*Patrick Mello, Email: patrick.mello@sowi.hu-berlin.de | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences | Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin

Democratic Subtypes, Institutional Mechanisms, and Armed Conflict:

A Fuzzy-Set Analysis of Democracies’ Military Participation in the Iraq War

Patrick Mello*

Paper prepared for the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, St. Gallen, 12-17 April 2011.

Working paper.

Please do not cite without author’s permission.

Comments most welcome!

Abstract How do different configurations of democratic subtypes and government partisanship affect participation in armed conflict? In this paper I discuss the findings of recent studies and suggest an alternative theoretical approach that combines the analysis of institutional and partisan factors. The empirical part analyzes twenty-six democracies’ degree of military participation in the Iraq War of 2003. Prior studies have identified institutional and partisan differences as potential explanatory factors for the observed variance in democratic conflict behavior. The interaction of institutions and partisanship, however, has gone largely unobserved. I argue that these factors require to be analyzed in conjunction: institutional constraints presume actors that fulfill their role as veto players to the executive. Likewise, partisan politics is embedded in institutional frames that enable or constrain decision-making. Hence, I suggest a comparative approach that analyzes configurations of these factors to explain why some democracies fought in the Iraq War and others did not. To investigate the relation between institutions, partisanship and war participation I apply a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). In brief, the results demonstrate that a combined framework is better suited to explain the observed outcomes, including deviant cases of approaches that focus on either institutional or partisan explanations.

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Introduction

Law-like propositions are hard to find in international politics. This might explain the

sustained amount of scholarly attention devoted to the democratic peace proposition, which

holds, in a nutshell, that ‘democracies do not fight each other’. The merits of the academic

debate surrounding the democratic peace notwithstanding, its often narrow focus on the

questions of whether and, to a lesser extent, why democracies don’t go to war against each

other has obstructed the view for conflicts that involve democracies, but take place outside the

democratic ‘zone of peace’ (MacMillan 1996). In particular, there is a lack of studies that

comparatively investigate the flipside of the interdemocratic peace, namely the use of military

force by democracies against non-democratic regimes and non-state actors. This shortcoming

is often compounded by a research focus on regime type differences that leads studies to treat

democracies as a homogenous group when it is apparent that this conceals substantial

differences in institutions, culture, and conflict behavior. In this context, two general

questions arise which this paper seeks to address. First, how can democracies be meaningfully

differentiated in the realm of foreign and security policy? Second, to which extent do

differences between democracies relate to their conflict behavior?

The article is divided into three parts. Part one reviews the debate on democracy and war

involvement and introduces the paper’s theoretical approach. Since most arguments in the

broader democratic peace literature have been well established, rather than providing a

comprehensive literature review, I will focus on works that are central to the research aim and

important to frame my argument.1 Part two introduces the research design for the fuzzy-set

analysis and the method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). In turn, part three

discusses the results for the analysis of twenty-six democracies’ participation in the Iraq War.

The final section concludes the essay and proposes areas for future research.

Prior studies have identified institutional and partisan differences as potential explanatory

factors for the observed variance in democratic conflict behavior. The interaction of

institutions and partisanship, however, has gone largely unobserved. I argue that these factors

require to be analyzed in conjunction: institutional constraints, and specifically ‘parliamentary

war powers’, presume actors that fulfill their role as veto players to the executive. Likewise,

partisan politics is embedded in institutional frames that enable or constrain decision-making.

Hence, I suggest a comparative approach that analyzes institutional and partisan 1 For reviews of the democratic peace research program at various stages of its development, see, for example Gleditsch and Hegre (1997); Huth and Allee (2002); Ray (2003); George and Bennett (2005); Geis and Wagner (2010).

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configurations to explain why some democracies fight and others do not. To investigate the

relation between institutions, partisanship and war participation I apply a fuzzy-set analysis.

In brief, the results demonstrate that a combined framework is better suited to explain the

observed outcomes, including deviant cases of approaches that focus on either institutional or

partisan explanations.

Democracy and Armed Conflict

Research on regime type and conflict behavior has yielded a host of findings, the most well

known of which remains the ‘democratic peace’. In the past three decades, numerous studies

have focused on the benign effects of ‘democracy’, whether in support of the dyadic argument

that democracies do not fight each other (e.g., Doyle 1986; Maoz and Russett 1993) or to

maintain the monadic argument that democracies are generally more peaceful when compared

to non-democratic regimes (e.g., Rummel 1995; Benoit 1996). While most researchers have

sided with the dyadic claim, it strikes one as odd that the monadic argument is ‘theoretically

rich’ but not supported by empirical evidence, while the dyadic argument is ‘theory-poor’ but

‘empirically grounded’ as Gates, Knutsen, and Moses remark (1996). However, in the debate

over theoretical explanations for the empirical finding of interdemocratic peace it is

sometimes lost that both monadic and dyadic approaches are based on similar assumptions

regarding political processes and institutional and normative constraints within democracies.

In effect, many of the theoretical explanations offered imply the existence of monadic

mechanisms, even though empirical support for the monadic claim has been inconclusive.2

Due to a widespread focus on regime type differences, many studies implicitly treat

democracies as a homogenous group. Scholars have repeatedly pointed out that this lack of

differentiation conceals considerable variation on the domestic level – a factor that could

explain why some democracies are more war-prone than others (Elman 2000; Palmer, Regan,

and London 2004). In this context a number of authors have begun to investigate

democracies’ varying institutional settings and domestic characteristics in relation to conflict

behavior. For instance, Prins and Sprecher (1999) examine parliamentary democracies and,

rather counter-intuitively, find coalition governments more likely to reciprocate disputes with

military force than single-party governments. This contrasts with Auerswald (1999), who

finds coalition governments restrained in their use of military force for the cases he examines.

Reiter and Tillman (2002), on the other hand, as well as Leblang and Chan (2003) report no 2 Jervis (2005, 19) stands for a number of authors who have begun to question the theoretical utility of distinguishing between monadic and dyadic approaches.

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significant results for the parliamentary-presidential distinction. Concerning electoral rules,

however, these studies find that proportional representation (PR) systems are less likely to get

involved in war (Leblang and Chan 2003) and that increased political participation reduces

the likelihood of conflict initiation (Reiter and Tillman 2002). Chan and Safran posit that

differences in electoral rules could also explain why some democracies participated in the

Iraq War when others did not, due to different degrees of political responsiveness. Thus,

governments in countries with proportional electoral rules are expected to be more responsive

to citizen demands and more constrained by public opinion than their counterparts in

majoritarian systems (Chan and Safran 2006). A different aspect is emphasized by Palmer,

London, and Regan (2004), who distinguish governments by their political position, based on

expert survey data. Their study lends support to the partisan argument, finding that ‘right’

governments are more likely to become involved in interstate conflict than ‘left’ governments.

Most of the quantitative studies just cited use data on Militarized Interstate Disputes

(MIDs) as their dependent variable (Ghosn, Palmer, and Bremer 2004). However, for the

purpose of analyzing political decisions on the use of military force this might not be the best

indicator, as Fordham and Sarver (2001) argue, since the MID data includes disputes that are

not linked to the political authorization of force, for instance military border clashes between

individual units, and it excludes disputes that are highly relevant, such as the use of force

against terrorist groups and other non-state actors. This paper explicitly focuses on the link

between domestic configurations of institutions and actors and the political authorization of

military force. Hence, in the following case study on the Iraq War the dependent variable

‘military participation’ is based on a qualitative coding to allow for more fine-grained

distinctions in degrees of military involvement.3

Lately, a number of publications have initiated what may constitute a ‘democratic turn’ in

security studies (Geis and Wagner 2010). These works typically emphasize democratic

cultures and political processes as conditions that shape democracies’ external behavior.

