis behavior of democratic states, Joseph Hewitt and Jonathan

Wilkenfeld explored the relationship between regime type and the involvement and effectiveness

of international organizations.11

Covering the seven decades between the end of World War I

and 1988, Hewitt and Wilkenfelds research suggests that democracy has no significant impact

on either the effectiveness or the involvement of global security organizations (i.e., the League of

Nations and the UN) in international crises. Democracy also appears to have no positive effect

on the involvement of regional security organizations such as NATO or the OAS, although

regional bodies tend to be more effective in crises that involve a high proportion of democratic

actors.12

9William D. Coplin and J. Martin Rochester, The Permanent Court of International Justice, the

International Court of Justice, the League of Nations, and the United Nations: A Comparative

Empirical Survey,American Political Science Review66, no. 2 (1972).10

See ibid., 534.11

J. Joseph Hewitt and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, Democracies in International Crisis,

International Interactions22, no. 2 (1996).12

Ibid., 136-38.


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Although highly interesting and suggestive, both Coplin and Rochesters work and Hewitt

and Wilkenfelds more recent analysis suffer from a number of shortcomings and limitations.

First, both studies fail to control for the potentially confounding impact of variables other than

regime type. Since the involvement and effectiveness of international organizations are obviously

influenced by more than just the political system of the disputing parties, and since at least some

of these other factors (dispute severity, for example) are correlated with democracy, this means

that the results summarized above are likely to be tainted by omitted variable bias and therefore

potentially misleading.13

Secondly, questions can be raised about the appropriateness of using international

organization involvement as an indicator of disputants willingness to resolve their conflict by

institutional means. Many of the activities that international organizations typically undertake in

crisis situations such as holding discussions, issuing appeals for restraint, or imposing sanctions

do not necessarily require the consent of the conflict protagonists. Consequently, the fact that

an international organization was involved in a given conflict says very little about whether the

disputants welcomed and supported this involvement, and hence has rather limited bearing on the

argument being tested.14

Third, neither Coplin and Rochester nor Hewitt and Wilkenfelds study is designed in a

fashion that would allow us to gauge whether the hypothesized relationship between democracy

and support for international organization involvement is primarily monadic or dyadic in nature.

13On omitted variable bias and its consequences, see Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney

Verba,Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research(Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1994), 168-82.14

Strictly speaking, this criticism applies only the Hewitt and Wilkenfeld study, since Coplin and

Rochester examine almost exclusively cases submitted to the UN/League/PCIJ/ICJ by one or

both of the conflicting parties and include a measure that weighs the frequency with which states


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Whereas Coplin and Rochester only examine the effects of democracy in general (i.e.,

irrespective of the opponents regime type), Hewitt and Wilkenfeld focus on the proposition that

the willingness of democratic disputants to manage their conflicts with the assistance of

international organizations varies with the nature of the political system of their opponents.

Although the latter version of the liberal argument currently enjoys greater popularity, both

variants are plausible in principle. But they are not identical in terms of their underlying causal

logic, and therefore should be treated as competing hypotheses. From a methodological point of

view, this means that we need to construct tests that enable us to explore both hypotheses

simultaneously a task to which I turn next.

3. Research Design & Key Hypotheses

As a first step toward a more rigorous assessment of the link between democracy and conflict

actors support for international organization activity, the following sections develop a multivariate

logistic regression model of the relationship between regime type and states decisions whether to

seek UN involvement when engaged in an international crisis.

As the preceding formulation suggests, the ensuing analysis is cast at the level of the

individual crisis actor rather than that of the conflict as a whole. The principal advantage of this

design is that it allows for a more discerning analysis of conflicts involving states with different

regime types. Whereas a conflict-level analysis would only be able to tell us whether crises

involving a mix of democratic and non-democratic participants are more or less likely to

experience UN activity than crises involving states of similar regime type, using the individual

used these institutions by the degree of support and initiative shown. For details, see Coplin and


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actor as the unit of observation allows us to identify which party acted as the initiator of UN

involvement. This information is of particular importance for evaluating the monadic version of

the liberal argument, which implies that in disputes between democratic and non-democratic

regimes, the former should generally be more supportive of international organization involvement

than the latter.

