Why Democracies Fight Dictators explores an important pattern in international conflict: the tendency for liberal democracies to engage in hostilities with countries ruled by personalist dictators. While it is tempting to place blame exclusively or primarily on the internal characteristics of these states— the lack of constraints on the leaders or the unsavory character of personalist dictators—these cannot explain why democracies find themselves so frequently at odds with personalists, but other non-democratic states do not. I argue that rather than being a byproduct of structural conditions, purely rational calculations, or the bad behavior of dictators, democratic-personalist conflict is often driven or exacerbated by democratic elites’ predisposition to view personalist autocrats as particularly compelling and uncompromising threats. I show how narratives of conflict between democracies and dictators reinforce the effects of psychological biases and heuristics such as the vividness effect and attribution bias, predisposing decision-makers in democracies to particular emotional responses that produce a preference for coercive, and often violent, action when conflicts of interest arise. This framework builds on cognitive and cultural psychology, and constructivist IR to challenge existing theories of threat perception and institutionalist theories of regime type and conflict. To test my theory, I utilize a multi-method design that combines case studies of Western excursions in the Middle East, drawing on multi-archival research in in the United States and UK, and large-N statistical analysis.
About the Speaker
Madison Schramm is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, and a non-resident fellow in the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. Schramm’s research focuses on international security, political psychology, and gender and foreign policy. She has published peer-reviewed research exploring US covert foreign-imposed regime change (Cambridge University Press Elements Series in International Relations), democracy and international security (Oxford University Press and Political Science Quarterly and the Journal of Global Security Studies), gender and conflict initiation (Security Studies), corruption charges against women heads of government (Canadian Journal of Political Science), and diversity and inclusion in post-conflict states (in Untapped Power, Oxford University Press 2022). Schramm’s commentary and reviews have been published in Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, the Texas National Security Review, the National Interest, the Atlantic, the Christian Science Monitor, Inkstick, the Duck of Minerva, Stimson.org, and CFR.org; and her research and analyses have been cited in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Jerusalem Post.
