Revolution, Personalist Dictatorships, and International Conflict

Abstract

A consensus exists that countries that have recently undergone domestic political revolutions are particularly likely to become involved in military conflicts with other states.
Scholars seek to understand when and why revolutions increase the likelihood of international violence.
Revolution fosters conflict by affecting states' domestic political structures.
Revolution tends to bring particularly aggressive leaders to power.
Revolutions frequently result in personalist dictatorships, or regimes that lack powerful institutions to constrain and punish leaders.
Revolutions that result in personalist dictatorships are significantly more likely to lead to international conflict than revolutions that culminate in other forms of government by empowering leaders with revisionist preferences and high-risk tolerance.
This explains why revolution so commonly leads to conflict, and also why some revolutions lead to conflict whereas others do not.

Introduction

Revolution and international conflict often go hand in hand, exemplified by China, Libya, Uganda, and Iraq.
However, not all revolutions lead to conflict, such as the Eastern European revolutions after the Soviet Union's collapse, and revolutions in Myanmar, the Yemen Arab Republic, and Peru.
Past research focused on how international systemic factors heighten the risk of war after revolutions, but postrevolutionary domestic political structures matter greatly.
Revolutions tend to bring leaders with risk-tolerant, revisionist foreign policy preferences to power, increasing the likelihood of international force.
The type of political regime that emerges in the wake of a revolution affects the extent to which those leaders are able to turn to violence internationally.
Personalist dictatorships initiate substantially more international conflict in the ten years after the revolution than when other types of political systems emerge.
Nearly half of all revolutions have resulted in personalist regimes.

Explanations for Why Postrevolutionary Regime Type Matters

Individuals who lead revolutions are particularly likely to have revisionist international preferences and to have high tolerance for risky strategies.
Personalistic regimes place fewer constraints on revolutionary leaders, allowing them to initiate conflict at a higher annual rate than revolutionary nonpersonalist leaders.
Personalistic political systems tend to ensconce leaders and allow them to enjoy longer tenure in office.
In nonpersonalistic regimes, leaders are more likely to be removed from office after a short spell and replaced with more moderate nonrevolutionary leaders with fewer international ambitions.
In personalist regimes the original revolutionary leaders remain in power for a higher proportion of the post-revolutionary period than in nonpersonalist regimes, leading to more conflict during that period.
Revolutionary leaders and personalist regimes have independent effects on the likelihood of conflict initiation, but the type of postrevolutionary government affects the extent to which revolution fosters international armed conflict.
Personalist regimes account for 71 percent of the international conflicts initiated by states with a recent domestic revolution.
Leaders such as Mao Zedong in China, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Idi Amin in Uganda, and Muammar Qadhafi in Libya all seized on the upheaval of their revolutions to build personalist dictatorships, allowing them to survive in office and enact their revisionist international policy preferences for years or even decades.
Leaders in nonpersonalist regimes face greater constraints on conflict initiation and tend to be replaced more quickly by more moderate leaders who are less eager to change the international status quo.
Saw Maung of Myanmar, Al-Sallal of the Yemen Arab Republic, and Velasco Alvarado of Peru all ushered in revolutions that did not engender personalistic regimes.

Existing Literature

Scholars have studied how domestic revolutions affect international relations, especially the likelihood of war.
States with a recent domestic revolution are unusually prone to international disputes and wars.
Empirical work and quantitative research support that revolutionary states are particularly conflict-prone.
Scholars have largely overlooked the question of whether the effects depend on the type of postrevolutionary government that emerges.
Walt argues that revolutions increase the likelihood of conflict by altering systemic factors but rejects an emphasis on domestic factors.
Other scholars emphasize how the domestic characteristics of revolutionary leaders and movements may cause international conflicts, but they do not explore whether these effects vary according to the types of political institutions present.
Skocpol argues that successful revolutionary leaders are particularly good at organizing and mobilizing their populations for campaigns of mass violence.
Gurr argues that revolutionary leaders who have secured power and maintained their positions through the use of violence domestically are disposed to respond violently to future challenges, even if those challenges arise internationally.
Maoz argues that revolutionary states face pressure to engage in conflict from both internal and external sources; internally, the new ruling elite feels pressure to "mobilize support for the regime through scapegoating," and externally, the pressure comes from the threat and opportunity perceived by foreign powers.