I concentrate on the case of the UN because although the UN is clearly not the only

international organization that plays an important role in the management of international conflict,

it is arguably the most prominent one. Moreover, in contrast to other international organizations

that execute a collective security or security management function, the UNs reach is global.

Focusing on states behavior toward the UN rather than regional organizations such as NATO or

the OAU thus allows me to examine a larger (and therefore more representative) sample of

interstate conflicts.

Since I want to explore not only whether democratic conflict actors are more prone to

refer a dispute to the UN but also whether the effects of democracy are monadic or dyadic in

nature, I test both of the following hypotheses:

HYPOTHESIS 1 (monadic): When engaged in an international crisis, democratic states

are more likely to seek UN involvement than states that are not democratic.

HYPOTHESIS 2 (dyadic): When engaged in an international crisis, democratic states

decisions whether to seek UN involvement will depend on the regime type of their opponent. The

more democratic the opponent, the higher democratic states propensity to seek UN involvement.

Rochester, The Permanent Court, 533.


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In addition, the monadic version of the liberal argument also implies an interesting if hitherto

overlooked corollary. If democracies are indeed more receptive in general towards managing

their conflicts with the help of international organizations, then states confronted with democratic

opponents can expect a more positive response to their own efforts at institutions-based conflict

management than if they were faced with a non-democratic opponent. This suggests the

following third hypothesis:

HYPOTHESIS 3 (monadic corollary): When engaged in an international crisis, states

facing democratic opponents are more likely to seek UN involvement than states facing non-

democratic opponents.

4. Control Variables

As noted in Section 2 above, to gain a proper understanding of the effects and relative

importance of democracy as a determinant of states decisions whether to bring a conflict before

the UN, it is crucial to control for the impact of potentially confounding variables. Unfortunately,

little systematic work has been done on the conditions under which states are likely to approach

the UN for help in managing their conflicts.15

Nonetheless, a number of control variables can be

identified based on previous research as well as arguments drawn from realist and institutionalist

theory.

15This lacuna reflects the general dearth of knowledge about when and why states act though

formal international organizations noted in Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal, Why States

Act through Formal International Organizations,Journal of Conflict Resolution42, no. 1

(1998).


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Security Council Membership

Permanent membership in the UN Security Council constitutes perhaps the most obvious

candidate for inclusion as a control variable. Members of the permanent five have special

influence over the UNs agenda and decisions, both because of their sheer material power and

because of their ability to veto any action that could prove harmful to their interests.

Consequently, we should expect permanent Security Council members to act more often as

initiators of UN involvement than states that are in a less privileged position within the UN

decision-making hierarchy.

Relative Power

In addition to Security Council membership, relative power also should play an important role in

shaping disputants attitudes toward the UN. Although relatively little is known about the link

between the balance of power and the propensity of conflict actors to act through international

organizations, it seems plausible to expect weaker parties to be more favorably predisposed

toward UN involvement, for two reasons. First, because the UN Charter proscribes the threat or

use of force except for purposes of self-defense, actors that try to achieve their diplomatic goals

through violent means risk being condemned or sanctioned by the UN. Although rarely an

effective deterrent by itself, UN involvement thus tends to raise the cost of using force and

constrain stronger powers in their ability to coerce weaker ones into submission. Secondly,

besides striving to discourage disputants from resorting to the use of force in the first place, UN

activity is also geared toward promoting compromise outcomes in situations where violence is

already underway. To the extent that the UN succeeds in this mission, its involvement again


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generally benefits weaker disputants, who otherwise might be faced with the prospect of total

defeat.

Alliance Ties to Major Powers

As realists would be quick to point out, the UNs physical capabilities are extremely limited. It

has no army and few other resources of its own, and therefore possesses little coercive power.

Given the UNs limited leverage and capabilities, the main benefit of bringing a conflict before the

UN (in terms of its effect on disputants bargaining position) usually consists of the ability to

mobilize international support by drawing attention to ones cause and endowing it with an added

degree of legitimacy. Although successful pursuit of this strategy can enhance the bargaining

power of any state, themarginalbenefits from using the UN in this fashion will usually be

negligible for actors with powerful military allies. Hence, states without alliance ties to a major

power should be significantly more likely to seek UN involvement than states that possess such

ties.

