Authoritarian Leaders, Defense Ministers and Inter-State Conflict

• In Event: Authoritarianism, Populism, and Foreign Policy

Abstract

What institutional arrangements push authoritarian leaders to instigate inter-state conflict? Existing studies on the effects of authoritarian institutions on conflict initiation rely on flawed conceptions of regime typology – mostly based on Geddes (2003) and Slater’s (2003) work. This set of scholarship focuses on regime categories, such as personalist and party-based dictatorships (Peceny and Butler, 2004), and leader types, such as civilian and military dictatorships (Lai and Slater, 2006), or both (Weeks, 2014). However, these studies do not explore what kind of institutions authoritarian leaders use to maintain their grip on power and stay in office, and how these institutional arrangements affect the propensity of those leaders to initiate conflict. Our study borrows from contemporary comparative literature (Roessler, 2011; Svolik, 2012; Roessler and Ohls, 2018), which suggests that authoritarian politics are driven by trade-offs – autocrats set up institutions to either protect themselves from coups or attempt to shield themselves from civil-wars – they cannot do both. We argue that dictators who hold a Defense Ministry portfolio, and by doing so reduce the threat of a coup, pursue disparate foreign policies than dictators who do not hold a Defense Ministry portfolio. Our statistical analysis of 113 autocratic regimes over the time period of 1946 – 2008 using conflict data from Correlates of War shows evidence that authoritarian leaders who hold Defense Ministry portfolios pursue less aggressive foreign policies than authoritarian states, where leaders share power by appointing defense ministers. This contrasts with existing IR scholarship, which suggests that personalist and military leaders are more likely to initiate inter-state conflict than non-personalist leaders and civilian regimes.

Authors

• Simonas Cepenas, University of Virginia

• Anne Meng, University of Virginia