Theory: Revolutions, Personalist Regimes, and International Conflict

Scholars have focused on how revolutions select for leaders that have characteristics that make them particularly likely to instigate conflict.
Revolutionary leaders are individuals who personally helped transform the existing social, political, and economic relationships of the state by overthrowing or rejecting the principal existing institutions of society.
Revolutionary leaders are a strict subset of all leaders that come to power as a result of the use of force because revolutions result in substantial transformations of the very organization of social, economic, and political life.
Individuals who succeed as revolutionaries tend to be more risk-tolerant and ambitious to alter the status quo than typical leaders.
These characteristics make it more likely that the leader will seek to instigate international conflict.
The same characteristics that allowed revolutionaries to succeed in their domestic struggle also make such leaders more likely to instigate international conflict once they have obtained office.
Foreign policy decisions are ultimately made by individuals, and not all leaders behave the same way under the same conditions.
The possibility that revolutions select for certain types of leaders provides a fruitful starting point for exploring how domestic political institutions may condition the effect of revolution on international conflict.

Political Institutions and Conflict Initiation in the Aftermath of Revolutions

If revolutionary leaders have preferences and risk tolerances that dispose them toward international conflict, domestic institutions could have a profound impact on the conflict propensity of postrevolutionary states.
The initiation of international conflict is the activity over which leaders have the most agency.
When it comes to the initiation of international conflict, a more important distinction is whether the regime features institutions that allow domestic political actors to constrain their leaders, or whether it is a personalist dictatorship in which such institutions are largely absent.
Personalist dictatorships are regimes in which one powerful individual dominates the government apparatus and its instruments, including the military, the ruling party, and the state bureaucratic apparatus.
Personalist regimes lack institutions to facilitate coordination by regime elites to check the powers of the individual ruler, such as an effective politburo, party hierarchy, merit-based rules for military promotions, or rules ensuring the turnover of leaders.
Personalist leaders typically have free rein to appoint friends, relatives, and other cronies to important offices in both the government and military and can then closely monitor their activities, ensuring that key regime insiders remain loyal.
Saddam Hussein designed elaborate overlapping security apparatuses in Iraq for the express purpose of keeping watch over subordinates and protecting the regime from a coup.
Mao Zedong in China relied on monitoring subordinates and ousting anyone who became too powerful.
In democracies and nonpersonalist dictatorships, leaders face more powerful institutions, whether through elections, a politburo that meets regularly, or tacit agreements among military leaders on how succession will be determined.
In nonpersonalist military juntas or single-party regimes, leaders must work to please elite constituencies, and there are always rivals who would willingly seize office if the leader violates the internal rules and norms of the regime.

Mechanisms Through Which Postrevolutionary Regime Affects Conflict Behavior

Reducing constraints on leaders while they remain in office, thereby raising the annual rate of conflict initiation.
Ensconcing the individuals who led the revolution in power, thereby allowing conflicts to accumulate over time.

Personalist Regimes Provide Fewer Constraints on Conflict Initiation

Leaders who are constrained by or accountable to a domestic audience should be less likely to initiate conflict than less accountable leaders.
Nonpersonalist leaders are more likely to be punished for poor war outcomes than personalist leaders, which could mute the willingness of nonpersonalist leaders to take on the risk of war.
Revolutionary leaders in nonpersonalist regimes might be able to constrain the leader from initiating a conflict in the first place.
Domestic audiences are expected to have more dovish preferences than the more hawkish revolutionary leaders, and in nonpersonalist regimes, the preferences of the domestic audience are more likely to affect the behavior of the state.