Alliance with Opponent

Some scholars have suggested that because allied states generally have important interests in

common, disputants that share an alliance with each other are likely to display a more positive

attitude towards third-party involvement than non-allied states.16

Accordingly, one might

hypothesize that states engaged in a crisis involving an allied opponent will be more prone to

approach the UN than states facing an opponent that is not an ally.

16See, for example, Dixon, Democracy and the Management of International Conflict, 61.


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This line of reasoning, however, ignores the observation that alliances themselves often

serve a conflict management function. According to hegemonic stability theory, for example,

alliance leaders often play a crucial role in preserving peace among quarreling allies.

17

Thus, it

seems at least equally reasonable to expect a substitution effect, whereby allied disputants

resort to alliance institutions or other alliance members instead of the UN to manage their

conflicts with each other. In either case, including shared alliance membership as a control

variable is important, because the tendency for democratic states to ally with each other (at least

during the time period examined in this study) might otherwise confound our results.18

UN Membership

This variable is likely to affect states propensity for seeking UN involvement for at least two

reasons. First, states that are UN members have an institutionalized voice in the organization

and therefore greater influence over how the UN approaches a given conflict than do non-

members.19

Second, constructivist theorizing suggests that institutions can have an impact on

how member states define their interests as well as what constitutes appropriate methods for

pursuing them. Because of these socialization effects as well, we should expect member

17On hegemonic stability theory, see Gilpin, War and Change; and Gilpin, ThePolitical

Economy.18

On the tendency of democratic states to form alliances with each other, see Randolph Siverson

and Juliann Emmons, Birds of a Feather: Democratic Political Systems and Alliance Choices,

Journal of Conflict Resolution35, no. 2 (1991). Evidence suggesting that this effect is confined

to the Cold War is presented in Brian Lai and Dan Reiter, Democracy, Political Similarity, and

International Alliances, 1816-1992,Journal of Conflict Resolution43, no. 2 (2000); and

Michael W. Simon and Erik Gartzke, Political System Similarity and the Choice of Allies,

Journal of Conflict Resolution40, no. 4 (1996).19

Even if this influence is likely to be small for most UN members when measured in absolute

terms, it will usually still exceed that of outsiders.


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states to be more likely to rely on the UN in managing their conflicts than states that are non-

members.20

Severity of Threat

In addition to the various realist and institutionalist factors considered above, states decisions

regarding whether to approach the UN should also be influenced by the severity of the threat that

a crisis poses to their security or interests. It is not entirely obvious, however, what direction we

should expect this relationship to take. On one hand, the higher the stakes, the greater the

incentives for states to use all available means - including the UN - for settling the underlying

conflict of interest and/or mobilizing international support. On the other hand, it might be argued

that because of the UNs comparatively limited leverage and resources, UN activity will usually

make little difference once a certain threshold of conflict severity is passed. Because of these

countervailing tendencies, I expect the relationship between dispute severity and the probability

that states will seek UN involvement to assume a curvilinear form. Specifically, I hypothesize

that states confronting an intermediate level of threat are more likely to seek UN involvement

than states facing either low or extreme levels of threat.

Political Similarity

Some scholars have argued that all types of regimes not only democracies are typically more

amenable to third-party conflict management when faced with an opponent whose political

20On the socializing impact of international institutions, see Alastair Iain Johnston, Treating

International Institutions as Social Environments,International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 4

(2001); Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics(Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999). For an application involving the UN, see Martha Finnemore,


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system resembles their own.21

To examine this possibility, I also include in my analysis a variable

that measures the similarity of states domestic regimes irrespective of whether they are

democracies or not. If the above hypothesis is correct, the probability that crisis actors will seek

UN involvement should decrease as their domestic regime becomes less similar to that of their

opponent.

Number of Disputants

This last variable is included mainly for statistical reasons. Everything else being equal, the

greater the number of crisis participants, the lower any individual actors baseline probability of

being the party that initiates UN involvement. Consequently, I anticipate this variable to be

negatively correlated with the dependent variable of this study.

5. Data and Measurements

Data on crises, crisis participants, as well as some of the independent variables are drawn from

the actor-level version (ICB2) of the International Crisis Behavior dataset compiled by Michael

Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld.22

In its original form, ICB2 contains actor-level information

for 412 crises that took place between 1918 and 1994. For purposes of the present analysis, I

made several alterations to this dataset.

