Collaborative Research: Beyond the Water's Edge: Individual Preferences, Domestic Institutions, System Structure and Foreign Policy

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9507909 Palmer A great deal of recent research in international relations has focused on the relationship between democracy and foreign policy. One strain on this literature, originating from works dealing with issues of war and peace, has addressed the question of whether democracies are less war prone than non-democracies. A second and older strain, some of it originating from the study of comparative foreign policy has expanded our horizons into other areas, including alliance behavior, defense expenditures and policy, and reliance on international organizations. These two approaches have produced a number of empirical regularities indicating that democracies do behave somewhat differently than do non-democracies with the best know being that although democracies tend to fight, and even initiate, wars as often as other states do, they rarely, if ever, fight one another. Explanations for these observations have centered around two main approaches--the norms approach, holding that democratic leaders' behaviors are guided by the norms regarding conflict behavior that they are socialized to accept, and the structural approach, holding that democratic institutions make it easier for a leader's opponents to block policies (such as war) they disapprove. Attempts to construct critical tests for determining the better approach have proven inconclusive, largely because there is so much overlap between the two arguments and because democratic norms and democratic institutions often coexist. The above suggests that a reevaluation of the research is in order and a new theory is needed. This investigation articulates and tests a general theory of foreign policy. The theory specifies how individual preferences, domestic political structures, and the international environment interact to produce foreign policies. The theory also integrates the work on conflict behavior with other types of foreign policy such as alliance formation, defense spending, and events inte raction. The theory is formalized and is used to deduce hypotheses systematically. The methods appropriately employed use a variety of extant data sets to test relevant hypotheses. This research investigation should substantially enhance our understanding of the topic. ***