Kenneth A. Schultz and Barry R. Weingast (2003), 'The Democratic Advantage: Institutional Foundations of Financial Power in International Competition', International Organization, 57, pp. 3-42.

Skepticism about the quality of democratic foreign policy has a long lineage in international relations scholarship.! It goes at least as far back as Thucydides's concerns about the "inconstant comrnons."21t reappears in Alexis de Tocqueville's famous assertion that democratic governments are "decidedly inferior" when it comes to foreign affairs? It is evident in A. 1. P. Taylor's indictment of the West's response to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, as well as more recent analyses of this period.4 And it was particularly influential during the Cold War, when many analysts saw the United States' political institutions as a source of weakness in its rivalry with the Soviet Union. Democracies were thought to be indecisive, slow to act, weak of purpose, squeamish about using force, and subject to the changing whims of public opinion. Democracies risked the politicization of the "national interest" by ill-informed publics and short-sighted legislatures.s Because these writers took as given that leaders of democratic states lack the freedom of action enjoyed by their nondemocratic counterparts, they anticipated that democracy would face an uphill battle in its struggle against authoritarianism.