Focusing on the inherent ‘antinomies’ of the democratic peace, these studies investigate the

reasons for democratic war-proneness and analyze the types of wars that are fought (almost)

exclusively by democratic states (Müller 2004; Daase 2006; Evangelista, Müller, and

Schörnig 2008). Geis, Müller, and Schörnig (2010) ask ‘why some democracies fight and

3 The recently updated International Military Intervention (IMI) dataset by Pickering and Kisangani (2009) presents an alternative to the commonly used MID data, particularly for research projects that are interested in the monadic use of force. In this paper I focus on democracies’ participation in the Iraq War, requiring a more differentiated coding of military participation. I seek to complement this with a statistical analysis for the post-Cold War timeframe using the IMI data.

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others do not’ to investigate parliamentary debates preceding the wars in the Persian Gulf,

Kosovo, and Iraq across seven democracies. Their extensive analysis of parliamentary

speeches provides empirical evidence of distinct foreign policy cultures in the observed

countries, as reflected in the discursive structures of plenary debates. This important

contribution indicates that democracies differ in their normative structures, and it questions

the idea of a democratic community that shares norms of conflict resolution and approaches to

the use of military force (Geis, Müller, and Schörnig 2010, 197–8). However, the study falls

short of explaining specific war participations, since countries’ ‘discursive maps’ are based on

aggregate data over a timeframe of fourteen years. Moreover, while Geis et al. acknowledge

that norms and institutions should be analyzed in conjunction (2010, 177), their approach is

restricted to an analysis of normative structures. This becomes problematic for cases that are

not clear-cut. For instance, parliaments in France and Germany turn out to have similar

discursive structures (Geis, Müller, and Schörnig 2010, 189), but the countries differ

substantially in their use of military force. Here, an investigation of executive-legislative

relations or the constellation of political actors could have provided more leverage to explore

‘why some fight and others do not’.

Executive-Legislative Relations

Democracies display remarkable differences concerning the extent to which their national

legislatures are formally involved in decision-making processes on the use of military force.

Whereas some countries’ governments face no constraints in sending the military abroad,

referring to an ‘executive prerogative’ over matters of foreign policy, other governments are

constitutionally required to seek parliamentary approval when they want to deploy troops to a

conflict. These positions signify opposite ends on a continuum that includes various

intermediary forms of ‘parliamentary war powers’ (Peters and Wagner 2011). In contrast to

the established notion of executive-legislative relations, the concept of parliamentary war

powers specifies the concrete authority of the legislature in the field of military deployment

policy, which does not necessarily correspond to the general balance between the executive

and legislative branches. It must further be distinguished from civil-military relations, because

these are predominantly concerned with establishing political authority over the military, but

say little about the inter-branch dynamics of how and by whom civilian control ought to be

exercised (e.g., Huntington 1957).

Recent works investigate the extent to which parliament influences executive decisions on

the use of force, whether by way of cross-country comparisons or single-country case studies

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(Dieterich, Hummel, and Marschall 2009; Kesgin and Kaarbo 2010; Kolanoski 2010). As

indicated, parliamentary war powers can take a variety of forms. Here, I will focus on the

formal powers of parliament in the deployment of armed force, in contrast to informal

practice or broader measures of parliamentary influence.4 Formal war powers first and

foremost concern the question of whether parliament holds a constitutional veto right against

executive decisions on military deployments. In its most encompassing form this veto right

exists ex ante for all types of military operations, requiring the executive to ask for

parliamentary approval before any kind of military operation is conducted. This veto right can

also exist ex post, granting parliament a vote on military operations that have already been

initiated. Arguably, the latter is a much weaker form of influence, since the material and

reputational costs for revoking a decision already made are substantial and make it unlikely

that parliamentarians are willing to use this power except under severe circumstances. At the

low end of war powers are mere informational rights where parliament enjoys no binding veto

of any sort, but has to be informed regularly by the executive and can initiate hearings and

parliamentary debate (Born and Hänggi 2005; Dieterich, Hummel, and Marschall 2010;

Wagner, Peters, and Glahn 2010).

In their study of European governments’ responses to the Iraq War, Dieterich, Hummel

and Marschall (2009) examine the parliamentary war powers of 25 EU member states in

relation to their military participation in the intervention phase.5 The study hypothesizes a

‘parliamentary peace’, suggesting that countries with ‘comprehensive’ parliamentary war

powers abstain from military participation. This argument rests on the premise of a war-

averse public, which was the case in the months preceding the Iraq War, where 60% to 80%

of the interviewed across European countries rejected an intervention absent an explicit UN

authorization (Gallup 2003). But despite this uniform pattern of public opposition across

Europe, several governments supported the Bush administration’s war plans. Dieterich et al.

argue that differences in parliamentary war powers help explain why some countries

participated in the war and others did not. Their findings largely confirm the initial

hypothesis: countries that were involved militarily had ‘basic’ or ‘deficient’ war powers,

while countries with ‘comprehensive’ war powers made no contribution or provided mere

logistical support. Deviant cases were Denmark and Lithuania, two countries with substantial

4 For a broader conception of legislative influence, based on the U.S. case and congressional influence on presidential decisions on the use of force, see Howell and Pevehouse (2007). 5 The study by Dieterich et al. (2009) includes the EU-15 member states (as of 2003) as well as prospective members that joined the EU in 2004. Information on the research project can be found at http://paks.uni-duesseldorf.de/ [7 February 2011].

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parliamentary war powers, which nevertheless supported the coalition with military force

(Dieterich, Hummel, and Marschall 2009, 30).

The study by Dieterich et al. makes a critical contribution to a democratic peace literature

that usually assumes the existence of ‘democratic constraints’ but rarely specifies this concept

in the light of actual political processes in consolidated democracies. The fact that

democracies differ greatly regarding the involvement of national legislatures in decisions on

war and peace, and particularly in decisions on military operations that lack a formal

declaration of war has not received the necessary attention of conflict researchers.6 I have two

comments, however, concerning case selection and actors’ preferences. First, while an

analysis of the EU-25 seems straightforward, this selection includes a number of very small

countries that are, arguably, most-likely cases for non-participation, namely Cyprus,

Luxembourg and Malta. Based on the size of their population and their armed forces, I would

hold that it is not plausible to expect a military contribution to the Iraq War from any of these

countries, even had their governments favored such a policy. Second, the parliamentary peace

hypothesis presents a strictly institutional argument that excludes parliamentarians’

preferences and the question of who is in government. Yet these are important factors that

influence whether a country steers towards war participation or not. If the governing coalition

holds an overwhelming majority of parliamentary seats, then it could see a military

deployment through, even in a country with strong parliamentary war powers. Hence, it seems

crucial to investigate partisanship and the constellation of actors in parliament as necessary

complements to the institutional strength of the legislature.

