FLEDGLING REGIMES - IS THE CASE OF INTERWAR GERMANY GENERALIZABLE

This paper formulates a three-phase model of regime change, domestic c onflict, and interstate conflict inspired by the case of Germany betwe en the First and Second World Wars. In the first phase of the German c ase, democratization during the Weimar regime was followed by chronic political instability and conflict. During the second phase, a weak We imar regime set the stage for the emergence of the National Socialists and the erosion, and subsequent elimination, of democracy under the d ictatorship of Adolph Hitler. In the third phase, autocratization of t he German state was followed by an increasingly aggressive foreign pol icy during the late 1930s - the prelude to the Second World War. I exa mine whether this familiar, if spectacular, example of democratization , instability, democratic erosion, and aggressive foreign policy is ge neralizable across a larger spatial and temporal domain. Testing hypot heses derived from the model's three phases, I draw the following prim ary conclusions. First, new democracies are subject to significant lev els of mild and severe forms of domestic conflict, although the findin gs suggest that new autocratic states are also subject to more severe domestic conflict for a longer duration than conflict experienced by n ew democracies. The empirical results for the second phase of the mode l indicate that polities afflicted with high levels of domestic confli ct are more likely to become more autocratic. Lastly, I find support f or the model's third hypothesis that new autocracies are more likely t o originate conflict with other states, and this relationship is fairl y strong across pre- and post-WWII samples. Interestingly, new democra cies are found to be more likely to initiate disputes in the pre-WWII sample, but not in the post-WWII sample.