ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how states’ military security environment influences their internal political structures, and the possibility that domestic power centralization within them might depend on the frequency and intensity of their conflict involvement. In the extant literature, the relationship between war participation and regime type has typically been analyzed through the prism of the second image, a level of analysis in international relations that aims to explain interstate hostilities by the domestic makeup of states. The most prominent and appraised of these approaches is democratic peace theory. According to its premises, democracies tend not to engage in war with one another due to their strong normative commitment to peace and mutual respect for other liberal governments, as well as a public accountability for war not observed among other types of regimes. Despite extensive criticism from systemlevel explanations of war such as neorealism, democratic peace theory remains one of the most influential approaches to the causes of conflict in the field of international relations, and continues to inform security strategies of many liberal states. The idea that democracies are inherently peaceful, despite finding little support in quantitative research to date, has been explicitly stated to be a major inspiration for the US policies of military interventions with the aim of democratizing the target nation. Despite much contestation from both the theory’s proponents (Russett 2005) and critics (Rosato 2003), and the low success rate of implanting democracy externally (Downes and Monten 2012), politics of democratization remain high on the list of US security priorities.
