Weeks, for example, characterizes “nonpersonalist civilian machines” as being governed by “civilian leaders and elites.” (19). Although I was unable to find an explicit statement that the leaders of Juntas must be military officers, Weeks strongly implies this when she writes, “the core domestic audience in Juntas is composed of other military officers” (6). (emphasis added). One could argue that the leader of a junta must, by definition, be a military officer. Her argument also makes other suggestions. Regarding the problem of Russian aggression under President Vladimir Putin, Russian aggression could be substantially constrained if the Russian elite found a means of putting constraints on the power of the Russian president, even if such constraints fall short of effecting a full democratic transition. The U.S. also might view a nuclear Iran as posing a lesser threat, assuming that one views Iran as a Machine dictatorship, run by a constrained, civilian dictator.

Hein Goemans is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. His first book, War and Punishment, was published by Princeton University Press (2000), and focuses on the role of leaders in war termination–with an empirical focus on World War I. His second book, Leaders and International Conflict, co-authored with Giacomo Chiozza, was published by Cambridge University Press (2011) and focuses on the role of leaders in war initiation. It was awarded the Joseph Lepgold Prize (Georgetown University) for best book in International Relations in 2011. His teaching focuses on international relations, with an emphasis on conflict and international relations history. Second, while the categorization of authoritarian regimes into Machines, Juntas, Bosses, and Strongmen is well motivated and theoretically useful, it is worth noting that it is not exhaustive. In Weeks’s data, which covers the period from 1945 to 2000, Machines are the most common of these regimes, constituting a total of 627 country years, compared to 584 years of Strongmen, 548 years of Bosses, and 294 years of Juntas. The most common category, however, is new and unstable regimes, with 1475 country years. Moreover, even setting aside these cases, whose recent changes may lead to distinct patterns of behavior that differ from the norm for the regime, there remain a total of 1,446 country years of other stable authoritarian governments. The majority of these states are monarchies in the Persian Gulf, Morocco, Thailand, and elsewhere, but the category also includes theocratic Iran, marginally democratic France in the 1960s, and a variety of different authoritarian regimes in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).In the remainder of this review, I examine Weeks’s major contribution—her typology of authoritarian regimes. Specifically, I explore whether or not it is comprehensive: that is, whether it captures all authoritarian governments (with the exception of new and transitional regimes). Drawing on insights from recent literature on military effectiveness, I argue that the typology excludes an important category of regimes—civilian-led governments that face a military audience—that exhibit a distinct set of behaviors from civilian regimes with civilian audiences. This argument highlights a variable that is omitted by Weeks’s theory: civil-military relations. Weeks assumes that civilians exert strong control over the military in Machines, but the quality of civil-military relations is a variable, not a constant. Civilian-led regimes with a powerful, autonomous military audience likely behave in a more aggressive fashion than civilian regimes with a civilian audience for one of two reasons: (1) the military audience may (threaten to) remove leaders who resist their aggressive plans, or (2) the government does not control the military, which is able to commit the state to conflict without clear regime approval. I develop this argument below using the cases of Imperial Japan, Wilhelmine Germany, and Egypt in the Six-Day War. Nonetheless, I agree that there is still much to be learned by linking monadic arguments about regime type to (dyadic) theories of strategic interaction. My aim was to characterize the domestic politics of making decisions about war in non-democracies and to develop some core hypotheses, none of which are inconsistent with the bargaining model. Of course, that still leaves many future steps. One is to understand how the politics of different kinds of authoritarian systems might compensate for a small bargaining range, or lead to war even when the bargaining range is large. Another is to investigate how different types of regimes interact. Another, as Goemans points out, is to integrate time-varying factors into the model, allowing for within-regime variation rather than the across-regime variation on which I focus. I hope my book will spur future scholarship to engage in those theoretical tasks, whether by building on my work or critiquing it.

