Transition DA

Democratic transition causes civil war

Goldsmith 08 [(Arthur, Professor of Economics at Williams University) Making the World Safe for Partial Democracy?
Questioning the Premises of Democracy Promotion International Security, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), pp. 120-147] AT
Social disorder in an intermediate regime stands a good chance of spiraling into civil war, as implied by James Fearon and David
Laitin's empirical work. The likelihood of armed conflicts breaking out within partial democracies
is two-thirds greater than in full autocracies for the period 1945 to 1999. This may be the
consequence of such regimes lacking the resources to either crush or placate insurgents, the authors
speculate.26 Extending the analysis to 1816, another study by Havard Hegre, Tanja Ellingsen, Scott Gates, and Nils Gleditsch finds
much the same pattern: democratic regime change is strongly correlated with internal
military conflict, though the prospects for civil peace improve with time if the country evolves into an established
democratic system.27 Refugee flows, border incursions, rising irredentist sentiment in
neighboring states, and other dangers make civil wars difficult to contain.28 A contemporary
example from the Muslim world of uncontained intrastate conflict is the ethnic war in the Darfur region of Sudan (ranked a
semidemocratic country when that conflict erupted in 2003). Irregular forces soon began to attack villages across the frontier with
Chad, where civilians and resistance fighters had fled. These events escalated into coup attempts in Chad, which were alleged to have
been coordinated with the Sudanese government operating through local proxy groups. The Central African Republic has also been
pulled into the turmoil, with rebel militias from its territory taking refuge in Sudan.

Partial democracies, which exist in the transition to full

democracy, cause war

Goldsmith 08 [(Arthur, Professor of Economics at Williams University) Making the World Safe for Partial Democracy?
Questioning the Premises of Democracy Promotion International Security, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), pp. 120-147] AT

mixed regime may have a

greater propensity to use its regular military forces against another nation-state (or
The second way partial democracies may imperil international peace is more direct: a

inadvertently to invite an attack against itself). A chief reason fully established democracies are thought to resolve foreign problems
peacefully is because institutional checks and balances make them attentive to the demands of the citizenry - and hence cautious in
embarking on policies that might be detrimental to the majority interest, such as starting wars. Where the representative
institutions are less rule-bound or only partly competitive, the opposite may happen because the regime
is not as beholden to popular sentiment. On the other hand, a mitigating factor might be that semidemocracies
are too disorganized to mobilize resources to assault a neighboring nation-state, though internal disorganization also
could send confused signals to potential adversaries and raise the risk of invasion.

Recent examples of partial democracies becoming involved in overt conflict with

each other are easy to find - for example, the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia that broke out in 1992 or Senegal's
intervention in Guinea-Bissau in 1998 - but the large-M research is contradictory on whether such incidents are part of a pattern of
international violence. Some studies suggest that countries undergoing democratic transitions are not unusually likely to join in wars
with neighbors, and that truncated transitions do not contribute to the probability of participation in interstate hostilities.29 Other
statistical evidence, however, shows that states experiencing incomplete transitions are apt to start wars. Limited

democracies appear to be inherently more aggressive than other regime types even
beyond the period of regime transition, according to another study. Swings between democracy
and autocracy are also found to increase a country's inclination to fight.30 The net effects of
democratization and semidemocracy on interstate warfare are thus questions that political science has yet to settle, but these factors do
not appear likely to diminish the risks of external war in the short run. At best, they may not add to the risks.

