Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [32]
The democratic peace literature illustrates how these suggestions work in practice. There is some factual disagreement on whether both British and French public opinion was bellicose in the Fashoda Crisis or whether British public opinion was substantially more supportive of going to war, and some argue that foreign policymaking was so dominated by elites in both cases that public opinion made little difference.133 Similarly, there is some disagreement on the nature and salience of public opinion in Spain at the time of the Spanish-American War.134
On the Fashoda Crisis, there is disagreement on whether democracy in both states and a wide power imbalance overdetermined the peaceful outcome, whether they had cumulative effects, or whether one factor was more causal and the other more spurious.135 This may be resolvable through more systematic analysis of process-tracing data, or careful counterfactual analysis, but likely will not be entirely determined to the satisfaction of a scholarly consensus.136 The same is true of discussions on whether a large power disparity and a (perceived) absence of democracy in Spain were both necessary conditions for the Spanish-American War.137 In case study methods, as in statistical methods, scholars may at times have to live with some degree of indeterminacy when competing variables push in the same direction.
One disagreement that has been narrowed by additional research concerns the question of how to interpret Finland’s decision to side with Germany against several democracies in World War II. Democratic peace proponents note that Finland did not undertake any offensive operations against democratic states, and the only attack against Finland by a democracy consisted of a single day of British bombing.138 Critics argue that the Finnish case should be considered an important exception to the democratic peace because Finland became a co-belligerent with Germany and several democracies declared war on Finland.139 Miriam Elman’s careful case study of the Finnish case suggests that more centralized or semi-presidential democracies like Finland are more likely than decentralized democracies to engage in war with other democracies. She indicates that the Finnish parliament resisted aligning with Germany, but was overruled by the Finnish president. Thus, while the case does not fit neorealist theories arguing that systemic pressures are paramount, neither does it strongly vindicate interdemocratic peace theories.140
The Third Generation: Formal Modeling Contributions
Researchers have more recently begun to use formal models to help unravel the causal mechanisms that might explain the correlational and case study findings on the interdemocratic peace. We concentrate here on Kenneth Schultz’s work on this subject, which provides an excellent exemplar both of formal work, and of multi-method research that tests a formal model with statistical and case study evidence.141 Schultz frames his research around the question whether democratic institutions primarily constrain or inform decisions on the use of force. The constraint theory argues that democratic publics are reluctant to vote upon themselves the costs of war, and will vote against any democratic leaders who use force unsuccessfully or unjustifiably. An alternative theory, which Schultz favors, emphasizes that the transparency inherent in democracy makes it hard for democratic leaders to bluff; a threat to use force will lack credibility when a democratic leader’s opposition party or the public does not wish to use force. At the same time, transparency makes a democratic leader’s threat of force highly credible when the opposition party or the public support the use of force. In this view, democratic leaders are more selective than authoritarian leaders in their threats to use force, and when they do threaten to use force, these threats carry high credibility when the opposition party supports them and low credibility