Partisan Politics

Conventional wisdom in IR holds that ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’ (Gowa 1998), or, in

other words, partisan politics concentrates on domestic affairs, whereas foreign policy is, or

ought to be, governed by a domestic consensus on what is in the ‘national interest’ (Krasner

1978, 6). These Realpolitik notions are mirrored in neorealist approaches that take a domestic

consensus on foreign policy issues as a given, rather than inquiring whether the preferences of

government parties matter in terms of the policies pursued. In contrast, liberal approaches

emphasize the domestic sources of foreign policy, regarding institutional structures of

political representation as crucial in determining whose preferences get to shape foreign 6 It is important to note that the formal requirement of the legislature’s approval for a declaration of war does not equate to parliamentary war powers. In fact, many legislatures that hold the former constitutional right (Fish and Kroenig 2009) do not enjoy a veto over military deployments (Wagner, Peters, and Glahn 2010). Arguably, the latter is more relevant for the involvement in contemporary armed conflicts.

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policy (Moravcsik 2008, 244). Similarly, constructivists, rather than assuming a priori the

existence of an objective ‘national interest’, aim to uncover how preferences are constituted

by looking at the processes through which state interests are defined by political actors

(Finnemore 1996).

While the influence of parties on policy output has spawned a vast literature in

comparative politics (e.g., Schmidt 1996; Kitschelt 2007), few studies have investigated this

nexus in the field of foreign and security policy. Works on democracy and the use of force

often approach the issue with a conception that regards parties primarily as office-seekers,

conveniently setting aside actors’ policy preferences to propose a purely institutional

argument (e.g., Auerswald 1999; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999). This neglect of partisan

politics is reflected in the works of seminal authors on the democratic peace, as MacMillan

notes (2004, 477), pointing out that Russett, for instance, had in his earlier work discussed

political ideology as an important factor (Russett 1990, 110–8), but later neglected this

dimension entirely (cf. Russett and Oneal 2001). By contrast, an alternative approach takes

issue with the ‘policy-blind’ conception of political actors. In distinction to the office-seeking

assumption of institutional arguments, this approach views parties as ‘policy-seekers’ and

focuses on ideological dispositions as a central influence on party behavior, while not denying

that parties also have office-seeking incentives.7 This perspective resonates with studies that

examined party affiliation in relation to the use of force and report distinctive patterns of

behavior based on party ideology (Palmer, Regan, and London 2004; Rathbun 2004; Schuster

and Maier 2006). Recent work further indicates that the left-right distinction commonly

applied to domestic politics is pertinent also in the area of foreign policy (Rathbun 2007).

Thus far, surprisingly few studies have comparatively investigated the relation between

governments’ partisan composition and participation in the Iraq War. An exception is

provided by Schuster and Maier (2006), who investigate twenty European countries’ political

responses to the Iraq War and test competing neorealist, liberal, and constructivist hypotheses

for their explanatory value. The authors’ partisan hypothesis expects left governments to

oppose the war, whereas right governments are assumed to give political support to the war

plans against Iraq. Governments and opposition parties are coded on the basis of party family

affiliation and expert judgments. Schuster and Maier find the partisan hypothesis to hold well

for Western European countries, but that it fails to explain the stance Central and Eastern

European (CEE) governments took during the conflict (2006, 233–5). While these findings

7 For an overview on different modes of party behavior, see Strøm (1990).

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are not conclusive, they nevertheless strengthen the notion that partisan differences translate

to the realm of foreign policy. This stands in contrast to traditional perspectives of foreign

policy as an arena where parties have agreed on an implicit consensus on which policies to

pursue.

The Interaction of Institutions and Partisanship

Based on the preceding discussion, I suggest a comparative approach that combines the

analysis of institutions and partisanship to explore why some democracies participated in the

war against Iraq and others have not.8 Conventional studies often test hypotheses derived

from what are conceived as competing paradigms in order to gauge their relative explanatory

strength. Research of this kind can be fertile where contradictory claims are clearly

identifiable, but in many cases paradigms ask questions that are directed at different levels of

inquiry. Hence, the thrust of a research question frequently affects the results in favor of one

paradigm over its competitors. The research problem of varying war participation among

democracies primarily concerns countries’ domestic sources of foreign policy, an area that is

commonly understood as the domain of liberal and constructivist approaches, though

neoclassical realism has begun to challenge this conception. However, instead of focusing on

differences between these schools of thought, I seek to integrate explanations that draw on

institutions and partisanship, two factors that previous studies have identified as important but

whose interaction has gone largely unobserved.

In terms of institutional factors, I follow recent work on ‘parliamentary war powers’,

which has provided an important specification of democratic foreign policy processes

(Dieterich, Hummel, and Marschall 2010; Wagner, Peters, and Glahn 2010). These studies

have identified sources of variation among democracies that have been overlooked by

conventional democratic peace writings. Moreover, the institutional feature parliamentary war

powers is analytically closer and thus more relevant to decisions on the use of force than

alternatives that have been proposed, such as the parliamentary-presidential distinction or

differences in electoral systems. The comparative analysis of constitutionally guaranteed

parliamentary involvement in military deployment decisions opens an avenue to differentiate

the security policy of democratic states. However, in order to derive theoretical expectations

8 A similar approach is proposed by Elman (2000), who argues in favor of combining institutions and preferences in analytical frameworks. In contrast to Elman, however, I do not regard majoritarianism as the central institutional criterion to distinguish democracies’ foreign policy approaches.

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for democracies’ behavior in specific conflicts, parliamentary war powers need to be

combined with an analysis of partisanship.

Scholars increasingly acknowledge that foreign policy issues can be just as contested

among political actors as domestic politics and that domestic ideological dispositions translate

to the foreign policy realm (cf. Holsti 2004; Rathbun 2007). But political conflict does not

arise equally for all foreign policy issues. In particular, I expect political dispute among

parties over wars that are matters of political choice, rather than ‘wars of necessity’ in which

no viable alternative to the use of force exists.9 Given the characteristics of the Iraq War as an

ad hoc military operation that was not authorized by the UN Security Council and preceded

by an intense and polarized political debate across countries, I expect to find patterns of war

participation that resonate with the partisan composition of government and parliament and

the constitutional role of legislatures in terms of military deployments. My conception of

partisanship follows the approach suggested by Rathbun (2004), who distinguishes three

substantive areas of divergence among parties of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. Accordingly,

parties differ in their definitions and evaluations of (1) the national interest, (2) the

appropriateness of military force, and (3) the role of multilateralism in international politics.

Left parties typically follow an inclusive conception of the national interest that seeks to

promote human rights and is committed to multilateral approaches. They are reluctant to use

military force, emphasizing civilian modes of conflict resolution instead. Right parties, by

contrast, typically have a narrower conception of the national interest, focusing on issues that

directly affect the well-being of their own country, as opposed to inclusivist humanitarian

concerns the left would raise. They prefer unilateral approaches to entangling alliances and

regard the use of military force as a necessary instrument of deterrence (Rathbun 2004, 15–

33).10

How does the combination of institutions and partisanship affect my theoretical

expectations? Here, the first reference point is the partisan composition of the executive party

or coalition of parties. Based on the previous argumentation, the most likely case for military

participation is a country with a right executive and no parliamentary war powers. This is an

executive that is least constrained domestically and that likely regards the use of military

force as appropriate in the face of perceived security threats. However, in the presence of

parliamentary war powers the partisan composition of parliament becomes critical as it 9 On the distinction between wars of choice and wars of necessity, see Haass (2009). 10 The contrast between left and right positions on the appropriateness of military force can be related to Robert Jervis’ two models of perception, which are based on showing resolve, as in the ‘deterrence model’ or on preventing escalation, as in the ‘spiral model’ (Jervis 1976, 58–113).