Personalist Institutions Ensconce Belligerent Revolutionary Leaders

Personalist institutions influence who occupies office in the postrevolutionary period: the incumbent who led the revolution, or a more moderate replacement.
The Chinese, Iranian, Ba'athist (Iraq), and Cuban revolutions each swept away existing political institutions and replaced them with more personalized regime structures that allowed the leaders to remain in power for many years, during which those leaders were able to enact their belligerent preferences.
Other revolutions have produced political systems in which nonrevolutionary leaders have a better chance of replacing revolutionary leaders.
Velasco Alvarado of Peru sought to initiate a war against Chile but was replaced by a nonrevolutionary leader before he could make those plans a reality.
When revolutions do not result in personalist dictatorships, the original revolutionary leader is more likely to be replaced by nonrevolutionary politicians who have not been selected for a propensity for international violence in the same way.
Personalist institutions raise the likelihood of conflict initiation in the postrevolutionary period by affecting who holds power.
States are more likely to instigate conflict when one of the individuals who helped to lead the revolution holds office.
When the revolution culminates in a personalist regime, those revolutionary leaders are able to remain in office well into the postrevolutionary period, and thus are able to enact their revisionist policy agendas.
When the revolution produces a nonpersonalistic political system, a less radical leader is likely to replace the incumbent more quickly.
Revolutionary leaders initiate conflict at a high, but fairly steady annual rate.
Because they are less likely to be replaced by more moderate nonrevolutionary leaders when the regime is personalist, the result is a higher average rate of annual conflict initiation in the postrevolutionary period.

Why Do Revolutionary Personalists Not Deter Conflict?

The relatively high-risk tolerance and revisionist preferences of revolutionary personalist leaders should narrow the range of mutually acceptable bargaining outcomes, and the size of the bargaining range is important for the probability of conflict.
A large bargaining range means that leaders would have to grossly miscalculate to fail to perceive an acceptable peaceful bargain.
When the bargaining range is small, the likelihood of war is higher because even small miscalculations or a small amount of private information could mean that the parties are no longer able to find a mutually agreeable bargain to avoid war.
Risk tolerance and revisionist preferences reduce the value of the status quo relative to war, which means the leader is more likely to challenge the status quo.
More challenges to the status quo generate more opportunities for conflict because each time there is a challenge, states again face the tradeoff between demanding greater bargaining concessions and minimizing the risk of war.
Postrevolutionary personalist regimes will be more likely to initiate militarized disputes.

Hypotheses

Central Proposition

H1: In states that recently experienced a revolution, personalist dictatorship is associated with greater militarized dispute initiation.

Mechanisms

H2: Revolutionary leaders are more likely to initiate international conflict when their regime is personalist than when it is not.
H3: When revolutions culminate in personalist regimes, the regime is led by a revolutionary leader for a higher proportion of the postrevolutionary period than when the revolution does not result in a personalist regime, because personalist leaders tend to survive in office for longer periods of time.

Does the Nonrandom Occurrence of Personalism Complicate the Analysis?

It seems unlikely that personalist regimes arise purely at random.
Preexisting international conflict and/or enduring interstate rivalries might make it more likely for a personalist regime to emerge following a revolution.
External conflict could lead to the establishment of personalist regimes, rather than the other way around, which is possible, but there is no evidence of reverse causation.
Regime type might be affected by regional dynamics that in turn affect the probability of conflict.
Personalist dictatorships are most likely to emerge in geographic regions with weak or developing institutions and little experience with democracy; thirteen out of the eighteen cases of revolutions that result in new personalist dictatorships occurred in Africa or the Middle East.
A potential threat to inference occurs if geographic region is an omitted variable that affects the probability of both personalism and interstate conflict.
Neither endogeneity nor omitted variables drive the causal relationships theorized here.

Data and Methods

Operationalizing Revolution and Personalism

The time period for the analysis is 1946 to 2000.
Revolutions are identified using two principal criteria.
Whether the government came to power through use of armed force, widespread popular demonstrations, or similar uprising (an "irregular transition").
Once in power, the government must have implemented radical domestic changes for the purpose of transforming the organization of society, including its social, economic, and political institutions and practices.
Dramatic changes in policy in at least three of the seven categories are required for the government's policy to be considered revolutionary.
Revolutions are quite distinct from related events such as coups or assassinations; 28 percent of the leaders who used force to come to power are coded as revolutionary leaders.
Identifying revolutions is difficult, and no list of revolutions will resonate with everyone perfectly.
Using coding rules to identify revolutions ensures consistency across cases and mitigates unintentional selection bias.
The ambiguous coding variable is used to identify only the "unambiguous" revolutions.
Principal independent variable for testing H1, postrevolutionary period, is coded as 1 if the country experienced a revolution within the last ten years, and 0 otherwise.
Variable called revolutionary leader measures whether the state leader in question came to power by leading a revolution.
The concept of personalist dictatorship is operationalized using characteristics of the regime, with additional rules for democracies and monarchies.
Indicators of personalism are coded independently of a leader's subsequent international behavior, based on observable domestic institutional features of a regime.