International Organizations as Teachers of Norms: The United Nations Educational, Scientific,

and Cultural Organization and Science Policy,International Organization47, no. 4 (1993).21

Jacob Bercovitch and Allison Houston, The Study of International Mediation: Theoretical

Issues and Empirical Evidence, in Resolving International Conflicts: The Theory and

Practice of Mediation, ed. Jacob Bercovitch (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996), 20-21.


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First, I dropped all crises that occurred before the UN was established. Second,

following the practice adopted by other users of this dataset, I decided to merge or delete a

number of the crises recorded by ICB. Specifically, I eliminated from the sample all cases in

which there was no clear evidence that any of the participants engaged in the threat or use of

armed force, as well as all crises in which at least one side was not an officially recognized

member of the interstate system at the time of the crisis. In addition, I merged several cases

where military violence was ongoing between crises (such as crises that broke out within the

context of a full-scale war or protracted guerrilla campaign).23

Third, I deleted from the

remaining sample all crises in which the UN was not involved in any form. 24 Finally, I removed

from the sample all states that joined a crisis only after the UN had already become involved,

since these actors by definition cannot be expected to become initiators of UN involvement.25

Following these modifications, the sample analyzed in this study comprises observations

for a total of 246 state actors in 128 international crises between 1945 and 1994. Details

22For a detailed description of this dataset, see Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld,A

Study of Crisis(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). The data file is available for

download at http://www.missouri.edu/~polsjjh/ICB/.23

Other studies that have pursued the same approach include Christopher F. Gelpi, Alliances as

Instruments of Intra-Allied Control, inImperfect Unions: Security Institutions over Time and

Space, ed. Helga Haftendorn, Robert O. Keohane, and Celeste A. Wallander (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1999); Christopher F. Gelpi and Michael Griesdorf, Winners or

Losers? Democracies in International Crisis, 1918-94,American Political Science Review95,

no. 3 (2001); David L. Rousseau et al., Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace,

1918-88,American Political Science Review90, no. 3 (1996). The rules used here follow

closely those detailed in the appendix to Gelpi and Griesdorf, Winners or Losers. 24

This procedure was adopted on purely pragmatic grounds (i.e., to minimize the amount of data

work) and raises obvious questions about the potential for selection effects. That is, crises that

experience UN involvement may differ from other crises in ways that may limit the

generalizability of the results presented below. To address this issue, I am currently in the process

of expanding the sample to include cases in which the UN did not become active as well. 25

Entry dates for joiners were determined based on the date identified by ICB2 as the time an

actor first perceives itself as involved in a foreign policy crisis.


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concerning the measurement and operationalization of my dependent and independent variables

are described below.

Initiation of UN Involvement

This constitutes the dependent variable of the statistical analysis presented below and is coded in

dichotomous (dummy) fashion. Actors receive a score of 1 on this variable if they undertook

positive diplomatic efforts that caused the UN to become involved in a given crisis26

; all

remaining crisis participants are given a score of 0. Actors in crises where UN activity resulted

from the efforts of a party that was not a crisis participant, or was initiated by the office of the

UN Secretary General, are also assigned a value of 0.27

Regime Type

To measure the regime type of crisis actors and their opponents,28

I draw on the most recent

version (IV) of the widely used Polity dataset compiled by Monty Marshall and Keith Jaggers.29

26Examples of relevant activities include bringing a conflict to the attention of one of the UNs

main official organs (General Assembly, Security Council, Secretary General); lodging a

complaint about another countrys actions over the disputed issue; requesting the dispatch of a

UN mediation, observer, fact-finding, or peacekeeping mission; and demanding the imposition of

economic or military sanctions against another country.27

Data for this variable were generated by consulting the case summaries provided in Brecher

and Wilkenfeld,A Study of Crisis For crises that took place during the 1945-1974 period, I

supplemented this source with information drawn from the synopses in Robert Lyle Butterworth

and Margaret Scranton, E.,Managing Interstate Conflict, 1945-74: Data with Synopses

(Pittsburgh: University Center for International Studies, 1976). Codings are based on states

actions during the time interval between the crisis start and end dates as specified by ICB. 28

Opponents were identified based on the ICB2 variable SOUTHV, which lists the state

perceived as the source of threat to values by the focal actor. In cases where the focal actor

perceives a threat from more than one state (e.g. Israel in the 1956 Suez War crisis), SOUTHV

lists the state perceived as the most threatening. For further details concerning the coding rules

for this and other ICB2 variables employed in this study, see the ICB2 codebook available for

download from the ICB website.


