Free to Develop?

Academics have long debated whether relationship exists between freedom and development. Problems with these studies lead others to question the connection between these variables. In contributing to the scholarly debate, a new interactive variable is created that combines several measures of economic and political freedom, as suggested by Milton Friedman. The link between this new freedom variable and both economic and human development is examined across a series of cross-sections from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Results indicate that this new freedom measure is strongly related to both forms of development for the developed and developing world

Democratic leaders and the democratic peace: The operational codes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton

Do the beliefs of leaders make a significant difference in determining if democracies are peaceful and explaining why democracies (almost) never fight one another? Our comparisons of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton reveal that both leaders view democracies as more friendly than nondemocracies, and they have significantly less cooperative beliefs toward the latter than toward the former, a difference that extends to the behavior of their respective governments during the Kosovo conflict. We also find that individual differences in the operational codes of the two leaders matter in the management of conflict with nondemocracies; the leaders exhibit opposite leadership styles and behavior associated with the domestic political culture of the two states. Overall, these results support the dyadic version of the democratic peace and suggest that the conflict behavior of democratic states depends upon the beliefs and calculations of their leaders in dealing with nondemocracies. © 2006 International Studies Association