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decides whether or not the executive can deploy military force. Under these circumstances, a

right-leaning parliament is expected to favor the use of force while a left-leaning parliament is

likely to stop the executive from initiating war participation. In other words, absent a left-

leaning legislature parliamentary war powers will prove inefficient in stopping a right

executive from using force. In contrast, left executives are expected to abstain from military

participation, regardless of parliaments’ institutional role or partisan composition.

Case Study: Democratic Participation in the Iraq War of 2003

When President Barack H. Obama announced on 31 October, 2010 that ‘Operation Iraqi

Freedom’ was officially over,11 he put an end to what has arguably been the most

controversial war democracies have fought since the end of the Cold War. During the past

two decades democratic states have used substantial military force on a number of occasions

and with varying justifications,12 but the preventive war against Iraq, initiated by President

George W. Bush on 19 March, 2003 and joined by an ad hoc coalition of states, stands out in

terms of the harm inflicted on soldiers and civilians killed or wounded, its extraordinary

economic costs, and its long-term toll on democratic politics and the project of democracy at

large.13

Against the backdrop of the preceding discussion questions arise concerning the interaction

of institutions and partisanship in relation to democracies’ participation in the Iraq War. Are

there discernable patterns of military participation? And if so, do they conform to the

theoretical expectations formulated above? As already discussed, comparative studies on the

participation of democracies in the Iraq War have proposed different explanations for the

observed variance. Some argue that differences in electoral systems lead to varying degrees of

political responsiveness. Hence, governments in countries with proportional electoral rules are

expected to be more responsive to citizen demands and more constrained by public opinion

than their counterparts in majoritarian systems (Chan and Safran 2006). Others suggest that,

contrary to traditional wisdom in International Relations (IR), political ideology does matter

in security policy and that the partisan composition of government helps to explain why some

countries participated in the Iraq War and others did not (Schuster and Maier 2006). A

11 See presidential address, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/08/31/remarks-president-address-nation-end-combat-operations-iraq (23 January, 2011). 12 For an empirical investigation of military interventions by democracies in the timeframe 1960-1996, see Gleditsch, Christiansen, and Hegre (2007). 13 A collection of essays on the political implications of the Iraq War is provided by Danchev and MacMillan (2005). Regarding the economic consequences of the war, see Stiglitz and Bilmes (2008).

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different line of reasoning focuses on the role of national legislatures, providing empirical

evidence of a ‘parliamentary peace’ that supports the argument that legislatures with authority

in security policy can serve as an effective check on war participation (Dieterich, Hummel,

and Marschall 2009). In the following section I test the theoretical expectations concerning

the interaction of institutional rules with partisan configurations in government and

parliament as detailed above.

Research Design

The analysis in this paper is based on an application of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative

Analysis (fsQCA). Since the method of fsQCA is still fairly new, I will briefly line out some

of its characteristics. QCA is a case-oriented approach based on Boolean algebra that is

ideally suited for small to medium numbers of cases. The method investigates the specific

conditions under which an outcome of interest occurs, rather than estimating the average

effect of a set of independent variables (Mahoney 2010, 132). Hence, causal relations are

expressed in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, a substantively important view of

causation that has gained increased attention in the social sciences (Collier, Brady, and

Seawright 2010, 147). While scholars are used to formulate their hypotheses in probabilistic

terms, many established theories actually follow an implicit understanding of necessary and

sufficient causation, as Goertz has extensively demonstrated (2003). The QCA approach

developed by Ragin (1987; 2000) builds on the idea that conditions, ‘variables’ in traditional

terms, often form combinations that are necessary and/or sufficient, while the constituent

parts might be neither necessary nor sufficient. This ontological perspective takes into

account the interaction of conditions, instead of focusing on net effects of single variables.

Fuzzy sets complement this approach, providing an intuitive tool to translate categorical

concepts into measurable conditions, based on the notion that cases can hold degrees of

membership in a given set (Smithson and Verkuilen 2006). The fuzzy set extension of QCA

thus allows for qualitative distinctions: based on empirical knowledge the researcher

determines when a case is ‘fully in’ (1) a given set, when it is ‘neither in nor out’ (0.5), and at

which point a case is ‘fully out’ (0) of a set. Based on these qualitative anchors, each case is

coded along a range of values from 1 to 0. This procedure challenges the implicit assumption

in many conventional studies that all variation is equally meaningful (Ragin 2000, 163).

Why not use a traditional approach instead? The pragmatic reason is the low number of

cases. Focusing on the Iraq War and a limited number of governments simply provides too

few observations for a proper statistical analysis. Granted, this could be overcome with a

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different design, but there are also substantive reasons for the chosen approach. I am

interested in the extent to which governments decided to partake in the military operation in

Iraq, which requires a qualitative assessment beyond troop numbers or a binary coding of

participation and non-participation. On the explanatory side I expect to see interaction

between conditions – that is, parliamentary war powers are expected to serve as a constraint

only under specific partisan constellations in government. Finally, I am interested in pathways

for particular countries, and less in an ‘average effect’ of the hypothesized conditions on

democratic war participation in Iraq. Hence, I employ the outlined approach for this study.14

Country Selection

A primary criterion for a country’s inclusion is the assumed possibility of military

participation. Thus, irrelevant ‘negative cases’ with regards to the outcome are excluded to

avoid a selection bias (Mahoney and Goertz 2004). Hence, I exclude countries that have no

regular armed forces (such as Iceland), and countries with a population of less than one

million inhabitants, based on their military capabilities.15 I further exclude countries that

retain a legal status of permanent neutrality, as Austria and Switzerland, or states that have

established a traditional policy of neutrality, which is the case for Sweden, Finland, and

Ireland (Bothe 2008, 577). Despite some of these countries’ increased military engagement in

recent decades, I do not consider them potential contributors to ad hoc coalitions that lack

Security Council authorization, such as the war against Iraq. Also, the regional democracies

Israel and Turkey were excluded due to their geographic proximity to Iraq, which complicates

a comparison with countries outside the Middle East.

The theoretical expectations outlined above are based on the premise of mature political

institutions and a democratic political culture. Thus, a further criterion is the democratic

character of a country. Here, I employ the widely-used Polity IV data and include countries

with a score of 8 and above on the combined scale. Table A.2 lists the twenty-six democracies

selected from Europe, Asia-Pacific, and North America. In 2003 the selected countries were

either members of NATO, in the final stages of the accession negotiations, or NATO ‘contact

countries’, as Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The Eastern enlargement countries Poland,

the Czech Republic, and Hungary joined NATO in 1999, while the other seven Central

Eastern European states became NATO members in 2004. Table A.2 further shows the 14 Due to space constraints the respective strengths and weaknesses of QCA vis-à-vis other methods cannot be discussed here. Compare, however, the symposium on QCA provided in the APSA Newsletter Qualitative Methods, 2004 (2) 2. See also Hug (2009) on the issue of QCA and measurement error, a problem on which I am uncertain whether it can be resolved in a satisfactory manner within the boundaries of QCA. 15 This criterion leads to the exclusion of Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Malta.