Dependent Variables and Model Specification

To test hypotheses in which international conflict is the dependent variable (H1 and H2), the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) data set is used.
Dyadic analysis of conflict initiation is used with directed dyad-years as the unit of analysis.
Primary dependent variable initmid marks whether Side A of the dyad initiated an MID against Side B in any given year.
Additionally, initfatal counts only MIDs that resulted in at least one death of official military personnel because fatal MIDs are less prone to reporting bias than lower-level incidents.
To control for temporal interdependence, cubic splines are included.
Standard errors are clustered by directed dyad to account for possible unobserved differences across country pairs.
A monadic analysis is carried out in which country-years, rather than directed dyad-years, are the unit of analysis; a variable initmidn counts the number of MIDs that a country initiated in any given year.
Second, initfataln counts the number of fatal MIDs initiated; H1 and H2 are tested using a negative binomial model because the dependent variables are event counts, and the negative binomial model accounts for overdispersion in the dependent variables.
Leadership tenure, the number of years that the leader remains in office, is used as the dependent variable for H3.

Control Variables

A number of control variables that might be correlated with revolution, personalism, and international conflict are included, which are gathered from a set of well-known quantitative models of MID initiation; all of these control variables are lagged by one year.
Capabilities: More powerful states have wider-ranging interests than minor powers and thus may be more conflict-prone.
Alliances: A measure of alliances, which may proxy for geopolitical interests, is included.
Contiguity: Another important predictor of international conflict is geographic contiguity.
Civil War: States undergoing civil war are significantly more likely to become involved in MIDs.
Trade Interdependence and Openness: Trade can dampen incentives to use military force against a trading partner.

Empirical Results

Revolution, Personalist Dictatorship, and International Conflict Initiation

The first hypothesis assessed is that postrevolutionary states initiate more conflict when the postrevolutionary regime is personalist than when it is not (H1).
H1 is tested by comparing coefficients on postrevolution period, personalist regime with those for postrevolution period, not personalist regime, carrying out two-tailed Wald tests to assess the significance of the differences in these coefficients.
Postrevolutionary personalist regimes have more than three times greater odds of initiating MIDs than countries that are neither postrevolutionary nor personalist.
Postrevolutionary personalists have 1.7 times greater odds of initiating MIDs than their nonpersonalist counterparts (p < 0.0006), and they also have 1.7 times greater odds of initiating fatal MIDs than leaders of nonpersonalist postrevolutionary regimes (p < 0.0142).
Regime type explains variation in dispute initiation in the aftermath of revolution.
When restricting the list of revolutions to "unambiguous" revolutions, being personalist again increases the odds of conflict for a postrevolutionary state by a factor of 1.7, significant at p < 0.0022, and postrevolutionary personalists have 1.5 times greater odds of initiating fatal MIDs than their nonpersonalist counterparts, significant at p < 0.0935.
Variables generally perform as expected by the existing literature.
- A country is more likely to initiate an MID against another country when the two states are geographically proximate; when a country or its potential opponent is militarily strong; when the countries do not trade extensively; and when the countries have few alliances in common.
- Civil war in Side B also increases the likelihood of a MID initiation.
For all MIDs, the baseline chance that State A will initiate an MID against State B when it is neither postrevolutionary nor personalist is 4.8 percent.
States that are revolutionary but not personalist are 1.7 times as likely to initiate conflict (8.2 percent versus 4.8 percent), whereas states that are both personalist and revolutionary are 2.8 times as likely; among personalist regimes, those in postrevolutionary periods initiate roughly 1.4 times as many MIDs as those that were not.
For fatal MIDs, states led by personalist leaders in a postrevolutionary period are 1.6 times as likely to initiate MIDs as states that are postrevolutionary but not personalist, and 3.7 times as likely to initiate MIDs as states that are neither postrevolutionary nor personalist.

