In sum, Dictators at War and Peace is an excellent book, which makes a number of careful and interesting arguments about an important but understudied topic. Weeks makes the most convincing case yet that, like leaders of democracies, many autocratic leaders are accountable to domestic audiences who rein in riskier behavior and thus help prevent many of the worst foreign policy mistakes. The empirical analysis is admirably clear and consistently reasonable, even if the results are not always beyond dispute. Even where arguments are more open to question, whether in the analysis of Juntas or the existence of large numbers of autocracies that fall outside her empirical scope, Weeks’s work will provide a starting point for important future research. In short, this book is a major contribution that deserves to be read both widely and carefully. Outside Stanford, other individuals gave me helpful comments or shared data that shaped the project early on. First among these is Barbara Geddes, who generously shared the raw data that inform important parts of the empirical analysis. I also thank Hein Goemans, who shared helpful data early in the process and was an important source of advice and encouragement throughout. I am very thankful to H-Diplo/ISSF for hosting this discussion of my book. I am grateful that four extraordinary scholars—Daniel Reiter, Alexander Downes, Hein Goemans, and Alexander Weisiger took the time to provide such detailed and thought-provoking comments. Their essays raise helpful questions about my book, and suggest many productive avenues for future scholarship about dictatorships and foreign policy. On autocratic audience costs in the context of threats of force rather than the use of force, see Jessica L. Weeks, “Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Winter 2008): 35-64.

On the latter, see H. E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). On the former, see Giacomo Chiozza and H. E. Goemans, Leaders and International Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). How Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Transforms Public Support for War" (with Michael Tomz and Kirk Bansak) PNAS-Nexus 2023The Vietnamese case differs from both of the above templates. Unlike the leaders of Iraq or Argentina, Vietnamese leaders Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan made decisions cautiously and shrewdly, using force only after lengthy internal debate. Their approach paid off: the United States withdrew in 1973, and Vietnam was reunified in 1975. It was a stunning defeat for the democratic side, and Le Duan’s reward for the victory was a long career as ruler of a united Vietnam. The Generalizability of IR Experiments Beyond the U.S." (with Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Chagai Weiss, and Jonathan Renshon)

Weeks] makes readers insightfully aware of the key differences among 'dictatorships' that may account for alternative foreign policies. With a good review of extant literature and innovative data-based and case studies on regime types and conflict behavior, she examines theories that distinguish between authoritarian leaders who nevertheless answer to significant elite constituencies and those who behave like unrestrained 'bosses' or 'strongmen'.... This study, and its main findings... are a significant contribution to the scientific study of war and peace." Goemans raises different questions about the conclusions I draw from the Argentine case. He argues that I do not engage enough with an alternative diversionary explanation for the war, namely that that General Galtieri had reason to fear severe punishment (such as death, imprisonment, or exile) if he lost office, which he expected would come at the hands of naval minister Jorge Anaya if he did not make progress on the Falklands. [44] This, he points out, is different from the more common diversionary interpretation, in which the junta went to war because it feared a domestic revolt.

Downes’s commentary raises an important question about the theory, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify how I conceptualized and coded regime type. While the term “junta” typically evokes a team of military officers, I use the term slightly differently in the book. When leaders are constrained by a domestic audience, I code the regime as military versus civilian, based on whether the domestic audience was composed primarily of civilians (machines) or military officers (juntas). Therefore, by my definition, Japan is considered a junta regime when it went to war against China in 1937, even though the leader at the time, Prime Minister Konoe, was a civilian. It is clear that by that time, civilian leaders knew that their survival in office depended on the support of the military. In 1932, the civilian prime minister had been assassinated by a radical group of junior naval officers, and in early 1936, 1400 military officers attempted a takeover of the government, resulting in the death of several top civilian leaders. Although the rebellion failed, it demonstrated the domestic coercive power of the military. Moreover, civilians were outnumbered by military officers in important ministries, and were increasingly excluded from important political and military decisions. [41] For these reasons, I coded the domestic audience in Japan as stemming primarily from the military. While the book does not delve into Wilhemine Germany, Downes’s description suggests that the leadership of this period might, like Japan, be coded as a junta because of the domestic power of the military. Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization, Winter 2008 (62.1) One issue that these three essays skirt, and which I wish to touch on here, concerns the policy ramifications of Weeks’s argument. Especially since the end of Cold War, American foreign policy has stressed the importance of converting dictatorships into democracies, in part because, as Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush reiterated, democracies do not fight each other, and dictatorships are belligerent. Weeks’s book challenges this assumption, noting that some types of dictatorships, especially ‘Machine’ regimes led by civilian dictators who have to answer to elites, can be as peaceful as democracies.