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respective executive leaders and the last relevant cabinet change due to general elections or a

shift in the governing coalition. It further specifies government type, government parties and

the indicators of effective number of parliamentary parties (ENPP) and effective number of

government parties (ENGP).

Military Participation in the Iraq War

This study is interested in the observed countries’ military participation in the Iraq War. The

qualitative measurement of military participation, however, poses several challenges. The first

concern is the timeframe of analysis. Here, I apply a broad conception of war participation

that includes a larger timeframe than the two-month invasion phase between March and May

2003.16 I argue that countries that provided troops immediately after the invasion should also

be considered military contributors. Yet, it is crucial to make distinctions based on the time of

deployment. Arguably, military deployments that were made during the early phases could be

interpreted as a clear signal of political support (expressed in military terms) to the US-led

war on Iraq. This shifted as subsequent UN resolutions clarified the legal status of the

occupation and called for international support in the reconstruction of Iraq. UN resolution

1483 of 22 May 2003 recognized the status of the United States and the United Kingdom as

de facto occupying powers. But the ‘Multinational Force Iraq’ was not established until UN

resolution 1511 of 16 October 2003 (Fleck 2010). The fuzzy set coding of the outcome takes

into account these distinctions by assigning higher values to earlier deployments.

Equally important than the timing is the kind of military contribution provided. What does

it mean to send an infantry battalion or a military field hospital from the perspective of a

political decision-maker at home? Here, it helps to assess military contributions based on the

level of risk associated with a deployment. Ground forces assigned to combat or patrol

missions face a higher risk of getting wounded or killed than rear support units, like engineers

or medical staff working in field hospitals. Democratic governments regularly emphasize the

nature of their deployments and caveats that apply, referring to non-combat or humanitarian

tasks. In brief, the second criterion asks whether a deployment is made in military or civilian

terms and, if the former is the case, whether combat or patrol tasks are included in a country’s

mandate. Finally, the third criterion I use to evaluate military participation refers to the

personnel involved in a deployment. This is placed in relation to the size of a country’s armed

forces, its economy, and the duration of the deployment. Thus, a small country’s provision of

16 In contrast, the study by Dieterich et al. (2009) focuses on the invasion phase of the Iraq War.

14

an infantry battle group of 500 soldiers is coded higher than a similar deployment by a

country with more resources.

Based on these three criteria I code the twenty-six countries from 1 to 0 on a fuzzy scale,

indicating a range from full membership in the set of countries that participated militarily to

full non-membership. At the high end of the scale are states that participated with combat

forces from the invasion phase onward. These include Australia, the United Kingdom, the

United States, and Poland. The next group contains countries that participated with combat

forces but who deployed their troops after the invasion phase. Here, the time of deployment

justifies qualitative distinctions. Spain, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Lithuania made contributions in

April or May, resulting in a higher coding. The groups of Denmark and Estonia as well as

Italy, the Netherlands, and Romania follow. The next group contains countries that provided

non-combat support such as transport units, engineers, military police, or medical units. This

includes Hungary and the Czech Republic as well as Norway and Slovakia. Based on their

tasks, the contributions of Japan and Portugal also belong in this group, but both countries

provided forces at a very late stage, which justifies a lower coding. The group of Belgium,

France, Germany, and Greece provided no direct military contribution, but offered logistical

help either through opening bases, providing facilities, or granting overflight rights. Finally,

two out of the twenty-six countries studied were not involved in military terms: Canada and

Slovenia.

Table 1 displays each country’s military contribution by type, troop numbers, the

timeframe of deployment, and the fuzzy-set coding for the outcome ‘military participation’.

Troop numbers refer to the maximum personnel deployed at any one point in time. While

these numbers give some indication of the relative size of a country’s deployment, it is

important to note that troop levels fluctuate and that calculations can vary depending on

whether troops based outside of Iraq (e.g., in Kuwait or Saudi-Arabia) are included and

whether non-military staff is counted. This results in sources reporting different numbers for

some countries. Hence, I base the coding primarily on the tasks and the timing, and less on the

respective troop levels. The information displayed was compiled based on information that

was publicly available through governmental reports and secondary sources listed in the

appendix.

15

Table 1 Military Participation in the Iraq War for 26 Democracies

Parliamentary War Powers

This condition is based on the parliamentary peace hypothesis (Dieterich, Hummel, and

Marschall 2009), which posits that parliaments with comprehensive and constitutionally

formalized influence on troop deployment decisions can, under specified circumstances, serve

as an effective check on hawkish executives. I operationalize parliamentary war powers on a

dimension that ranges from mandatory parliamentary approval of all military deployments (ex

ante veto right), to the complete absence of parliamentary involvement in troop deployment

decisions. The central criterion is whether a country has a parliamentary veto right (fs-

PARLi>.50), or whether this is absent (fs-PARLi<.50). In between these poles gradations

exist, from ex ante veto rights ‘with exceptions’ for certain types of operations (either in

specific institutional frameworks or below a certain personnel threshold), to mere ex post

rights of information.

I coded the cases based on the classifications of extant studies (Born and Hänggi 2005;

Dieterich, Hummel, and Marschall 2009) and profited greatly from the new ParlCon dataset

compiled by Wagner, Peters, and Glahn (2010). ParlCon classifies the parliamentary control

level of countries in terms of the presence or absence of an ex ante veto right. In order to

16

transfer the dichotomous data into a fuzzy set, I drew on the country briefs provided in

ParlCon and additional sources (Nolte 2003; Born and Hänggi 2005; Baker and Christopher

2009; Dieterich, Hummel, and Marschall 2010). Table 2 displays the degree of parliamentary

war powers across the twenty-six democracies studied.

Countries with an ex ante veto on all military deployments include Denmark, Estonia,

Germany, Hungary, Japan, Latvia and Lithuania. While the majority of former Communist

countries established strong parliamentary authority during their constitutional foundation

processes, many of the CEE countries later reduced their level of parliamentary control in

order to accommodate the NATO accession process, aiming for a ‘more flexible’ use of their

military. This results in lower, but still substantial, parliamentary war powers for Bulgaria, the

Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia. Italy and the Netherlands are difficult to classify as

the military deployment competences of their governmental branches are rather vague. The

situation in Italy, however, presents a weak form of a parliamentary ex ante veto on troop

deployments. In contrast, the Netherlands has a tradition of parliamentary involvement, but no

formal veto right exists. These ambiguities are captured in the coding of these countries. The

penultimate group contains Belgium, Canada, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, and the

United States. In these countries military deployments are primarily a matter of the executive,

but parliament has to be informed after military operations are under way. Finally, at the low

end of the scale of parliamentary involvement are countries with an executive prerogative

over matters of foreign policy, as is traditionally the case in Great Britain and France, but also

in Australia, Greece, New Zealand, and Spain.

Table 2 Parliamentary War Powers and Coding Criteria

17

Executive Ideology

This condition refers to the ideological position of a country’s government on a left-right

scale in political space. To estimate government ideology I draw on the extensive research of

the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) (Budge et al. 2001; Klingemann et al. 2006). The

CMP data is based on a qualitative coding of statements in party election programs along

fifty-six policy categories and seven policy domains that range from domestic issues to

external relations. Thirteen of the policy categories are traditionally associated with positions

emphasized by the ‘left’, while another thirteen indicate policy positions commonly

emphasized by the ‘right’. These categories were grouped a priori on theoretical grounds and

confirmed via factor analysis (Laver and Budge 1992).

The CMP left-right values result from subtracting the sum of left statements from the sum

of right statements for each party and each election. For the estimate of government ideology

I follow the approach suggested by Laver and Garry (2000) and calculate the ‘substantive’

policy position for each party. This technique is a slight adaptation of the original CMP

calculation. In essence, it discounts the salience a party places on a category in favor of its

‘pure’ policy position, via dividing the CMP left-right values by the total percentage of left-

right references (cf. Gabel and Huber 2000). Hence, the political ideology of party P, in terms

of its left-right position, is defined as:

PLR = (Pright – Pleft) / (Pright + Pleft)

While this calculation is straightforward for single-party governments, the majority of

parliamentary democracies typically feature coalition government (Müller and Strøm 2000).

For these governments, I calculate a weighted score where each coalition party’s left-right

value is set in relation to its parliamentary seat shares and the overall number of seats of the

governing coalition. Thus, a government’s ideological position on a left-right scale (GLR) is

specified as:

GLR = [(GPLRa * Seatsa) + . . . (GPLRn * Seatsn)] / Government Seats

Parliament Ideology

This condition refers to the ideological composition of parliament. As for government

ideology, the condition draws on the CMP data. I calculate parliament ideology based on the

substantive left-right positions (Laver and Garry 2000) for each party represented in

parliament, weighted against its respective seat shares. In effect, the result indicates

18

parliament’s ideological ‘center of gravity’ (cf. Cusack 1999). Parliament’s ideological

position on a left-right scale (ParlLR), is defined as:

ParlLR = [(PPLRa * Seatsa) + ... (PPLRn * Seatsn)]/ Parliament Seats

Where necessary, the electoral data was complemented with additional sources (Gallagher

and Mitchell 2009; Nohlen and Stöver 2010). Table A.1 displays the raw values and

calibrated fuzzy values for all conditions.

Analytical Results

The following sections present the fuzzy-set analyses for the outcomes ‘military participation’

and ‘military non-participation’ in the Iraq War.17 Before proceeding with the analysis of

sufficient conditions, I test for necessary conditions. These are conditions that must be present

for the outcome to occur, but their presence does not ensure that the outcome will occur on

every occasion. In contrast, the presence of a sufficient condition always leads to the

outcome, but the outcome can also occur in its absence. To give an example, proponents of

the democratic peace consider a pair of democratic states a sufficient condition for peaceful

interstate relations between these countries. However, ‘mutual democracy’ is not a necessary

condition for peace, as the existence of peaceful non-democratic dyads demonstrates. In

fuzzy-set analysis a potential necessary condition is indicated by a subset relation between

instances of the outcome and the respective condition (Ragin 2009, 109–10). Here, the

analysis of the three explanatory conditions against the outcome and its negation reveals no

indication of a necessary condition. The consistency values do not exceed .76, which is

substantially below the threshold of .90 as an established indicator of a potential necessary

condition (Schneider and Wagemann 2007, 213).

Military Participation in the Iraq War

Under which conditions did governments participate in the Iraq War? Are there distinct

patterns of war participation for the democracies under study? The fsQCA procedure applied

here contains several steps, which are carried out with the QCA software.18 During the first

step, a truth table is constructed on the basis of the fuzzy-set membership scores for each

condition and the outcome. This procedure helps identify patterns in the empirical data. The

fuzzy-set truth table represents a multidimensional vector space with 2k corners; where k

17 Both the outcome and non-outcome have to be analyzed in separate steps, since the results are not necessarily symmetrical. 18 Version 2.0 of fsQCA was used. The software is available at: www.u.arizona.edu/~cragin [12 January 2011]

19

relates to the number of conditions and each corner of the resulting property space signifies a

theoretical ideal type defined by a distinct combination of conditions. Based on the fuzzy-set

membership scores, each case can then be assigned to a single corner of the property space

(Ragin 2008, 124–35).19

Table 3 displays the truth table for the outcome military participation and the three

conditions parliamentary war powers (W), right executive (E), and right parliament (P).

Hence, the truth table contains 23 (W, E, P) = 8 rows. Each country’s membership in the respective

ideal types, or corners of the vector space, is given in brackets. Australia, for instance, holds a

membership of .89 in the conjunction given in the first row, indicating the absence of

parliamentary war powers, combined with the presence of a right executive and a right

parliament. The consistency column indicates the extent to which a combination of conditions

is a subset of the outcome and can thus be considered an (almost) sufficient condition for

military participation. The consistency scores help to determine a cut-off point to separate

cases with a consistently positive outcome (1) from those with a negative outcome (0). Since

there is a substantial drop in consistency after the third row, I decide for a high consistency

threshold of .83. Thus, all configurations below this threshold are excluded from the ensuing

minimization procedure. This practice illustrates the trade-off between consistency and

coverage. If a lower consistency threshold is set, more cases are included in the minimization

algorithm, but the less consistent the results become. Hence, the combination of consistency

and coverage provides some indication of the quality of an fsQCA result. In brief, while

consistency indicates how well a solution term fits the cases, coverage specifies how much

the solution term actually explains (Schneider and Wagemann 2007, 93).

19 This holds for cases that do not have a value of .50 on any of the conditions Ragin (2008, 31).

20

Table 3 Truth Table for Outcome Military Participation

Next, the truth table is reduced to identify combinations of conditions that are sufficient for

the outcome. Since the observed cases cover all corners of the typological space, there are no

‘logical remainders’ (Rihoux and Ragin 2009). Thus, I will focus on the ‘complex solution’

term fsQCA produces.20 This procedure results in a solution with two paths toward the

outcome military participation. In fuzzy-set notation this is expressed as:

(E*P) + (W*e*p) → O

In Boolean notation uppercase letters indicate the presence of a condition while lowercase

letters indicate its absence. Contrary to common usage, the sign ‘*’ refers to a logical ‘AND’,

whereas a ‘+’ signals a logical ‘OR’. Therefore, alternate paths are described by this solution

term. The first path consists of the combination of a right executive (E) and a right parliament

(P), while the second path contains parliamentary war powers (W) and the absence of both a

right executive (e) and a right parliament (p).21 In combination, the paths that comprise this

solution term have a coverage value of .74 and a consistency value of .82.

How can these paths towards military participation be interpreted against the backdrop of

the theoretical expectations lined out above? The first path broadly supports the partisan

hypothesis that expects states to differ in their use of military force based on the partisan

composition of government. For the observed cases, the combination of a right executive and 20 FSQCA produces complex, parsimonious, and intermediate solution terms. The primary difference concerns the way logical remainders are treated, that is, whether assumptions are made regarding non-existent, but theoretically plausible, configurations. 21 Based on underlying concepts and the calibration criteria the ‘absence of a right executive’ is equivalent to a ‘left executive’. For the remainder of this section I will use the shorter term.

21

a right parliament can be considered an almost sufficient condition for military participation.