Monadic Analysis

Personalist regimes in a postrevolutionary period initiate 2.6 times as many MIDs as countries that are both nonpersonalist and not in the aftermath of a revolution.
Postrevolutionary states with a personalist regime initiate MIDs at about a 1.8 times greater rate, and fatal MIDs at a 1.7 times greater rate, than nonpersonalist postrevolutionary states, and the differences are statistically significant at p < 0.08 for Model 1 and p < 0.03 for Model 2.
In the aftermath of "unambiguous" revolutions, using a more restrictive coding of revolution, postrevolutionary personalist regimes have a rate of MID initiation that is 1.8 times higher than postrevolutionary nonpersonalists (pcO.11), and a rate of fatal MID initiation that is 1.7 times higher (p < 0.08).

Why Do Personalist Postrevolutionary Regimes Fight More?

Personalist revolutionary leaders initiate MIDs at a higher annual rate than revolutionary leaders who do not preside over personalist regimes, due to lower domestic constraints (H2).
Revolutionary leaders have about 1.6 greater odds of MID initiation when they lead a personalist regime than when they lead a more institutionalized, nonpersonalistic, and hence more constraining political system, and the difference is significant at p< 0.001; revolutionary leaders of personalist regimes have 1.6 times greater odds of fatal MID initiation as revolutionary leaders of nonpersonalist systems, a difference significant at p < 0.025.
Revolutionary leaders initiate about 1.6 times as many MIDs when they lead a personalist regime than when they lead a nonpersonalist regime, a difference that is significant at p <0.065; revolutionary leaders of personalist regimes initiate 1.5 times more fatal MIDs than revolutionary leaders of nonpersonalist systems, a difference significant at p < 0.083.
The second mechanism is that personalist regimes increase MID initiation in the postrevolutionary period by allowing revolutionary leaders, who are particularly likely to have revisionist preferences, to remain in office (H3).
Personalism allows revolutionary leaders to occupy office for a greater proportion of the postrevolutionary period; therefore, personalism allows revolutionary leaders to occupy office for a greater proportion of the postrevolutionary period (of ten years, for example) when the regime is personalist than when it is not, accumulating a greater number of conflict initiations.
Personalist leaders survive almost twice as long (9.2 years) as nonpersonalist leaders (4.8 years), and the difference is statistically significant.
Leaders who first come to power in the ten-year period during or after a revolution survive in office for 10.6 years when the regime is personalist, compared with 5.5 years when the regime is not personalist; conditional on having led a revolution, leaders survive for 13.2 years when the regime is personalist and 8.0 years when the regime is not.
Revolutionary leaders are in office for a larger proportion of the postrevolutionary period, they instigate more conflicts in the aggregate, based on a fairly steady (but high) annual rate, and the result is a greater aggregate number of MIDs in the postrevolutionary period.

Why Postrevolutionary Regime Type Matters

Postrevolutionary governments are disproportionately likely to take the form of personalist dictatorships.
Revolutions encourage the emergence of a personalist dictatorship for two reasons:
- Selection effect: revolutions are unlikely to succeed unless they are led by a charismatic, forceful, risk-tolerant, politically savvy, and ambitious leader, and these are precisely the types of individuals most likely to create personalist dictatorships.
- Because revolutionary movements by their very nature overturn the political institutions of the previous government, revolutionary leaders are especially likely to be able to consolidate a personalist dictatorship because such leaders face few limits on their formal legal powers in the immediate aftermath of the revolution and therefore often have the opportunity to structure the regime as they wish.
States are 1.4 times as likely to be personalist in the year immediately following the revolution (47 percent) as in the year immediately preceding the revolution (34 percent); twenty-nine of the sixty-two cases either installed a personalist regime or allowed a new personalist regime to take the place of an old one.
When looking at all of the state-year observations, personalist regimes are twice as likely to exist in the ten-year wake of a revolution than at other times (27 percent of observations).

Overall Result: Personalist Dictatorships Account for Most Postrevolutionary Conflict Initiations

Fully 71 percent of the MIDs instigated in the period following a domestic revolution are initiated by personalist dictatorships.
Overall, the finding is driven by three factors:
- Revolutions generate personalist regimes at a much higher rate than average.
- Revolutionary leaders tend to have higher average rates of MID initiation when the regime is personalist than when it is not (H2).
- In personalist regimes, revolutionary leaders manage to survive in office for much longer than in nonpersonalist regimes.