Empirical evidence confirms

Goldsmith 08 [(Arthur, Professor of Economics at Williams University) Making the World Safe for Partial Democracy?
Questioning the Premises of Democracy Promotion International Security, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), pp. 120-147] AT

The empirical regularities observed for peaceful regimes, however, apply to established constitutional political systems, not to the
mixed regimes common in the Greater Middle East. Any expansion in the group of partially democratic
nation-states seems more likely to hinder international security than to help it. Stalled transitions
and semidemocratic rule are each correlated in some empirical studies with (1) strife within

nations that can spread to other countries, (2) large and small wars between nations,
and (3) rising incidence of terrorism. The cross-national evidence of danger is strongest regarding intrastate
conflicts. Partial democracies, no matter the region, represent a disproportionate amount of the
world's political turmoil, according to a report from the Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task
Force), a U.S. government-funded interdisciplinary research program. In the period 1955 to 2001, mixed regimes by its tally
accounted for more than one-third of all major "political instability events" (i.e., adverse
shifts in patterns of governance, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, and genocides).23 Mass killings of civilians, for example, are most
common at intermediate levels of democracy, with a decline at higher levels.24 Other studies confirm that more political

repression and human rights violations occur in semidemocratic states compared to

full democracies.25 These difficulties are plausibly explained as the consequence of
social mobilization and expanded political participation in the absence of
selfrestraining governing institutions.

Links
Sanctions

Sanctions fail and institute semi-democracies

Goldsmith 08 [(Arthur, Professor of Economics at Williams University) Making the World Safe for Partial Democracy?
Questioning the Premises of Democracy Promotion International Security, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), pp. 120-147] AT
A less punitive form of leverage

used by the United States and other powers is to impose

international trade and finance restrictions on the target country until it makes
democratic concessions. Many in the foreign policy field are skeptical about the efficacy
of economic sanctions, especially on an autocracy where the leadership can shift the cost
from itself to the larger society.45 The most notable and comprehensive study that
indicates economic sanctions sometimes do work is by Kimberly Ann Elliott, Jeffrey
Schott, and Gary Hufbauer.46 I use their data to explore the relationship between
sanctions and regime change. Of 183 cases of economic sections they catalogue for the
post-World War II period, 85 had primarily political aims, as opposed to military or
economic objectives. These were cases where Elliott, Schott, and Hufbauer list policy
goals such as achieving democracy, human rights, or the destabilization of a dictatorship.
The objectives were pursued through both multilateral sanctions and unilateral embargos
and boycotts. I separated a subset of cases where the initiating party was a democratic
state in the terminal year, according to the criteria used earlier for coding countries with
the polity2 variable. (International bodies were coded as democracies for this purpose.) I
dropped cases if the economic action ended before 1970 or was ongoing in 2004. This
sorting results in a sample of 61 cases in the data set where a democratic state or states
imposed politically oriented sanctions on another state. In only 9 cases was a Muslim
country the object of foreign economic pressure that terminated during the period under
consideration. What happened to them? Table 2 (column 4) shows that just 6 of the
Muslim target countries underwent a regime change around the period of the sanctions and all of those produced a semidemocratic system of government.
Link

Military Action

Military efforts to expand democracy fail and institute transitional regimes

Goldsmith 08 [(Arthur, Professor of Economics at Williams University) Making the World Safe for Partial Democracy?
Questioning the Premises of Democracy Promotion International Security, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), pp. 120-147] AT

The most obvious form of leverage is the use of military power to change regimes and
extend democracy. Neoconservatives have a cavalier attitude about this approach. David
Frum and Richard Perle, for instance, casually proclaim that "when it is in our power and
our interest, we [the United States] should toss dictators aside with no more compunction
than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker."38 Offhandedness about
"gun barrel" democratization is deeply misplaced, according to many empirical studies.
An example is an article by Charles Kegley and Margaret Hermann of military
interventions by all democratic states from 1974 to 1988. They report that on those rare
occasions when a regime change does ensue, the result is most often a "partly free"
state.39 Looking at a longer period (1960-96) of nearly 700 military interventions, Nils
Gleditsch, Lene Christiansen, and Havard Hegre again show that these are largely
ineffectual in changing regimes. When a democracy introduces military forces to a
nondemocratic nation, that action is seldom followed by an advance in democratization;
when forward movement does occur, it frequently stops at the volatile semidemocratic
type of regime.40 If the regime being imposed is only partially democratic, it will
probably undermine regional peace, according to a third empirical study going back to
1909.41