Promoting Democracy through Military Intervention
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
Since World War II, democratization has served as a common foreign policy goal for established democratic states. Countries, like the United States, have applied various means to promote democratic regime change in other countries ranging from sanctions to military force. To date the research that exists analyzing the impact of military force as a tool for democratization in Third Party countries has yielded ambiguous results. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of military intervention on democratization in states around the world. We examine the relationship between military intervention and democratization in three ways. First, we provide a discussion on the logic of military intervention for the purposes of democratization. Second, we analyze the direct causal connection between military intervention and democratic transition (within one year of intervention) during the entire post-World War II era. Finally, we analyze the variation in a target states polity when a military intervention is carried out for purposes of democratization versus other foreign policy goals. The data (drawn from the Military Intervention Database and Polity IV) suggest military intervention results in weakening in the polity of the target state, meaning the recipient state becomes less stable. These findings suggest that military intervention not only fails to produce consolidated democratic states, it also fails to provide the target of military intervention with a stable government, leaving perhaps a bigger foreign policy problem in its wake.
