Chaining the Dog of War: Comparative Data

Table of ContentsI. Introduction 139II. Prologue: the American Debate 141III. War Powers in Other States 146A. Trends across Time and Space 146B. The Role of Regime Type 152IV. Optimal Design & Positive Analysis 154V. Predicting Legislative War Powers 157VI. Conclusion 161(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)I. IntroductionHow should powers of war and peace be distributed in democratic constitutions? This question has been a central one in constitutional design since the founding of the United States, and has (if anything) gained more importance in recent years: not only are constitutions frequently rewritten around the world, but by some accounts, the number of wars has increased as well.1 A central question is whether constitutional design can indeed affect a nation's tendency to engage in armed conflict and its performance in international crisis bargaining. And the question relates to international efforts to reduce the levels and costs of violent conflict.To understand why constitutional design might matter requires engagement with the large literature in international relations theory on the democratic peace. Since the time of Immanuel Kant, scholars have speculated on the relationship of internal constitutional structure and war. The central findings of the democratic peace literature can be summarized briefly: (1) mature democracies generally do not go to war against each other; (2) democracies are, on the whole, no less warlike (or only slightly less warlike) than autocracies; and (3) democracies are likely to win the wars that they fight against autocracies. To illustrate, by one account, democracies win over three quarters of their wars, and over 93 percent of wars they initiate.2 Putting propositions (1) and (2) together (and setting asides debate over proposition (2)),3 we can see that democracies are more likely to go to war against autocracies because they are not fighting fellow democracies. These statistical regularities, however, are not self-explanatory, and there is a large debate on the sources of the democratic peace.4 Most of this literature treats states as unitary actors and does not "unpack the black box of the state" to try to understand specific institutional sources of the democratic peace.5 This is a weakness that can be addressed in part by the availability of fine-grained data on national constitutions.In thinking about the project of optimal constitutional design, we need to understand why it is that democracies may have certain advantages in war. In particular, it would be helpful to know whether constitutional choices may have anything to do with the propensity of states to enter into conflict, as the American Framers imagined. We focus on the question of legislative involvement in war powers, which was the central concern of the US Founders. Informed by Machiavelli, the Founders thought that concentrating war powers in the executive created a risk of tyranny, and also put the national interest at stake because of the risk of selecting bad wars.6 Many other countries have followed this constitutional design theory, while some have not. This variation gives us the opportunity to try to understand what factors lead countries to involve the legislature in decisions about war. …