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

9511289摩根最近对国际关系的大量研究都集中在民主和外交政策之间的关系上。这部文学作品中的一种压力来自于处理战争与和平问题的著作，它解决了民主国家是否比非民主国家更不容易发生战争的问题。第二个和更老的压力，其中一些源于对比较外交政策的研究，已经将我们的视野扩展到其他领域，包括联盟行为、国防开支和政策，以及对国际组织的依赖。这两种方法产生了许多经验规律，表明民主国家的行为确实与非民主国家略有不同，最广为人知的是，尽管民主国家往往像其他国家一样经常打仗，甚至发动战争，但它们很少相互打仗。对这些观察结果的解释主要围绕两种方法--规范方法和结构方法，前者认为民主领导人的行为是由他们社会化接受的关于冲突行为的规范来指导的，后者认为民主制度使领导人的对手更容易阻止他们不赞成的政策(如战争)。事实证明，为确定更好的办法而构建关键测试的尝试没有结果，这主要是因为这两种论点之间有太多重叠之处，而且民主规范和民主机构往往并存。上述情况表明，对这项研究的重新评估是合理的，需要一个新的理论。这项调查阐明并检验了外交政策的一般理论。该理论规定了个人偏好、国内政治结构和国际环境如何相互作用来产生外交政策。该理论还将关于冲突行为的工作与其他类型的外交政策相结合，如联盟形成、国防开支和事件干预。该理论被形式化，并被用来系统地推导假设。适当采用的方法使用了各种现有的数据集来检验相关的假设。这项研究调查应该会大大提高我们对这一主题的理解。***

9511289 Morgan 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. ***