Each of these core regime types creates a different set of incentives and opportunities for leaders’ foreign policy decisions. Leaders of nonpersonalist civilian machines, such as modern China or the post-Stalin Soviet Union, face a surprising amount of domestic accountability for decisions to use force. Moreover, the civilians who exercise power in these regimes tend to take a prudent and cautious attitude toward the use of force, much like voters and politicians in democracies. This causes leaders of machines to initiate military conflicts relatively infrequently, to prevail in the conflicts they do initiate, and to face punishment when they miscalculate. Indeed, I show that machines are virtually indistinguishable from democracies in terms of these three behavioral patterns.Weeks, for example, characterizes “nonpersonalist civilian machines” as being governed by “civilian leaders and elites.” (19). Although I was unable to find an explicit statement that the leaders of Juntas must be military officers, Weeks strongly implies this when she writes, “the core domestic audience in Juntas is composed of other military officers” (6). (emphasis added). One could argue that the leader of a junta must, by definition, be a military officer. Hard to Say I’m Sorry: Domestic Reactions to Making International Apologies" (with Michaela Mattes) Saburō Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 35-36; and Ronald H. Spector, Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 33.

Indeed, as I argue below, under the Meiji Constitution, the military already constituted the key audience that could remove civilian leaders. The Goemans, Downes, and Weisiger essays that follow are constructive discussions of an important piece of international relations scholarship. We hope that ISSF readers find these essays, as well as Weeks’s reply, to be stimulating and informative, and as encouragement to read Dictators at War and Peace itself. Public Opinion and Decisions about Military Force in Democracies” (with Michael Tomz and Keren Yarhi-Milo), International Organization 2020 (74:1)Nonetheless, I agree that there is still much to be learned by linking monadic arguments about regime type to (dyadic) theories of strategic interaction. My aim was to characterize the domestic politics of making decisions about war in non-democracies and to develop some core hypotheses, none of which are inconsistent with the bargaining model. Of course, that still leaves many future steps. One is to understand how the politics of different kinds of authoritarian systems might compensate for a small bargaining range, or lead to war even when the bargaining range is large. Another is to investigate how different types of regimes interact. Another, as Goemans points out, is to integrate time-varying factors into the model, allowing for within-regime variation rather than the across-regime variation on which I focus. I hope my book will spur future scholarship to engage in those theoretical tasks, whether by building on my work or critiquing it. From Foes to Friends: The Causes of Interstate Rapprochement and Conciliation" (with Michaela Mattes) forthcoming, Annual Review of Political Science These criticisms should in no way detract from the questions Weeks raises and from her insights into the logic of different authoritarian regimes at war and peace. Weeks deserves much credit for the originality of her contributions, and I hope and am confident that others will follow her lead. Review by Alex Weisiger, University of Pennsylvania The first is the idea that all authoritarian regimes are similar in that their leaders face few domestic constraints when making decisions about war and peace. This perspective, which typically concludes that democracies as a group are less warlike than dictatorships, dominates the existing international relations scholarship on regime type and foreign policy. The core of this view, introduced by Immanuel Kant, is that nondemocratic leaders are freer to choose war than leaders who must answer to the public. ² This assessment rests in part on the assumption that citizens find it difficult to punish dictators who subject them to the ravages of war.³ Dictators internalize fewer of the costs of war and are therefore more likely to use military force, whereas democratic leaders have incentives to choose less costly, and hence more peaceful, options. Downes’s commentary focuses on the two kinds of nonpersonalist regimes: machines and juntas. Downes correctly points out that my argument assumes that machines feature strong civilian control of the military. Otherwise, the fear of a military coup or insurrection would cause leaders of machines to act more like the leaders of military juntas, in which a leader faces a domestic audience composed primarily of military officers. Leaders of juntas, I argue in the book, are more likely to use force because their audience can benefit from arms buildups and war, and because they tend to be more pessimistic about the efficacy of alternatives to war such as diplomacy.