Abstract
- Democratization has served as a common foreign policy goal for established democratic states since World War II. Established democracies have been inclined to apply various means to promote democratic regime change in other countries ranging from sanctions to military force. To date, research on the impact of military force on democratization in third party countries has yielded ambiguous results. It seems that military intervention has some impact on regime change, but democratic regime change is somewhat debatable. This study attempts to sift the data on post-World War II military interventions in order to pinpoint any impact it has on regime change, and more specifically on democratic regime change. The analysis draws on data from the Military Intervention Database and Polity IVd in order to assess the impact of military intervention on changes in regime characteristics within target states. The data suggest military intervention, more often than not, weakens the polity of the target state making the target state less stable, leaving behind a potentially bigger foreign policy problem.