In her excellent book, Jessica Weeks advances a clear and generally compelling argument about how important variations among autocracies affect decisions about the use of force. International relations scholars have long been interested in the implications of democracy for foreign policy, whether in classical realist arguments that democracies are ill-suited to the effective conduct of power politics or in more recent arguments that democracies are both good at managing their relations with one another and particularly effective at war. [36] In this discussion, non-democracies have constituted a residual category, collecting together countries as varied as Tsarist Russia, communist China, and contemporary Somalia. It is only recently, however, that systematic analyses of variation among autocracies have emerged. None of the foregoing should detract from Weeks’s achievement in Dictators, which represents a substantial advancement in our knowledge of the behavior of authoritarian regimes on questions of war and peace. Consideration of civil-military relations, however, might have caused her to differentiate further among civilian-led regimes according to whether they face a civilian or a military audience, and identify those that are more and less prone to conflict. It also might have led her to different coding decisions on certain personalist regimes. Future work might seek to integrate civil-military relations to provide additional nuance to Weeks’s typology. Review by H. E. Goemans, University of Rochester Finally, personalist bosses and strongmen such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Kim Jong Il, Idi Amin, or (some argue) Vladimir Putin do not face powerful, organized domestic audiences. Instead, these are regimes in which the leader personally controls the state and military apparatuses and can use that control to thwart potential rivals. ⁹ Given these leaders’ personal supremacy in matters of foreign policy, we must inquire into the preferences of the leaders themselves. I draw on research from psychology, history, and political science to argue that the challenges of attaining and maintaining absolute power mean that personalist boss and strongman regimes tend to feature leaders who are particularly drawn to the use of military force and often have far-ranging international ambitions. Moreover, the sycophants who surround these leaders have few incentives to rein in their patrons’ impulses, to correct any misperceptions they may have about the likely outcome of a war, or to try to oust them if things go poorly. Compared to leaders of other kinds of regimes, then, leaders of personalist boss and strongman regimes initiate conflict more frequently, lose a higher proportion of the wars they start, and yet survive in office at a remarkable rate even in the wake of defeat. The Vietnamese case differs from both of the above templates. Unlike the leaders of Iraq or Argentina, Vietnamese leaders Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan made decisions cautiously and shrewdly, using force only after lengthy internal debate. Their approach paid off: the United States withdrew in 1973, and Vietnam was reunified in 1975. It was a stunning defeat for the democratic side, and Le Duan’s reward for the victory was a long career as ruler of a united Vietnam.Jessica Chen Weiss, “Authoritarian Signaling, Mass Audiences, and Nationalist Protest in China,” International Organization, Vol. 67, No. 1 (January 2013): 1-35; and Jessica Chen Weiss, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Outside Stanford, other individuals gave me helpful comments or shared data that shaped the project early on. First among these is Barbara Geddes, who generously shared the raw data that inform important parts of the empirical analysis. I also thank Hein Goemans, who shared helpful data early in the process and was an important source of advice and encouragement throughout.

Downes’s commentary raises an important question about the theory, and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify how I conceptualized and coded regime type. While the term “junta” typically evokes a team of military officers, I use the term slightly differently in the book. When leaders are constrained by a domestic audience, I code the regime as military versus civilian, based on whether the domestic audience was composed primarily of civilians (machines) or military officers (juntas). Therefore, by my definition, Japan is considered a junta regime when it went to war against China in 1937, even though the leader at the time, Prime Minister Konoe, was a civilian. It is clear that by that time, civilian leaders knew that their survival in office depended on the support of the military. In 1932, the civilian prime minister had been assassinated by a radical group of junior naval officers, and in early 1936, 1400 military officers attempted a takeover of the government, resulting in the death of several top civilian leaders. Although the rebellion failed, it demonstrated the domestic coercive power of the military. Moreover, civilians were outnumbered by military officers in important ministries, and were increasingly excluded from important political and military decisions. [41] For these reasons, I coded the domestic audience in Japan as stemming primarily from the military. While the book does not delve into Wilhemine Germany, Downes’s description suggests that the leadership of this period might, like Japan, be coded as a junta because of the domestic power of the military.Ienaga, Pacific War, 35. By tradition, and sometimes by law (1900-1913, and from 1936 to the end of the war), both ministers had to be serving officers. Weeks’s argument also differs from a second model of civil-military relations developed in the military effectiveness literature. Risa Brooks’ theory of strategic assessment focuses on the balance of power between civilian leaders and military leaders (civilian dominance, military dominance, or shared power) and the extent of preference divergence between the two groups (high versus low). [7] When civilians are firmly in charge and civilian and military officials have congruent preferences, states will be able to assess their strategic environment accurately and are likely to have positive military outcomes. When civilians share power with the military—that is, when the military can threaten the tenure of the leader directly or indirectly (in Weeks’s terms, the military constitutes an audience)—and the two sides have strongly divergent preferences, then strategic assessment will be very bad. [8] Because they are competing for power, both civilian and military officials are reluctant to share information with each other, which in turn makes it difficult to coordinate strategic plans with political goals. Moreover, the military tends to focus on its internal rival, undermining its ability to assess its own (and its external adversary’s) strengths and weaknesses, and it is unclear who has the final say on military strategy. Such states are prone to major strategic mistakes. Again, I thank these scholars for their commentaries, and I hope that this exchange will stimulate future research on dictatorships and foreign policy.

