Mansfield and Snyder argued that incomplete democratic transitions in countries with weak political institutions raise the risk of both international and civil war, because mass electoral competition before institutions can restrain elites gives elites the motive and opportunity to mobilize nationalist or sectarian constituencies. In a 2009 International Organization exchange, Narang and Nelson countered that state failure is a more parsimonious explanation for much of the apparent pattern. In their rejoinder, Mansfield and Snyder posed two connected open research questions that remain unanswered: (1) how to disentangle the causal mechanisms of state failure versus democratizing nationalism in civil wars occurring during or shortly after incomplete democratic transitions, with contemporary Iraq — where internationally imposed elections coincided with state failure and sharp identity conflict — as the paradigmatic case; and (2) whether attempting to democratize in the absence of necessary institutions not only elevates the risk of war but also consolidates a pattern of illiberal politics that hinders subsequent democratic consolidation. Both components remain contested and unresolved in the subsequent literature.

Background

The democratic peace — the well-documented regularity that pairs of established democracies rarely fight one another — has a widely discussed transition-period exception: states in the middle of a transition from autocracy toward democracy appear unusually prone to conflict. An incomplete democratic transition is a regime change toward democracy that stalls short of full democracy, typically while political institutions (courts, bureaucracies, parties, rule of law) remain weak. Mansfield and Snyder built a research program on this exception: they argued that when mass political participation expands through elections before institutions can restrain elites, both rising and declining elites have incentives to play the nationalist card — mobilizing nationalist or sectarian constituencies against domestic and foreign rivals — raising the risks of both international and civil war (Mansfield and Snyder, "Democratization and War," 1995; "Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength, and War," 2002; Electing to Fight, 2005). They called this mechanism democratizing nationalism. The rival account is state failure: a state whose capacity to control territory and enforce order collapses becomes prone to civil war for reasons that have little to do with the transition itself, a view descending from the canonical weak-state baseline of Fearon and Laitin ("Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," 2003). Much of the quantitative debate uses the Polity data set, which scores regimes from autocracy to democracy; intermediate scores define an "anocracy," and a shift from autocracy toward — but not reaching — democracy over a five-year window is the standard operationalization of incomplete democratization. In International Organization 63(2) (2009), Narang and Nelson ("Who Are These Belligerent Democratizers?") challenged the statistical evidence: they argued that a few outlier observations (notably Ottoman Empire war-years) drive the findings, that wars since 1992 offer little support, and that state failure is a more parsimonious explanation than democratizing nationalism. Mansfield and Snyder's rejoinder ("Pathways to War in Democratic Transitions," 2009) defended the theory with evidence on post-1992 wars, the Ottoman cases, and two causal pathways (weak-institution democratizers that provoke attack, and strong-administration/weak-representation cases), and closed by posing the research agenda this debate leaves open. Around the same time, a related policy debate — the "sequencing" debate — asked whether democracy promoters should build institutions before encouraging mass elections: Carothers ("How Democracies Emerge: The 'Sequencing' Fallacy," 2007) argued that insisting on institutions first is neither feasible nor necessary, while Mansfield and Snyder's reply later that year ("Exchange: The Sequencing 'Fallacy'," Journal of Democracy 18(3), 2007) contended that wrong-sequence democratization risks bloodshed and the mobilization of durable illiberal forces able to block later democratic consolidation. Illiberal politics here means political competition and participation without constitutional liberalism — elections without secure civil liberties, rule of law, and constraint on executives — and democratic consolidation means democracy becoming so routinized and accepted that breakdown is no longer a live concern.

Problem Statement

The problem, posed by Mansfield and Snyder at the close of their 2009 rejoinder to Narang and Nelson, has two connected parts, aimed at determining what it is about institution-poor democratization that produces civil war, and what political legacy it leaves.

Part 1 (mechanism disentangling). In civil wars that occur during or shortly after an incomplete democratic transition, two causal mechanisms have been proposed and neither has been separated from the other: (a) state failure — the erosion of state capacity, which opens opportunities for violent rebellion irrespective of the transition itself; and (b) democratizing nationalism — the mobilization of nationalist or sectarian constituencies by elites competing in newly mass electorates before institutions can restrain them. The task is to disentangle these mechanisms: to establish, with research designs in which their effects are separately identified (identification meaning that the data variation used to estimate each mechanism distinguishes it from the other), whether the elevated civil-war risk during incomplete democratic transitions is attributable to state failure, to democratizing nationalism, or to some combination of the two. Contemporary Iraq — where internationally imposed elections coincided with state failure and sharp identity conflict — is the paradigmatic case in which both mechanisms operate simultaneously.

Part 2 (the illiberal-consolidation hypothesis). Test whether attempting to democratize in the absence of necessary institutions not only elevates the risk of war (the claim contested in Part 1) but also consolidates a pattern of illiberal politics — electoral competition without secure civil liberties, rule of law, and executive constraint — that hinders the subsequent consolidation of democracy. This requires observing political trajectories well beyond the transition itself and distinguishing the institutional-deficit cause from rival drivers of illiberal outcomes. Both parts must be addressed to resolve the problem: Part 2 is an independent test and does not presuppose an affirmative answer to Part 1.

References

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