Democratizing the dispute: democratization and the history of conflict management

What explains the complex processes of democratization and conflict management? Are new democracies more likely to use peaceful means or engage in militarized means when presented with opportunities to resolve their territorial disputes? In this paper, we hypothesize that democratizing states still engaged in territorial disputes are more likely to attempt conflict management following the transition to democracy to remove flashpoints that the military and other former autocratic regime elements can use to discredit democracy and prevent consolidation of democracy. Depending on the history of past conflict management attempts, newly democratic leaders either continue or break with the past policies of non-democratic leaders, indicating a degree of interdependence in the conflict management process. Using multinomial logistic regression on claim-year dyad data from the Issues Correlates of War project, we find that previous management attempts and democratization interact to make peaceful conflict management more likely when past leaders have been successful in peaceful conflict management, but not with failed peaceful attempts or militarized attempts. Our results indicate that previous arguments overstate the propensity for democratization to spark armed conflict, attempted conflict management is more often peaceful, and current attempts are highly influenced by the history of attempts pursued by past leaders.