Ideology and International Conflict

• In Event: Strategies of Subversion in International Politics

Abstract

Why do states intervene in the domestic politics of other countries, and how does the threat of these interventions shape broader patterns of international conflict? I argue that ideological cleavages between states increase the risk of regime disputes through two main mechanisms. First, some states may have an ideological preference for the leadership and institutions of other countries to be more like their own. Second, states may have incentives to undermine ideologically-dissimilar states as a way to prevent political contagion. Ideologically-similar states, by contrast, face pressure to prop each other up against domestic threats, and contagion concerns may even prevent them from using subversion to pursue other foreign policy goals. Using a variety of conflict data sets, I show that pairs of countries that legitimate their rule according to similar principles are less likely to intervene in civil conflicts against one another, less likely to experience policy and regime disputes, and are more cooperative than pairs of ideologically-dissimilar states. Overall, these findings suggest that regime disputes are not simply the product of other foreign policy rivalries, but a source of international conflict in their own right.

Author

• Lindsay Hundley, Stanford University