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Consistent with standard practice, I measure a states level of democracy by subtracting its score

on the autocracy index from the score it receives on the democracy index to generate a scale

ranging from -10 (=maximal autocracy) to +10 (=maximal democracy). Since liberal theory is

silent on how variations in levels of freedom below the threshold to full democracy affect conflict

actors propensity for utilizing international organizations, I dichotomized this variable using +7 as

a cutoff value. States with regime scores equal or greater than this value are coded as

democratic; all other states are classified as non-democracies.30

In order to test Hypothesis 3, I also created an interaction term designed to capture the

effects of the opposing partys regime type on the propensity of democratic crisis actors to

approach the UN. For this purpose, I first rescaled the continuous version of the opponents

regime score so that it ranges from 1 (=maximal autocracy) to 21 (=maximal democracy) instead

of -10 to 10. This new measure was then interacted with the dummy variable representing the

regime type of the focal actor so that it equals the opponents regime score if the focal actor is a

democracy, and 0 otherwise. If Hypothesis 3 is correct, we should observe a positive correlation

between this variable and the probability that a state will initiate UN involvement.

Permanent Security Council Membership

Permanent membership in the UN Security Council is represented by a dummy variable that

equals 1 if the actor in question was a permanent member of the UN Security Council at the time

29Polity IV Project, Polity IV Dataset. Computer file, Version p4v2000 (College Park, MD:

Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2000).

Polity IV updates and integrates the Polity III and Polity IIId datasets.30

This is also the approach adopted by the managers of the Polity dataset themselves. See Keith

Jaggers and Ted Robert Gurr, Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity Iii Data,

Journal of Peace Research32, no. 4 (1995), 474. Setting the threshold at +6 or +8 does not


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it was engaged in a crisis, and 0 otherwise. Since Chinas seat in the UN was occupied by

Taiwan until October 1971, the latter receives a score of 1 on this variable for any crisis that

occurred between 1945 and this date, while China is coded 0 for this time period. For crises that

took place after 1971, the codings for the two Chinas are reversed. The Unites States, France,

Great Britain, and the Soviet Union/Russia are coded 1 for the entire historical period covered in

this study.

Relative Power

Relative power is operationalized using the Correlates of War (COW) projects composite

capabilities index, which measures states share of global systemic resources in terms of

population, urban population, energy consumption, iron and steel production, military manpower,

and military expenditures.31

Specifically, relative power will be represented by the natural

logarithm of the ratio of the focal actors score on the COW capabilities index to that of the focal

states opponent.32

I use the natural logarithm of this ratio rather than its raw value because I

assume relative power to marked by declining returns to scale (i.e., going from parity to a power

ratio of 2:1 is likely to have a greater substantive impact than moving from a ratio of 9:1 to a ratio

of 10:1).

affect the substantive nature of the findings reported below, although it changes the confidence

levels for some coefficients.31

J. David Singer, Stuart Bremer, and John Stuckey, Capability Distribution, Uncertainty, and

Major Power War, 1820-1965, inPeace, War, and Numbers, ed. Bruce Russett (Beverly Hills:

Sage, 1972).32

Capabilities scores were obtained using Version 2.3 of the EUGene data generation and

management software authored by D. Scott Bennett and Allan Stam. For a description of the

program, see D. Scott Bennett and Allan Stam, Eugene: A Conceptual Manual,International

Interactions26 (2000). For dyadic crises, capabilities scores are for the year that ICB records

as the year in which the crisis broke out. For multilateral crises, scores are for the year in which

an actor became a crisis participant.


