Dictators at War and Peace (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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None of the foregoing should detract from Weeks’s achievement in Dictators, which represents a substantial advancement in our knowledge of the behavior of authoritarian regimes on questions of war and peace. Future work might seek to integrate civil-military relations to provide additional nuance to Weeks’s typology. In fact, in my work with Alexandre Debs I have proposed such a theory, built on the cost of replacing different types of leaders.

The book also argues that civilians would have been more likely to stay put in the South Georgia islands, inviting the UK to look like the aggressor. Leaving such theoretical issues aside, Weeks’s framework also raises some issues for the empirical sections of her book, especially the case studies which are a significant addition to her previous published work.

Downes suggests that power-sharing between civilians and the military could introduce unique pathologies into the decisionmaking process. She finds that the differences in the conflict behavior of distinct kinds of autocracies are as great as those between democracies and dictatorships. Weeks is at the forefront of a new generation of scholars who seek to open up the black box of authoritarian regimes and use variation in their domestic characteristics to explain their foreign policy choices. Consideration of civil-military relations, however, might have caused her to differentiate further among civilian-led regimes according to whether they face a civilian or a military audience, and identify those that are more and less prone to conflict. In the remainder of this review, I examine Weeks’s major contribution—her typology of authoritarian regimes.

S. also might view a nuclear Iran as posing a lesser threat, assuming that one views Iran as a Machine dictatorship, run by a constrained, civilian dictator. In the second, the hybrid type I have been describing, the military is outside civilian control and has the ability to remove the leader.For Weeks, some autocracies are like democracies in that their leaders face audience costs for guiding their country into losing wars, or for backing down after issuing public threats of force. 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.

Weeks differentiates authoritarian regimes that do not have an audience that can potentially punish the leader (personalist dictatorships) from authoritarian regimes that do have such audiences, but ignores the strategic interactions between domestic actors. The least convincing results in the book concern Juntas, a limitation that is particularly salient because the Juntas provide the primary evidence of the independent effect of the distinction between civilian and military outlooks on foreign policy. For Weeks, the key factors that distinguish authoritarian regimes from each other are whether they face a domestic audience that can hold the leader accountable for his or her actions, and whether the audience and the leader are civilians or military officers. Still other leaders face few constraints, and it is their own preferences and predilections that matter.

Since these factors come together coherently, Weeks can use them to rank regimes from least to most likely on each of the proposed dependent variables, with for example Strongmen having the highest, Bosses, the second highest, Juntas the second lowest and Machines the lowest probability of conflict initiation. Since the four factors mentioned earlier neatly organize themselves into four regime types, it is not really possible to evaluate which factors drive decisions for conflict.

Thus, Weeks dismisses fears of punishment as a motivator in Argentinean Junta leader General Galtieri’s decision making, pointing out that few of his direct predecessors in Argentina and his contemporary colleagues from Latin America suffered from punishment after they lost office.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. Moreover, civilians were outnumbered by military officers in important ministries, and were increasingly excluded from important political and military decisions. It is a bit puzzling, thus, to see the directed-dyad-year as the unit of analysis in Chapter 2, the quantitative chapter. While the focus of my theory is not on how regime type affects private information, commitment problems, or indivisible issues, my argument dovetails well with the bargaining model in its attention to the size of the bargaining range between two countries. The key fact that makes Imperial Japan from 1889 to 1941 a hybrid regime with civilian leaders and a military audience, and which Weeks mentions only in passing, is that under the Meiji Constitution of 1889, the military had the power to bring down any civilian government by withdrawing—or refusing to name—the Army or Navy Minister.