Book Review

Critical Dialogues: War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy. By Matthew A. Baum and Philip B. K. Potter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 280p. $95.00 cloth, $29.95 paper

Horowitz, Michael C, Stam, Allan C, Ellis, Cali M

2017

Overview

Baum and Potter's fundamental claim is that as the number of political parties in a system increases and the media in a country becomes more open, the give-and-take of domestic politics is more likely to place constraints on leaders who want to take their countries to war.[...]neither media access nor the number of political parties, on their own, are enough to significantly influence the militarized behavior of a country.The United States, for example, has free media but a small number of political parties.[...]the United States is less militarily constrained than a country like Germany, which has free media and a larger number of political parties.[...]by explaining the logic of democratic constraint and how it may only apply to certain types of democracies, Baum and Potter's research and theory could break a logjam in research on regime type and audience costs.For their macro claims about conflict initiation and reciprocation, the authors' models do, of course, suffer from the inherent inferential limitations of cross-national, observational time-series analysis, especially when using data like the Militarized Interstate Disputes and International Crisis Behavior data sets.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Constraints / Credibility / Democracy / Disputes / Domestic politics / Foreign policy / International relations / Leadership / Mass media / Political leadership / Political parties / Political science / Politics / Researchers / State / Theory