Time to fight - Government type and conflict initiation in parliamentary systems

Democratic peace arguments make compelling claims about the importance of r egime type for explaining conflict but do not explain the variation in conf lict propensity among states that share a common regime type. The authors d evelop a veto-player approach to capture the effects of executive constrain t and argue that in parliamentary democracies, cabinet structure and allies influence states' conflict behavior. A hazard analysis is used to examine the time before a government's first initiation of force in 569 cabinets in 18 countries from the end of World War I to 1990 (N= 25,238 cabinet months ). Results show that minority governments have a smaller hazard for initiat ing a conflict than either coalition or majority cabinets. However, the lik elihood of conflict initiation for coalition and majority cabinets is the s ame. States with allies are less likely to initiate force. Across states of relatively uniform political culture, institutional measures of constraint effectively predict variation in conflict behavior.