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Alliance Ties to Major Powers

Data concerning the availability of major power allies are based on the ICB2 variable

ALLYCAP. ALLYCAP divides states into four categories: 1.) states that are non-aligned or

neutral; 2.) states with informal alliance ties to a great or superpower; 3.) states that are formally

allied with a great or superpower; and 4.) alliance leaders, i.e., the great/superpowers

themselves. Since I expect the major distinction regarding the effects of this variable to lie

between those states that are either aligned with a major power or are major powers themselves

on the one hand, and states that fall into neither of these two categories on the other hand, I

collapsed this variable into a simple dichotomy. States that ICB identifies as non-aligned or

neutral receive a score of 1 on this variable, while all other states are assigned a value of 0.33

Alliance with Opponent

Like the preceding variable, the presence or absence of alliance ties between crisis actors on

opposing sides is measured in simple dichotomous fashion. States are given a value of 1 on this

variable if they have any form of (formal) alliance relationship with their opponent, and 0

otherwise. States are classified as allies if they are coded by COW as having shared a defense

pact, neutrality pact, or entente during the year in which the crisis broke out.34

Severity of Threat

33I rely on ALLYCAP rather than the much more widely used COW alliance data for the coding

of this variable since the former has the advantage of capturing informal as well as formal

alliance relationships.34

Like the capabilities scores, data on states alliance memberships were obtained using

EUGENE, V. 2.3.


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ICB2 codes the severity of the threat that a crisis poses to an actor on a 7-point scale whose

values are as follows: 0 = economic threat; 1 = limited military threat; 2 = political (regime)

threat; 3 = territorial threat; 4 = threat to influence; 5 = threat of grave damage; 6 = threat to

existence.35

Since my prediction about the impact of this variable focuses on the distinction

between crisis actors confronting a low or extreme level of threat on the one hand and actors

faced with intermediate levels of threat on the other, I first collapsed the above scale into a

trichotomous measure. Specifically, I classified threats to a states existence as constituting an

extreme level of threat; threats to a states territory or regime, as well as those involving grave

damage as medium-level threats; and all other types of threat as comparatively low-level threats.

Because I expect both low and extreme levels of threat to be associated with a lower propensity

for states to approach the UN, I then further simplified this measure so that it takes on a value of

1 if a state faces an intermediate level of threat, and 0 otherwise.

UN Membership

This variable is coded dichotomously as well. It assumes a value of 1 if, at the time of the crisis,

the actor in question was a member of the UN, and 0 otherwise.36

Political Similarity

The similarity of states regime types is measured using the absolute value of the difference

between the focal actors score on the combined democracy-autocracy index described above

35Cases for which ICB identifies the level of threat as Other are treated as missing for

purposes of the present analysis.36

Data on states membership in the UN were obtained from the UN website at

http://www.un.org/Overview/unmember.html


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and that of the actors opponent. Values for this variable can range from 0 to 20, with higher

values indicating increasing degrees of dissimilarity.

Number of Disputants

For this variable, I first simply added up the number of states that ICB2 lists as actors for a

particular crisis. In addition, I counted as a disputant every state that ICB2 identifies as an

opponent (source of threat) of a state classified as a crisis actor. Finally, I subtracted from the

sum of these two numbers the number of states that joined the crisis only after the UN had

already become involved, since these states have no impact on a states baseline probability of

becoming an initiator of UN involvement. Observed values for this variable range from a

minimum of 2 to a maximum of 7.

6. Analysis and Results

Since the dependent variable of this study is of binary nature, I test the model outlined above

using logistic regression (logit).37

The results of this statistical analysis are presented in overview

form in Tables 1 through 3 below. Overall, the logit results strongly support the liberal claim that

democracies are more likely to utilize international organizations when engaged in a militarized

confrontation, although not all of our initial hypotheses are confirmed.

Hypothesis 1, which stated that democracies are more likely in general to seek UN

involvement than other types of regimes, receives solid confirmation. As Table 1 shows, the

37The logit analysis was performed using Stata 7.0. On logit, see William H. Greene,

Econometric Analysis, 4th ed. (Prentice Hall, 2000), chp. 19.


