Replication Data for: Hawks and Doves Reconsidered: Parties, Leaders, and Foreign Policy in Democracies

What are the domestic determinants of international conflict? A number of political scientists have proposed that leaders in democracies initiate interstate disputes or use force abroad to divert the electorate's attention away from a flagging economy. Others have examined the role of institutions in constraining political leaders. Some scholars have integrated measurements of partisanship into their theoretical explanations, but extant scholarship has not effectively introduced the foreign policy position of the executive into the equation. Here I employ elements of salience theory to build an issue emphasis approach to foreign policy. I hypothesize that parties and candidates in democracies credibly signal their foreign policy position prior to their election and that this foreign policy position has an effect on state behavior in the international arena. The approach I take here is an important one because it accurately models elite preferences. From this viewpoint, we can connect competing foreign policy platforms to conflict behavior in a new way. I estimate involvement in militarized interstate disputes by democracies from 1951-2001 in the empirical test, and the results provide support for the hypothesis.