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A NOTE ON CURVILINEARITY , DEMOCRACY , AND VICTORY

In their recent letter to the editor of International Security, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam seek to rebut some of the criticisms I made of their work on democracy and victory in an article that appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of the journal. 1 One of their rebuttals concerns the question of whether the relationship between regime type and war outcomes for war initiators is curvilinear. This note provides more detail on this issue than was possible in my published response to their letter. Reiter and Stam divide political regimes into three categories—democracies, mixed regimes (moderately repressive non-democracies), and autocracies (highly repressive non-democracies)—and argue that democratic initiators are most likely to win, followed by autocracies, with mixed regimes being the least likely to achieve victory. 3 Democracies are considered to be states that receive a score of 7 or above on the Polity index, which ranges from-10 to +10. Mixed regimes score between-6 and +6, and dictatorships score-7 or below. The examples of autocratic military ineffectiveness that Reiter and Stam give throughout Democracies at War, however, convey the impression that autocracies—such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Stalinist Russia, and Hafez al-Assad's Syria—rather than mixed regimes are the least capable type of authoritarian state.