Dyadic Conflict: Elites, Citizens, and War

From the democratic peace to the authoritarian peace to the conflict-prone behavior of democratizing states, empirical evidence shows that regime types influence the decision to go to war. The only way distinct regimes can behave differently in similar circumstances is if they have different tastes for settlements. Moreover, dyadic negotiation is dependent on the regime types of both participants. Here we offer a dyadic theory of conflict where states bargain over a good with different attributes: a club good element and an element of private goods like rents. We show that dyad type has important effects on the potential for conflict. Empirically, we show our new predictions about the dependence of conflict on dyad type— namely, the presence of private goods in an international crisis increases the likelihood of violence when both sides are autocratic but decreases it when one side is sufficiently democratic.