One issue that these three essays skirt, and which I wish to touch on here, concerns the policy ramifications of Weeks’s argument. Especially since the end of Cold War, American foreign policy has stressed the importance of converting dictatorships into democracies, in part because, as Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush reiterated, democracies do not fight each other, and dictatorships are belligerent. Weeks’s book challenges this assumption, noting that some types of dictatorships, especially ‘Machine’ regimes led by civilian dictators who have to answer to elites, can be as peaceful as democracies.Wilhelmine Germany is another important case that seems to elude Weeks’s categorization. The structure of the German government in the years prior to World War I has long defied easy description. There were elections and universal manhood suffrage, but the Chancellor served at the pleasure of the Kaiser and did not require the support of a majority of the Reichstag. Moreover, command of the armed forces and the conduct of foreign policy were the sole prerogative of the throne rather than parliament. In addition to these regime characteristics, Wilhelmine Germany is perhaps the signature case of military autonomy in the literature. Brooks argues that civilian and military leaders shared power in the Wilhelmine system: “the German army…had substantial latent power and constituted a major force within the kaiser’s coalition.” [13] At a minimum, civilian officials had no input on the formation of military strategy and it was unclear who had the authority to make strategic commitments on behalf of Germany. But it seems entirely plausible to propose that leaders value the same good differentially because it brings them different private benefits [27] of war, thereby eliminating the bargaining range. Alternatively, variation in regime type could be linked to variation in private information, incentives to misrepresent, or commitment problems. It could be argued that personalist regimes, in particular Bosses like Saddam Hussein or Stalin, make decisions in such isolation that information about their preferences and calculations is limited to a very few individuals, leaving the dictator with more private information than other authoritarian leaders. In turn, the international opponent of such a leader might also have `more’ private information about his capabilities and resolve. Any information that contradicts the leader’s beliefs about the international opponent may never reach a personalist leader who is surrounded by sycophants. Thus, even when dealing with a complicated four-way regime typology it seems by no means necessary to bypass the bargaining model of war. Explicitly building on the bargaining model of war and taking account of strategic interaction at both the domestic and international level, I would argue, might also lead to some countervailing hypotheses. Weeks writes that while “autocratic audiences may approve of the use of force if the benefits outweigh the costs, they are no less wary of the possibility of defeat than they democratic counterparts and do not see systematically greater gains from fighting” (22). In her view, such audiences by and large restrain leaders from going to war or initiating a dispute (22-23). Weeks differentiates authoritarian regimes that do not have an audience that can potentially punish the leader (personalist dictatorships) from authoritarian regimes that do have such audiences, but ignores the strategic interactions between domestic actors. As Giacomo Chiozza and I argue, it is the time-varying (an issue to which I return below) threat of domestic punishment that can make war a rational gamble for resurrection. [28] If the peacetime threat of domestic punishment is high, the use of force with the potential for political domestic rewards in the case of victory can be a rational gamble, even if defeat carries a high concomitant likelihood of punishment. The truncation of punishment is key. This suggests that the presence of an audience might prod leaders into wars they would not have selected if they had not had such an audience. On the latter, see H. E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). On the former, see Giacomo Chiozza and H. E. Goemans, Leaders and International Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Overcoming the societally ingrained belief that all non-democratic regimes are alike, Weeks shows the striking differences between them not just internally, but externally. These factors are related in her argument and she makes a convincing case. Although I am personally not fond of positivism in the humanities as a methodology, she uses it adequately to show the differences of conflict occurrence between regime types in her admittedly limited example pool.