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coefficient for the democracy variable is positive and significant at the 0.05 level.38

Hypothesis 3,

the corollary of the monadic argument, finds only limited backing in the data. As predicted, crisis

actors appear to be more inclined to approach the UN when confronted with a democratic

opponent, but the coefficient for this variable fails to reach conventional levels of statistical

significance.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Hypothesis 2 (the dyadic version of the liberal argument)

receives no support. Contrary to what this hypothesis predicts, the coefficient representing the

interaction between democracy and opponents regime type is negative. Although it is significant

only at the more permissive 0.10 level, this result suggests that the propensity of democratic

states to refer their disputes to the UN actually declinesas their opponents become more

democratic.39

What makes this finding especially striking is the fact that in general, political

similarity appears to have a positive influence on the willingness of crisis actors to bring their

conflicts to the UNs attention. Although the variable measuring the degree to which an actors

domestic political system differs from that of its opponent also is significant only at the 0.10 level,

it is negatively signed, indicating that, in general, states become less inclined to involve the UN

when facing politically dissimilar adversaries.

Table 1: Logistic Regression Resul ts

38All significance tests reported in this section are two-tailed.

39Raising the threshold used for coding states as democratic to +8 instead of +7 renders this

finding significant at the 0.05 level, while leaving the results for the monadic term virtually

unchanged.


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Variable Coefficient Standard

Error

Significance

Level

(two-tailed)

Democracy 1.746 .871 0.045

Opponent Democratic .711 .509 0.162

Democracy * Polity Score of Opponent -.118 .068 0.084

Political Dissimilarity -.071 .041 0.085

Security Council Member .909 .526 0.084

Relative Power -.208 .076 0.006

No Major Power Allies 1.100 .365 0.003

Alliance w. Opponent -.564 .382 0.139

Dispute Severity .728 .362 0.045

UN Member 2.673 1.088 0.014

No. of Disputants -.470 .151 0.002

Constant .119 .666 0.858

N = 246

Log likelihood: -129.0753

Pseudo-R2: 0.1827

% of Cases Correctly Predicted: 76

Proportionate Reduction in Error (PRE): 29.6%

The remaining control variables behave largely as expected. As predicted, the

coefficients for the variables measuring relative power and joint membership in a military alliance

are negatively signed; only the former, however, achieves statistical significance.40

Also as anticipated, membership in the UN and the absence of major power allies have a positive

and robust influence on the tendency of crisis actors to engage the UN, with significance levels

of 0.014 and 0.003, respectively. Permanent Security Council membership also has a positive

40One reason why the alliance term fails to reach significance may be its relatively strong

correlation with political similarity (r = -0.427).


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effect on disputants proclivity for involving the UN, although this variable is significant only at

the 0.10 level.41

The coefficient for the dummy variable measuring the gravity of the threat

confronted by crisis actors, finally, also has a positive sign and is significant at 0.05. Thus, there

indeed seems to exist a curvilinear relationship between dispute severity and the inclination of

crisis actors to resort to the UN, as hypothesized above.42

In terms of its overall fit, too, the model performs quite well. As Table 2 shows, the

model successfully predicts states decisions concerning whether to initiate UN involvement in

76%, or 187 out of the 246 cases included in the sample. This constitutes a considerable

improvement over the number of correct predictions (162, or 65.9%) that could have been

obtained through simple reliance on the modal value of the dependent variable, and is equivalent

to a proportionate reduction in error (PRE) of nearly 30%.

Table 2: Compar ison of Predicted and Observed Outcomes

41Again, collinearity may be to blame here, as Security Council membership correlates fairly

strongly with some of the other independent variables in the model. Pearsons r for the bivariate

associations between Security Council membership and the remaining independent variables

range from 0.133 to 0.465.42

To ensure the accuracy of this conclusion, I repeated the above analysis with a linear version

of the gravity term added to the regression equation. In this amended analysis, the linear term is

negatively signed and falls far short of statistical significance, whereas the coefficient for the

curvilinear term retains its positive sign and is only slightly less significant. Repeating the analysis

with only the linear term included produces a positively signed but statistically insignificant

coefficient.


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Variable Change from Baseline

Democracy

No to Yes, Opponents Democracy Score = 1 +62%





Opponent Democratic

No to Yes +50%

Regime DissimilarityIncreased by one Std. Deviation -30%

Security Council Member

No to Yes +64%

Relative Power

Increased by one Std. Deviation -30%

Major Power Allies

Yes to No +77%

Alliance w. Opponent

No to Yes -33%

Dispute Severity

Medium to Low/Extreme Level of Threat -41%

UN Member

No to Yes +90%

Note: Marginal effects of changes in the value of independent variables were

calculated by generating predicted values from the logistic regression equation

while holding the remaining variables at their means or modes.

