Peter Leeson, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming book “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates,” blogged here earlier this week about U.F.O.’s and Bigfoot. This is his second of three posts.
Since the dawn of the cold war, a “democratic domino theory” has helped motivate important U.S. foreign policy decisions. Dwight D. Eisenhower summarized this theory, which he called “the falling domino principle,” in 1954:
You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.
Eisenhower was talking about communist dominoes. Since him, however, other U.S. policymakers have invoked the same basic logic — only with democratic instead of communist dominoes — and thus virtuous effects where a “first domino” falls.
Most recently, some policymakers have pointed to the possibility of a democratic domino effect in the Middle East as a reason for America’s continued presence in Iraq. According to George W. Bush, for instance, “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”
In a recent paper, co-author Andrea Dean and I investigate whether democratic dominoes like the ones American foreign policy posits actually exist and, if they do, how “hard” they fall.
Does democracy really spread between countries? If so, how much? We find that democratic dominoes do in fact exist, but they fall significantly “lighter” than foreign policy applications of this principle pretend.
Countries only “catch” about 11 percent of their geographic neighbors’ average changes in democracy; the modesty of this spread rate is consistent over time. Our analysis extends back to 1850, but 150-plus years ago, like today, changes in countries’ democracies were only mildly contagious.
Our study isn’t focused on the impact of U.S. intervention on democracy abroad. But if our estimates are in the ballpark, they have potentially sobering implications for attempts to democratize the world through intervention. Even if U.S. intervention succeeds in improving democracy in a key country it occupies, the democracy-enhancing “spillovers” of the intervention are likely to be minimal.
Democratic dominoes don’t have the “oomph” to democratize entire regions. Most of an intervention’s benefits for democracy, where there are any at all, are likely to remain local.
Bill Easterly and two of his colleagues have a provocative working paper that looks specifically at foreign intervention’s influence on democracy abroad. What they find is even more damning for domino-inspired interventions.
According to their work, which examines interventions in the cold war period, U.S. interventions decreased democracy by 33 percent in countries where America intervened (so did Soviet interventions). Christopher Coyne’s important book examines the reasons for this failure and provides evidence that foreign intervention’s democracy-reducing outcome isn’t limited to the cold war context.
If U.S. interventions fail to enhance democracy in the countries where they take place, pro-democracy spillovers obviously cannot spread throughout the greater regions these countries are part of. If the evidence from past attempts is any indicator, the prospect of using falling dominoes to democratize the globe looks pretty dim.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
For a related study from PRIO in Norway, see
Gleditsch, Nils Petter; Lene Siljeholm Christiansen & Håvard Hegre 2007. ‘Democratic Jihad? Military Intervention and Democracy’, presented at Post-Conflict Transitions Conference, World Bank, Washington, DC, 30 April–1 May.
http://www.prio.no/sptrans/-139794680/file49713_democraticjihadapril2007.pdf
Abstract: Democracies rarely if ever fight one another, but they participate in wars as frequently as autocracies. They tend to win the wars in which they participate. Democracies frequently build large alliances in wartime, but not only with other democracies. From time to time democra-cies intervene militarily in on-going conflicts. The democratic peace may contribute to a nor-mative justification for such interventions, for the purpose of promoting democracy and eventually for the promotion of peace. This is reinforced by an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention. Democracies may have a motivation to intervene in non-democracies, even in the absence of on-going conflict, for the purpose of regime change. The Iraq War may be interpreted in this perspective. A strong version of this type of foreign policy may be interpreted as a democratic crusade. The paper examines the normative and theoretical foundations of democratic interventionism. An empirical investigation of interventions in the period 1960–96 indicates that democracies intervene quite frequently, but rarely against other democracies. In the short term, democratic intervention appears to be successfully promoting democratization, but the target states tend to end up among the unstable semi-democracies. The most widely publicized recent interventions are targeted on poor or resource-dependent countries in non-democratic neighborhoods. Previous research has found these characteristics to reduce the prospects for stable democracy. Thus, forced democratization is unpredictable with regard to achieving long-term democracy and potentially harmful with regard to securing peace. However, short-term military successes may stimulate more interventions until the negative consequences become more visible.
The main point leftists apparently don’t get is that democracy is neither a moral principle nor a (valid) end in itself. Where democracy is desirable, it is desirable because it tends to create and preserve freedom for individuals.
And there are, in fact, many places in the world where if you give people the vote, they will vote themselves a tyranny because that’s what they grew up with and are comfortable with.
Many of those places are in the Middle East and Asia.
The only reason that India and Pakistan are somewhat free countries is that a century of British occupation gave those people the experience of freedom, and instruction on how to build institutions that will preserve it. As unfair as colonialism is, I believe it did those places a lasting favor, just as it did America.
I only wish we could afford to do the same to the rest of the unfree parts of the world starting now.
If this be heresy, make the most of it.
World War II democratized – by intervention – the parts of Europe that America could reach. The parts of Europe that the Sovieet Union reached remained undemocratic for sixty years.
aaron #8: “I don’t understand the preoccupation with democracy. I think the real concern is liberty. Do our actions infuence other to become more liberal and prosperous is the real question. Democracy is just a system that helps prevent liberties from eroding.”
aaron, I don’t think we can make such a sharp distinction between our preoccupation with democracy and our concern for liberty or freedom. For instance, the quote from George Bush mentioned by the author is taken from a speech Bush gave in 2003. You’ll find the link below.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html
Bush uses the word free (and freedom) 51 times and the word democracy (and democratic)…50 times.
It’s all too easy to quote only one sentence dealing with democracy (“The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution”) and take this as a representative statement of America’s foreign policy. One could also say that US wants to free people in other countries.
Let me hasten to say that I was firmly opposed to war with Iraq. My point is the simple one that 1) it is reductive to say that America’s foreign policy is guided only by considerations of democracy, 2) America’s foreign policy is equally inspired by considerations of freedom, 3) that if one considers US intervention as a failure, then, one should not limit this failure to democracy, but also to the implementation or restoration of freedom. In other words, this post could also have been titled “Freedom dominoes”…
That said, I do not trust a single word pronounced by Bush (or other politicians for that matter). I believe that US foreign policy is in fact guided by motivations other than democracy or freedom. So that I am not at all surprised by the fact that US intervention abroad does not nurture democracy or democratic spillovers, just because this is not the genuine objective sought by US’s foreign policy.
The problem is that most, instead of looking to help create the conditions for a sustainable democracy to prosper, are mostly trying to impose their own democracy on others.
In Iraq the sine qua nom condition for having a sustainable democracy is an oil revenue sharing system that hinders the concentration of oil wealth in the hands of governments and bureaucrats. The Iraq Study Group Report, 2006, even mentioned to “redistribute a portion of oil revenues directly to the population on a per capita basis”… but who has heard a word on that truly democracy empowering proposal since?
http://perkurowski.blogspot.com/2007/08/pleasewhile-you-are-busy-leaving-iraq.html
Thinking about Applying to NW? ,