Why Do More Authoritarian Regimes Fight Shorter Ethno-Territorial Wars?

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics I & II
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Comparative Politics I

Abstract

The civil war duration literature sometimes finds that authoritarianism leads to shorter wars, and sometimes that regime type has no significant impact. Theoretically, the two most commonly emphasized regime-type mechanisms propose that authoritarian regimes are likely to fight wars more effectively, ending wars earlier by military victory; and, by contrast, that authoritarian regimes are likely to be more tolerant of war costs, and thus less likely to negotiate ends to wars. We also investigate a third mechanism—willingness to make substantive concessions to rebels—in which more authoritarian regimes’ lesser accountability makes war-ending negotiations more likely. For theoretical and empirical reasons, we limit our universe of cases to the ethno-territorial type of civil war and control for the effect of leadership preferences. For empirical reasons, we present variant results in which cases of intra-war regime change are right-censored. Our results show that highly authoritarian regimes tend to have shorter wars, and democracies longer ones; and that the concessions-constraint mechanism is the strongest, and the war-costs-tolerance mechanism the weakest.

Author

• Shale Horowitz, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee