Intervention in Civil Conflicts: The Balance of Domestic Politics and Structural Factors

With the rise in civil conflicts, third­party interventions aimed at protecting and advancing national interests have become common. However, despite potential benefits, such interventions can result in negative reputational and material consequences for the intervening party. As such, decisions to intervene may often confront domestic political constraints. This study integrates the institutional aspect of democratic peace theory and neoclassical realism to examine internal and structural factors that influence the decision to intervene. Theoretically, enhanced democratic institutions are expected to produce a moderating effect on intervention, but this effect is sidelined when structural incentives take hold. To test these assumptions, a wide range of data sources are utilized, including the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) External Support Dataset and the International Military Intervention Correlates (IMIC) developed at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). Using these two datasets, the author proposes to separate military and non­military interventions in order to test for potential differences in effects that characteristics of political systems may have on them. Varieties of Democracy data are employed to measure institutional characteristics. The analysis reveals heterogeneous effects of different aspects of institutional design on the propensity to intervene. The author suggests that the differences in effects could be attributed to variations in institutional specifics, public reactions, and types of intervention. Specifically, military interventions as a result of their publicity and overtness produce special short­term and long­term public opinion dynamics that are reflected in different effects of various forms of political behavior. Structural incentives consistently increase the likelihood of intervention, though they only partially mitigate the impact of differences in institutional characteristics.

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