Robustness

Coding of revolution, using different dependent variables, dyadic and monadic specifications, and extensive set of further robustness tests were checked.
Hybrid Weeks/GWF measure did not affect core results; the coefficients change slightly because about 17 percent of the observations are dropped because of missing data, but the relative differences between postrevolutionary regimes that are personalist and those that are not remain large and statistically significant (p < .0056 and p < .0177, respectively).
In Models 3 and 4, which focus on "unambiguous" revolutions only, the differences remain substantively large and significant at the p < 0.0097 and p < 0.0935 levels.
Series of additional tests were implemented, including:
- Dropping control variables and adding others; dropping important countries from the analysis to ensure that influential countries were not driving the results; dropping the Tanker Wars from the analysis to ensure that the results were not driven by the large number of attacks on international shipping carried out by Iran and Iraq during the 1980s.
- Dropping all observations associated with the founding leaders of new states, which might be incorrectly classified as nonrevolutionary; using different thresholds for considering a regime to be personalist; controlling for low-intensity civil wars; controlling for the trade dependence of Side A, rather than the lower trade dependence in the dyad.
- Controlling for previous experience with democracy; adding a dummy variable for the Cold War.
All of these changes did not alter central findings.
Same pattern when restricting the analysis to only high-fatality MIDs (in which at least twenty-five deaths occur), though the rarity of these events limits the degree of statistical confidence in some models.

Evaluating the Possibility of Endogeneity

There is no endogeneity introduced by the coding of revolution and personalist regime variables.
Attempted to mitigate one possible concern that war causes revolution by lagging all of the predictor variables.
Investigated the possibility of reverse causation because of preexisting rivalries; found no evidence that preexisting rivalries make it more likely that a personalist regime emerges out of a revolution.
Diversion and opportunism would be most likely in the immediate aftermath of the revolution (for example, years 1 to 3); if, on the other hand, the nature of personalist rule (few constraints, etc.) is most causally important, then the higher likelihood of MIDs would persist long after the initial aftermath of the revolution.

Discussion and Conclusion

States are much more likely to become involved in international conflict in the wake of domestic revolution.
Revolutionary governments' leaders and domestic regime structures play a key role in explaining their strong propensity to initiate conflict.
Postrevolutionary states are more belligerent when they result in personalist regimes than when they result in other kinds of domestic political systems.
Personalist regimes feature fewer constraints on leaders, and personalist regimes tend to allow belligerent revolutionary leaders to survive in office for a greater proportion of the postrevolutionary period.
Revolutionary movements have a strong tendency to result in personalist dictatorship; whereas only 27 percent of country-years (1946 to 2000) were under personalist rule when a country had not had a recent revolution, almost half of postrevolutionary country-years were personalist dictatorships.
Although both personalism and revolution independently increase the likelihood that a state initiates international conflict, revolutions that install a personalist dictator appear to generate significantly more international conflict than those that do not.
Scholars who wish to understand why some countries are more conflict-prone than others must not overlook the importance of domestic political revolutions and the leaders and institutions that they produce.
Findings cast further doubt on the wisdom of treating states as black boxes and ignoring domestic political factors.
Revolutions tend to usher specific types of leaders into office and often result in political institutions that place few constraints on those leaders.
Revolutions and regime type may be important for other security-related issues such as the likelihood of economic sanctions and the transnational nature of the civil wars that often follow revolutions.
Conclusions are relevant to the study of a range of political economy variables, from exchange rate regimes to military expenditures, which can be shaped by revolutions or authoritarian regime type.
Revolutions often produce a period of contested domestic legitimacy and human rights abuses even as constitutions, courts, and other institutions are redesigned; we demonstrate that the regime established in that period sets a pattern for interactions with outsiders, which may stymie the efforts of international organizations.
Researchers would do well to explore whether structural or historical factors make the emergence of personalist regimes more likely, and what strategies emerging dictators use to centralize their rule.
Understanding the determinants of the postrevolutionary form of government may generate significant policy insights, especially for policymakers seeking to intervene in an ongoing revolution and alter its course toward a preferred outcome.