Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [33]
Schultz provides a tight logic for his theory by developing it through a formal model of crisis bargaining that incorporates democratic leaders’ preferences, opposition leaders’ preferences, the information leaders have, and the signals they send to and receive from domestic audiences and the opposing actor in a crisis. This model highlights the bargaining problem, or the challenge that actors in a crisis face when they attempt to negotiate a peaceful outcome without complete information. In this view, the use of force, costly to all parties, is always to some degree suboptimal, as the side that ultimately loses on the battlefield would almost always have been better off conceding on the dispute prior to the costly resort to force (though if the public strongly favors war or the leader wants to have an international reputation for being “tough,” there may be incentives to fight losing battles). Even when a negotiated outcome would be preferable for both parties, however, they may resort to force because they are unable to accurately assess each other’s intentions and capabilities. Actors in a crisis have private information about their willingness and ability to fight, and they have incentives to misrepresent this information by bluffing to achieve a favorable outcome at the bargaining table. This is where the transparency of democratic politics enters in, helping to resolve the bargaining problem by making it hard for leaders to bluff but easy to issue credible threats when they have the support of the opposition party.
Schultz tests the implications of his formal model through a statistical analysis of 1,785 cases of militarized interstate disputes. In this test, he finds strong evidence that democratic institutions decrease the probability of a crisis being initiated by a threat of force, decrease the likelihood of resistance to a threat if one is issued, and decrease the probability of war.143 Schultz further tests his model against fifty-six cases in which states attempted to deter threats made against their allies, finding a tendency for democratic governments to be more successful in their deterrent threats when their opposition parties support them (though this finding falls short of standard levels of statistical significance).144 Schultz then turns to case studies so that his analysis can provide “both a statistical correlation that is consistent with the argument … and historical evidence that the hypothesized causal mechanisms underlie this correlation.” 145 Here, Schultz studies one case where the credibility of a democratic government’s threat to use force is confirmed by the support of its opposition party (the British side of the Fashoda Crisis) and several cases where a democratic government decided against threatening force or issued a threat that was less credible because of objections from the opposition party (the French side of the Fashoda Crisis, the British threat and use of force in the 1899 Boer War, French and British behavior in the 1936 Rhineland Crisis, and British behavior in the 1956 Suez crisis and the 1965 Rhodesian crisis).
Schultz’s work in each methodological approach is generally rigorous and well done. He devotes ample attention to alternative explanations, including explanations that emphasize democratic norms (nonviolence and respect for democratic regimes) and neorealist variables (particularly alliance portfolios), as well as the constraining and informing aspects of democratic institutions. Schultz is careful not to overstate his findings, and his case studies are convincing in showing that opposition parties played an important role in forestalling, bolstering, or undercutting democratic leaders’ threats to use force. He is not as systematic