It is important to note that under this partisan configuration it does not matter whether the

legislature holds a veto right over military deployments, since parliament is likely to carry

executive initiatives to use military force. This supports my argument regarding the

interaction between institutions and partisanship. In this sense the first path presents a

qualification of the parliamentary peace argument discussed in the literature. Empirically, this

concerns the cases of Denmark, Italy, and Estonia – countries that deployed military force to

Iraq while having parliamentary war powers, right executives and right parliaments. The

second path, however, provides more of a puzzle. The fact that countries with parliamentary

war powers, a left executive, and a left parliament participated militarily runs counter to

theoretical expectations. Therefore, a closer examination of the cases that form this path is

necessary. The columns on the left in Table A.3 display each country’s fuzzy-set membership

scores for the separate paths in relation to the outcome military participation.

Table A.3 indicates how well each path describes the countries under study. Set

membership >.50 is stated in bold. It is apparent that path 1 (E*P) carries much more

‘empirical weight’ as it accounts for 40% unique coverage, whereas path 2 (W*e*p) has a

unique coverage of 15%. An examination of the countries reveals that the second path is

followed by four Central Eastern European states: the Baltic republics Latvia and Lithuania,

and the latest EU enlargement countries Bulgaria and Romania. Note that the membership

values are relatively low (.56 and .65), with the exception of Romania. In other words, this

path accounts for few of the observed countries, and those countries that hold membership are

not well captured by this path – indicated by their low fuzzy-set scores for the conjunction

W*e*p.

An effective way of demonstrating the results of fsQCA and the underlying empirical

patterns is an XY-plot (Schneider and Grofman 2006). Figure 1 shows the position of each

country, tracing membership in the solution term (x-axis) against membership in the outcome

military participation (y-axis). The diagonal line, which should not be confused with a

regression line, demarcates points that hold equal membership in both sets. More importantly,

it separates cases with a higher value in the outcome than in the solution (Xi<Yi), from those

where membership in the solution exceeds that of the outcome (Xi>Yi). While the former can

indicate the presence of a sufficient condition, the latter can signal a necessary condition.

In set-theoretic terms, it is crucial to distinguish whether a case holds membership in a set

(fs-xi>.50) or whether it is situated outside a set (fs-xi<.50). This lets us divide the XY-plot

into six distinct zones, which differ in their theoretical relevance, depending on the analytical

22

aim (Schneider and Rohlfing 2009, 37). Cases in the lower left corner hold neither a

membership value above .50 in the outcome nor in the solution. These cases can therefore be

considered substantially irrelevant for the analysis. In contrast, cases in the upper right corner

show both the outcome and the solution. The cases in zone 6 are cases for which the solution

proves sufficient for the outcome. Four countries are placed in zone 1 below the diagonal line,

indicating a nearly sufficient condition. Cases in the upper left corner also show the outcome,

brought about by alternative conditions as these countries hold a low membership in the

solution term. Finally, countries in the lower right corner can be considered ‘deviant cases’ as

they hold membership in the solution term but do not display the outcome as expected.

Figure 1 XY-Plot of Solution Term and Military Participation

Figure 1 demonstrates that the complex solution term can be considered an (almost) sufficient

condition for the outcome military participation. Of the twenty-six countries under study,

thirteen hold membership in the solution term and only two of these, Slovakia and Slovenia,

do not also display the outcome (zone 2). Seven countries can be considered ‘typical cases’

for the solution term (zone 6), whereas four countries are positioned slightly below the

diagonal and thus reduce the consistency of the result (zone 1). Poland and Spain are

23

countries that show the outcome, but are not explained by the solution term (zone 5). While

this decreases coverage, it does not affect the consistency of the theoretical argument.

Military Non-Participation in the Iraq War

Under which conditions did governments abstain from military participation? How do country

patterns of non-participation differ from those that participated in the war? To address these

questions I apply the procedure outlined above to the outcome military non-participation. As

for the preceding analysis, in the first step the truth table for military non-participation is

constructed, which contains 23 (W, E, P) = 8 rows. Each country’s membership score in the

configurations of conditions is identical to the values reported in Table 3. However, since the

analysis is now directed towards the non-outcome, the consistency scores inevitably differ.

Table 4 displays the truth table for the outcome military non-participation and the conditions

parliamentary war powers (W), right executive (E), and right parliament (P). The table shows

that, unlike for the previous analysis, here only two configurations of conditions prove

sufficiently consistent and there is a substantial drop in consistency (9%) between the second

and third row of configurations. The third row has a consistency score of .72, due to the fact

that both the Czech Republic and Hungary participated in the Iraq War, albeit to a limited

extent with a restriction to non-combat tasks. However, their configuration is shared with the

non-participating country Germany and hence this row does not yield a consistent result.

Thus, I set the consistency threshold at .81 to proceed with the minimization algorithm based

on first two rows, which contain Greece, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, France, Norway,

and Japan.

24

Table 4 Truth Table for Outcome Military Non-Participation

In a second step, the fsQCA procedure minimizes the truth table to identify combinations

of sufficient conditions for the outcome military non-participation. Again, since there are no

logical remainders, the analysis can be restricted to the complex solution term. The procedure

identifies a solution term with two distinct paths toward the outcome. In fuzzy-set notation

this can be expressed as:

(w*e*p) + (W*E*p) → o

How to interpret this solution term for military non-participation? In brief, both of the paths

identified are in line with the theoretical expectations about the interaction between

institutional rules and partisanship outlined above. Path 1 reflects the partisan politics

argument. It indicates that countries with a combination of a left executive (e), a left

parliament (p) and the absence of parliamentary war powers (w) did not participate militarily

in the Iraq War. This pattern has a solid consistency of 85.7% and considerable unique

coverage of 38.3%. But how to interpret the fact that absent parliamentary war powers are

part of a conjunction towards non-participation? This might appear counterintuitive, but it

does not directly affect the parliamentary peace hypothesis, since the argument merely posits

that the presence of parliamentary war powers, under the premise of public war aversion, is a

sufficient condition for non-participation. Therefore, as long as the presence of parliamentary

war powers coincides with military non-contribution the hypothesis is supported.

Against this backdrop, path 2 is of particular theoretical interest. It combines parliamentary

war powers (W) with a right executive (E) and a left parliament (p). This configuration

25

exemplifies the purported interaction between institutions and partisan politics. The

preferences of a right-leaning executive are countered by an opposing parliament that holds a

veto right on military deployment decisions. Hence, the combination of parliamentary war

powers with a right executive and a left parliament is a sufficient condition for military non-

participation. This pattern, however, can be found empirically only for Japan, which does not

make it less valid, but more difficult to generalize the implications for the countries under

study. Japan had parliamentary war powers combined with a left parliament – a configuration

that was sufficient to lead the country to pursue a policy of military non-participation despite

the presence of a right executive. The columns on the right hand side of Table A.3 display the

membership scores for each country in the alternate paths towards military non-participation.

In order to demonstrate the fit of the solution term, a XY-plot is constructed. Figure 2

shows the position of each country, tracing membership in the solution term against

membership in the outcome military non-participation. The diagonal line separates cases with

a higher value in the outcome than in the solution term (above the diagonal line) from those

where membership in the solution term exceeds the score for the outcome (below the line).