Democracys effects, however, vary greatly depending on the regime type of the

opponent. As the figures in Table 3 indicate, the amount by which switching a states regime


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type from non-democratic to democratic increases the predicted probability that it will approach

the UN is greatest when the actors opponent is fully autocratic. As the opponent becomes more

and more democratic, the substantive impact of democracy steadily declines, and picks up again

only once the opponents regime type has crossed the threshold to full democracy (due to the

strong positive influence of Opponent Democracy in general). As noted before, this pattern

strongly contradicts the dyadic version of the liberal argument and raises interesting questions

about the nature of the causal processes at work a subject to which I turn below.

7. Conclusion

This paper has examined the relationship between regime type and states propensity for

managing their conflicts with the assistance of international organizations. Based on a

quantitative analysis of state behavior in 128 international crises between 1945 and 1994, I have

shown that democracy has a strong positive effect on the willingness of states to seek UN

involvement when engaged in an international crisis. Contrary to what existing theoretical

formulations would lead us to expect, however, the preceding analysis also suggests that

democratic regimes utilize the UN predominantly in order to manage their conflicts with non-

democracies.

Given the unanticipated nature of this second finding, perhaps the most pressing task for

future research is to investigate the causal mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. Two

possible explanations suggest themselves, neither of which is entirely satisfactory. First, one

might conjecture that the apparent tendency of democratic states to resort to the UN primarily

when confronted with non-democratic adversaries simply reflects the greater intractability of


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these types of conflicts. From this perspective, conflicts between democratic states are less

likely to require the involvement of conflict management agents such as the UN, mainly because

of the superior ability of democratic states to signal their intentions and resolve disputes through

compromise rather than war.44

Conflicts between democracies and non-democracies, in

contrast, are more much difficult to resolve and therefore call for the presence of a mediating

agent. Although plausible, this argument does not explain why regime similarity in general (i.e.,

among non-democracies) appears to have a positive effect on states inclination to refer a dispute

to the UN. Since conflicts between politically similar states tend to be more tractable than those

involving states with more divergent domestic political systems, the former should be associated

with a decreased not increased willingness of crisis actors to request third-party assistance if

the argument were correct.

A second possible explanation might proceed from the observation that states often value

the UN less for its capacities as a mediator than as a tool for generating international attention

and support. Based on this insight, it could be argued that democracies value this mobilization

function more highly when engaged in conflicts with non-democratic opponents, where the

potential for escalation is typically higher. The challenge for this line of reasoning, however,

would be to explain why non-democracies do not appear to make the same calculation when

confronting a democratic adversary.

44On the unique signaling and dispute resolution capabilities of democratic regimes, see, inter

alia, William J. Dixon, Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict,

American Political Science Review88, no. 1 (1994); James D. Fearon, Domestic Political

Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,American Political Science Review88,

no. 3 (1994); Michael Mousseau, Democracy and Compromise in Militarized Interstate

Conflicts, 1816-1992,Journal of Conflict Resolution42, no. 2 (1998); and Kenneth A. Schultz,

Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).


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In addition to addressing these theoretical issues, future research should also aim to

extend and refine the empirical analysis presented in this paper. First, although states decisions

whether to refer a dispute to the UN provide us with some indication of their overall attitude

toward UN involvement, this measure is far from perfect, since it provides no information on the

degree to which non-initiating parties supported or opposed the UNs activities. Secondly, future

studies should also go beyond the present effort by examining the relationship between

democracy and the effectivenessof UN involvement. Since disputants frequently resort to the

UN primarily for its mobilization rather than mediatory function, the democratic tendency to seek

UN involvement demonstrated in this paper need not necessarily translate into making the UN a

more successful peace broker.45

Finally, future research should also explore whether the

empirical patterns reported in this paper are specific to the UN or extend to the behavior of

democracies toward international organizations in general. If the preceding analysis is any

indication, the results of these efforts are likely to challenge what we thought we knew about the

relationship between democracy and international organizations.

45I am addressing this issue in research in progress.


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Documents

Regime Types and Appeals for UN Involvement in International Crises 1945-1994