Why Democracies Fight Dictators

In Why Democracies Fight Dictators Schramm explores the dynamics that intensify conflict between liberal democracies and personalist regimes—political systems where a single individual has undisputed executive power and prominence. Much of the recent Political Science scholarship has been devoted to explaining why democracies don’t go to war with one another, but there is still relatively little work on the particular dynamics that mark the relationships between democratic governments and autocratic states. Schramm argues that when conflicts of interest arise between liberal democracies and personalist regimes, leaders in liberal democracies are predisposed to perceive personalist dictators as more threatening, and to respond with anger, an emotional response that elicits more risk acceptance and aggressive behavior. Schramm explores how this tendency facilitates a dramatic increase in hostility, applicable broadly to escalatory dynamics and coercion, extending to everything from covert action to crisis bargaining. Building on research in Political Science, History, Sociology, and Psychology and marshalling evidence from statistical analyses of conflict, multi-archival research of American and British decision-making during the Suez Crisis and Gulf War, and non-democracies’ understanding of the threat from Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Schramm offers a novel and nuanced explanation for patterns in escalation and hostility between liberal democracies and personalist regimes.