The horizontal and vertical lines help to distinguish cases by their theoretical relevance. Cases

in the lower left corner hold neither a membership value above .50 in the outcome nor in the

solution term. Hence, these cases can be considered substantially irrelevant. In contrast, cases

in the upper right corner, particularly those above the diagonal line, are cases for which the

solution proves a sufficient condition for the outcome. Cases in the upper left corner also

show the outcome, but this is brought about by other factors as these countries hold a low

membership in the solution term (below .50). Finally, there are no cases in the lower right

corner, since all countries that hold membership in the solution term also display the outcome.

The identified patterns differ from the previous analysis of military participation. While there

are no deviant cases (zone 2), there are a number of countries that show the outcome, but are

not captured by the solution term (zone 5). On the other hand, seven countries fall within the

scope of ‘typical cases’ and are fully captured by the solution term (zone 1+6).22

22 I consider New Zealand and Greece typical cases, since both countries show almost full membership in the solution term and the outcome.

26

Figure 2 XY-Plot of Solution Term and Military Non-Participation

Conclusion

The political controversy over Iraq tore a chasm between democracies and many countries’

citizens and their representatives. In this regard, the Iraq War presents a critical case for the

study of democracies’ domestic sources of foreign policy to account for variance in countries’

external conflict behavior. Recent studies have identified institutional differences between

democracies that have been overlooked by the extant literature on the democratic peace. In

particular, parliamentary war powers provide an essential differentiation of democratic

security policy. The concept is analytically closer and thus more relevant to decisions on the

use of force than suggested alternatives. So far, however, studies have neglected the

interaction between institutions and partisanship. In this paper I suggested a comparative

approach that combines the analysis of parliamentary war powers and partisanship to derive

theoretical expectations for democracies’ behavior in specific conflicts. Institutional

constraints presume actors that fulfill their role as veto players to the executive. This brings in

partisanship as an indicator of actors’ revealed preferences. Whereas partisan politics and its

influence on policy output have resulted in a vast literature in comparative politics, few

studies have investigated this nexus from the perspective of foreign and security policy. Yet,

27

scholars increasingly acknowledge that foreign policy issues can be equally contested among

political actors as domestic politics and that domestic ideological dispositions translate to the

foreign policy realm.

This paper has analyzed patterns of military participation across twenty-six democracies.

The fsQCA results indicate that a combined framework of institutions and partisanship is

better suited to explain the observed outcomes than approaches that focus on individual

factors or competing explanations. Regarding the interaction between parliamentary war

powers and partisanship it has been shown, for instance, that a political configuration

comprised of a right parliament and a right executive can override institutional veto rights on

the use of military force, a constellation that was found in Denmark, Estonia, Italy and

Slovakia.23 This finding adds to existing studies in two ways. First, it provides scope

conditions that specify the applicability of the ‘parliamentary peace’ hypothesis. Rather than

expecting a uniform effect of institutional veto rights in military deployment policy, I argue

that it is critical to examine partisanship among the executive and legislative branches in

addition to institutional rules. Second, the presented framework helps to explain deviant cases

of prior studies. For example, Dieterich et al. (2009) identified Denmark and Lithuania as

deviant cases in their study of the EU-25. This paper has shown that the case of Denmark can

be explained by taking into account the partisan configuration of political actors. Lithuania,

on the other hand, points to difficulties in assessing partisanship in Central and Eastern

Europe (CEE). The analysis indicates that partisan patterns seem less reliable for the CEE

countries, an observation that previous studies have made, but which was based on different

coding schemes (Schuster and Maier 2006). Further research could investigate, for instance,

whether left-right dimensions capture extant cleavage structures in CEE countries or whether

an alternative conception could be more useful for comparative purposes. The framework for

this study focuses on domestic sources of foreign policy. While the results indicate that the

analysis of domestic institutions and partisanship provides important clues about countries

behavior in terms of war participation, additional research could include factors that relate to

countries’ external environment. It could be argued, for instance, that among CEE countries

factors such as threat perception and alliance dependence outweighed domestic considerations

in a number of cases. A refined framework could include these factors to further investigate

the interaction between the domestic and the international level.

23 Denmark, Estonia and Italy provided ground forces. Slovakia restricted its military contribution to mine clearance tasks (see Table 1).

28

Appendix

Table A.1 Raw Data, Fuzzy Values, and Coding Criteria

29

Table A.2 Heads of Government, Parties, and Government Types

30

Table A.3 Country Membership in Sufficient Paths

31

Additional Sources for Military Participation Data

Balogová, Beata (2004) ‘Parliament Refuses to Withdraw Slovak Troops from Iraq’, The Slovak Spectator, 29 September, available at http://spectator.sme.sk/articles/view/17411/10/ (15 December 2010).

BBC News (2004) ‘Spain PM Orders Iraq Troops Home’, 18 April, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/3637523.stm (8 December, 2010).

BBC News (2005) ‘Bulgaria to Pull Iraq Troops Out’, 5 May, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4516265.stm (10 January, 2011).

BBC News (2008) ‘Japan Ends Five-Year Iraq Mission’, 18 December, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7789580.stm (10 January, 2011).

Blanchard, Christopher M. and Catherine M. Dale (2007) ‘Iraq: Foreign Contributions to Stabilization and Reconstruction’, Congressional Research Service (RL32105, 26 December).

Cordesman, Anthony H. (2003) The Iraq War. Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons, Washington: CSIS.

Davids, W.J.M, den Boer, M.G.W. and C. Fasseur (2010) Rapport, Amsterdam: Boom. Dempsey, Judy (2004) ‘Hungary to Withdraw Its 300 Troops From Iraq’, The New York Times (3

November). Eastley, Tony (2009) ‘Date Set for Australian Troop Withdrawal from Iraq’, 12 May, available at

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2567621.htm (8 December, 2010). Estonian Ministry of Defence (2007) ‘International Operations: Iraq’, available at

http://operatsioonid.kmin.ee/ (2 December 2010). Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2003)‘Estonian Government Discussed War in Iraq’, 20 March,

available at http://www.vm.ee/?q=en/node/351 (7 December, 2010). Haerens Operative Kommando (2003) ‘Danske soldater skal sikre freden i Irak’, 22 May, available at

http://www.hok.dk/more.php?id=A56_0_1_0_M (15 January 2011). Heimann, Doris and Regine Palm (2003) ‘Regierungskrise schickt Zloty auf Talfahrt’, Handelsblatt,

11 March, available at http://www.handelsblatt.com/regierungskrise-schickt-zloty-auf-talfahrt/2232090.html (8 December, 2010).

Hildreth, Steven A., Jeremy M. Sharp, Melanie Caesar, Adam Frost and Helene Machart (2003) ‘Iraq: International Attitudes to Operation Iraqi Freedom and Reconstruction’, Congressional Research Service (RL31843, 18 December).

Joint Chiefs of Staff (2003) ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) - History Brief’ United States Central Command 14 May, http://www.dod.gov/pubs/foi/ojcs/09F_1449_OperationIraqiFreedom _OIF_HistoryBrief.pdf (20 January, 2011).

Ministerio de Defensa de España (2008) ‘Libertad Iraquí’, available at http://www.mde.es/en/areasTematicas/misiones/historico/mis (8 December, 2010).

Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic (2003) ‘7th Field Hospital on Iraqi Zone Stabilization Force Operation, available at http://www.army.cz/scripts/detail.php?id=6386 (10 January, 2011).

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