ABSTRACT
U.S. foreign policy involves continual efforts to spread democracy by military intervention. Advocates of these interventions point to successful cases, such as the transformation of West Germany and Japan into consolidated democracies after World War II. This chapter improves on past efforts to evaluate military intervention’s efficacy in installing democracy. Existing studies often employ overly broad definitions of intervention, fail to grapple with possible selection effects in countries where democracies choose to intervene, and stress interveners’ actions while neglecting conditions in targets. Through statistical examination of seventy instances of foreign-imposed regime change in the twentieth century, the chapter shows that implementing pro-democratic institutional reforms, such as sponsoring elections, is not enough to induce democratization and that interveners tend to fail unless conditions in the target state—high levels of economic development and societal homogeneity, and previous experience with representative governance—are favorable to democracy. That bodes ill for U.S. regime change operations, which typically occur in poor, divided countries. Recent efforts—Iraq, Libya, and perhaps Syria—have come in countries especially ill suited to successful democratization. U.S. policymakers should scale back their expectations that forcibly removing autocrats will bring democracy.
