Why Democracies Fight Dictators

Over the course of the last century, there has been an outsized incidence of conflict between democracies and personalist regimes--political systems where a single individual has undisputed executive power and prominence. In most cases, it has been the democratic side that has chosen to employ military force.

Why Democracies Fight Dictators takes up the question of why liberal democracies are so inclined to engage in conflict with personalist dictators. Building on research in political science, history, sociology, and psychology and marshalling evidence from statistical analysis of conflict, multi-archival research of American and British perceptions during the Suez Crisis and Gulf War, and non-democracies’ understanding of the threat from Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Madison V. Schramm offers a novel and nuanced explanation for patterns in escalation and hostility between liberal democracies and personalist regimes. When conflicts of interest arise between the two types of states, Schramm argues, cognitive biases and social narratives predispose leaders in liberal democracies to perceive personalist dictators as particularly threatening and to respond with anger--an emotional response that elicits more risk acceptance and aggressive behavior. She also locates this tendency in the escalatory dynamics that precede open military conflict: coercion, covert action, and crisis bargaining. At all of these stages, the tendency toward anger and risk acceptance contributes to explosive outcomes between democratic and personalist regimes.

Madison Schramm is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a Non-resident Fellow in the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. Schramm’s research focuses on international security, the domestic politics of foreign policy, political psychology, and gender and foreign policy. She has completed works in the subjects of US covert foreign-imposed regime change (forthcoming in the Cambridge Elements Series in International Relations), democratic constitutional systems and international security (in Political Science Quarterly and the Journal of Global Security Studies), gender and conflict initiation (Security Studies), corruption charges against women heads of government (forthcoming Canadian Journal of Political Science), and diversity and inclusion in post-conflict states (in Untapped Power, Oxford University Press 2022). Schramm’s commentary and reviews have been published in Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, the Texas National Security Review, the Atlantic, the Christian Science Monitor, Inkstick, the Duck of Minerva, Stimson.org, and CFR.org.