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Mitchell, Sara M., Kelly M. Kadera and Mark J.C. Crescenzi. "Practicing Democratic Community Norms: Third Party Conflict Management and Successful Settlements." Presented at the 2004 Annual International Studies Association meeting, Montreal, March.
In this paper we investigate the methods by which aggregate democratic forces influence dyadic-level interactions in the interest of peace. We examine the causal linkage between a strong democratic community in the world and the involvement of third parties in attempts to settle dyadic claims that may otherwise lead to violence. We hypothesize that a strong democratic community and its institutions make third party settlement attempts more likely, that these third parties are likely to be democracies or international institutions, and that the settlement attempts are more successful. Using data from the ICOW project as well as from Kadera, Crescenzi and Shannon (2003), we test these hypotheses and find broad but not universal support for the notion that when the democratic community has the ability to influence international politics, it does so through the propagation of democratic societal norms of dispute resolution.
"Reputation, Learning, and Conflict" Presented at the 2005 annual American Peace Science Society meeting, November, 2005.
In international politics, states learn from the behavior of other nations. This includes the behavior of states towards the other states in the international system. Typically, however, researchers assume that a pair of states behaves independently from other dyads in the system. This article relaxes this assumption, and I develop a model of how states learn from these extra-dyadic ties and present a theory of how this learning affects the conflict process. I then investigate whether a dyad is more likely to experience conflict if one of the states has hostile ties with other states similar to its dyadic partner. The hypotheses derived from the theory are tested empirically across all dyads from 1817-1992 (as well as a subset of politically relevant dyads) using survival analysis. The empirical results strongly indicate that states do engage in this learning behavior, and that the extra-dyadic interaction of states has a significant bearing upon the likelihood of dyadic conflict.
Paper (.pdf, 41 pages, 292 KB)| Presentation (.pdf, 13 pages, 3.7 MB)
"FORTHCOMING: Reputation, History, and War: The Competing Pressures of Escalation and Settlement" with Stephen Long and Jake Kathman. Journal of Peace Research, 2007.This paper investigates the role of repuational history in the onset of interstate war. Scholars have recently identified the importance of separating the phenomena of conflict from the rare event of war, and have argued persuasively that the causes of war may diverge from the causes of lower levels of interstate violence. Here we build on earlier work concerning the role of reputation and history in the onset of militarized interstate disputes (Crescenzi and Enterline 2001, Crescenzi 2003) to examine the role these factors play in the onset of war. We argue that states in crises face competing pressures brought on by their dyadic history and the opponents' reputations. While historical conflict reveals private information regarding the credibility of state demands, this history also generates constraints upon the ability of governments to seek peaceful resolutions to the current crisis.
"Providing a Global Supply of Conflict Mediators: a Job for the Democratic Community?" 2004. Presented at the Global Democratic Peace workshop at the University of Iowa, March.
Mediators provide international disputants with peaceful alternatives for resolving disagreements. It seems sensible to expect that successful mediators are fair and impartial (Fisher 1995; Young 1967). Scholarship on democratic institutions, for example, suggests that the neutrality of courts involved in domestic disagreements builds citizens' confidence in their state's use of international courts (Caldeira and Gibson 1995). Yet, Kydd finds that in order to be credible enough to prevent conflict escalation, mediators must be biased in favor of one side (2003). We are left with a dilemma: impartiality improves disputants' confidence in a mediator, but biased mediators are the most credible and successful. A mechanism for making impartial mediators credible would resolve this dilemma. In order to identify such a mechanism, we investigate the mediation marketplace. In particular, we consider the international democratic community's ability provide credible and impartial mediators.
"The Bells of Peace and the Drums of War: Integrating Cooperation Into A Model of Interstate Relations" with Andrew Enterline and Stephen Long.
Interstate rivalries are primarily identified by the frequency, timing and degree of militarized conflict in a dyad. Yet, as formal and empirical studies of reciprocity demonstrate, even rivals engage in non-militarized, often cooperative, interactions. We offer an alternative conceptual model of interstate relationships that relies on two assumptions: (1) central to the evolution of interstate relationships is cooperation; and (2) actions taken by dyadic partners toward each other comprise a joint relationship that can be summarized in a single model. This approach should allow us to make better predictions of subsequent behavior in a dyad, because we are modeling more completely the evolution of a given interstate relationship.
"Autocratic Survival in a Democratic Community" with Kelly Kadera. Presented at the 2003 annual Peace Science Society meeting, Ann Arbor, November.