The authors advance a theory of the effects of political institutions on state policy. The theory explains how political institutions affect the ability of leaders to maintain themselves in office, why some political systems are more prone to policy failure than others, and why autocrats create...

A large amount of recent research points to the importance of domestic political institutions in shaping foreign policy, most of it turning on the distinction between democratic and nondemocratic regimes. However, fundamental characteristics differentiate regime types beyond the distinction...

Do variations in partisanship and political outcomes among democratic states affect the duration of militarized interstate disputes? To answer this question, the author develops a model of partisan competition derived from the government failure literature. The author argues factors associated...

Do governments of the left attract more terrorism than governments of the right? We examine how the political orientation of governments affects the probability of states being the target of terrorist attack. We develop a series of related theoretical linkages between partisan orientation,...

The authors investigate the expectations generated by the “interaction opportunity†model initially developed by Most and Starr for the study of diffusion. The impact that borders and alliances have as “treatments†on the overall war behavior of states is the focus of study,...

The relationship between the distribution of power among nations and the outbreak of war has been a question of perennial interest to students of international politics. Although recent empirical studies seem to support the idea that equal power will lead to the outbreak of war, a review of...

Most wars do not expand beyond the initial two participants. Why is this so? We argue that wars remain small because initiators select as targets states that they believe will not receive third-party help and that they can defeat without such help. Drawing on the idea of selection effect, a...

An examination of the alliance choices of democratic states between 1920 and 1939 and between 1946 and 1965 is undertaken to answer the question, do democracies have a tendency to ally with each other more than they ought to according to probability? The analysis of the data indicates that...