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I. DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE, INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS, AND WAR
A fairly broad consensus has emerged among scholars of international relations that
domestic regime type has a systematic impact on at least some types of international behavior. In
particular, democratic systems seem to produce incentives for leaders to avoid military conflict,
adopt favorable trade policies, and fulfill cooperative agreements, at least in interactions with
other democracies (e.g., Russett and Oneal, 2001; Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and
Smith, 1999; Mansfield, Milner and Rosendorff, 2000, 2002; Martin, 2000; McGillivray and
Smith, 2000; Leeds, 1999). Yet, there remains debate about what it is about democracy that most
influences these outcomes. By exploring democratic behavior in an issue area that concurrently
involves decisions for war and decisions to fulfill or violate international agreements, we hope to
shed light on this question.
Specifically, we analyze the decisions of states to fulfill military alliance commitments
when they are invoked by war. While many scholars have argued that leaders of democracies are
advantaged at making credible commitments (e.g., Gaubatz, 1996; Fearon, 1994; Leeds, 1999;
Martin, 2000; McGillivray and Smith, 2000; Schultz and Weingast, 2003), theorists have also
claimed that democracies are particularly sensitive to the costs of war and should choose to avoid
military conflict (e.g., Kant, 1795; Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, 1992). This may lead one to
question whether the reliability of democracies extends to an arena in which fulfilling an
agreement may require engaging in war. The little empirical analysis of this topic that exists is
inconsistent– while Leeds (2003a) finds that democracies were comparatively reliable in the pre-
WWII era, Gartzke and Gleditsch (2003) use a different definition of reliability, a different
dataset, and a different sample, and discover that democracies are comparatively unreliable
Convention