Cooperation in Good Times: Are Democracies Really Different?

Democracies are supposed to behave differently than other states when cooperating in alliances, organizations, trade, or a host of other international institutions. We contend, however, that these democratic differences largely depend upon geopolitical environments that make cooperation possible. Though studies have demonstrated endogeneity between democracy and peace, few analyze the effects of this joint relationship on democratic foreign policies related to cooperation. We use the alliance literature as our example and find that democracies in alliances are no more reliable than other regime types, once the threat environment of states is jointly modeled. We find that alliances formed during times of conflict are particularly unreliable “scraps of paper”, and that the general reliability of alliances is concentrated to those coordination alliances existing in already-peaceful environments. Our argument has important ramifications for a host of literatures focused on regime type as well as current debates over the effectiveness of democratic deterrence. Gibler thanks the National Science Foundation (Awards #0923406, #1260492, and #1729244) for their generous support on research related to this project. Nieman thanks the National Science Foundation (Award #1728395) for their support for research. For questions and comments, please contact dmgibler@ua.edu. Institute for Social Science Research, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL. Department of Political Science, Iowa State University, Ames, IA. Since the establishment of the empirical finding that democracies rarely fight each other, many studies have sought confirmation of democratic differences in other types of empirical relationships. Democracies are thought to trade more with other democracies, are more likely to form and cooperate in intergovernmental organizations, and are more likely to ally with each other and be reliable partners. These are just a few examples of the larger democratic peace research program. We believe these types of inferences are unwarranted, however, since the explanations often miss an important point: democracies tend to be clustered across the globe in mostly peaceful regions. As democratization is more likely in peaceful environments, analyses examining any type of democratic difference must be careful to separate the independent causal effect of democracy on political outcomes from that of the political environment. Since democracy is itself at least partially determined by the political environment, a failure to model both the direct and indirect effect of the political environment on policy outcomes will incorrectly attribute the indirect effect of the political environment to democratic institutions. This, in turn, makes it easier to find statistically significant differences in foreign policy behaviors across regime types. We argue that once the political environment is accounted for, and this source of bias is eliminated, many of the differences in foreign policy behavior between regime types will be eliminated. We focus our argument on the large body of research that examines democracies in alliances and build on a recent study that found democracies to be more reliable partners. We use a split-population logit with an instrumental variable to model the likelihood of conflict and peace when alliances are formed and maintained, and introduce this likelihood into the study of democratic reliability. The split-population model allows us to statistically account for the degree of threat within the political environments, while the intrumental variable allows us to account for any possible endogeneity between alliance reliability and threat environment. We find that any association between democracy and reliable alliances appears to actually be a function of the political environment facing the state. Further, our