Death and taxes: Sources of democratic military aggression

When do democracies aggressively choose military coercion as their preferred tool in international politics? When do voters have a moderating influence on foreign policy, and when do they allow their leaders free rein, and when do they encourage entering conflicts, even at the risk of overstretch? When do democracies pursue a military doctrine ill-suited for the war at hand? In answering these questions, this study challenges previous findings that democracies are risk-averse in the wars they fight, are less threatening to other states, and rarely engage in overexpansion. The major explanation for this exceptionalism is the cost internalization inherent in democracy—the people shouldering the burdens of war are also the holders of political power. Focusing on the distribution of costs within a democracy, this study argues that the average voter will often find the aggressive use of the military appealing because costs can be shifted to a wealthy minority by developing heavily capitalized armed forces. Having derived testable hypotheses from two formal models, the dissertation uses newly-collected data on military capital expenditure and capital stock to assess statistically the role of economic inequality in the development of military doctrine. In so doing, it demonstrates that democracies can use the military as a tool for redistribution. Based on these findings, the dissertation proceeds to analyze the role redistribution can play in the initiation of militarized coercion, finding that democracies with higher economic inequality or more capital-intensive militaries pursue more instances of militarized compellence. These two factors also result in larger military efforts by democracies during wartime. I trace the causal mechanism and show the theory's explanatory power through studies of two important cases of puzzling democratic aggressiveness: the expansion of the British Empire after 1867 and the American war in Vietnam

Military Technology and the Duration of Civil Conflict

Why do some civil conflicts end quickly, while others last for years? We argue that an incumbent government’s military forces play a crucial role in conflict duration. Specifically, combined arms militaries—which bring to bear a mixture of mechanized infantry, armor, and aircraft—make short conflicts more likely. The use of mechanized ground forces in combination with airpower increases the likelihood of decisive engagements early in a conflict, helping to mitigate information asymmetries that can drive violence. By contrast, less-mechanized forces face greater difficulty bringing the fight to the enemy. Combined arms militaries therefore tend to bring conflicts to more rapid conclusions. However, like maneuver warfare in conventional interstate conflict, these outcomes do not always favor incumbent governments. To test this argument, we employ new, detailed data on military mechanization and airpower from civil conflicts between 1967 and 2003. The results indicate that national militaries with high combined arms capabilities are associated with significantly shorter conflicts. Perhaps surprisingly, this relationship remains robust even when we limit the analysis to insurgencies