Replication data for: Domestic Strife and the Initiation of Violence at Home and Abroad

The idea of diversionary war, i.e., that leaders may seek to alleviate strife at home by initiating conflict abroad, is an intuitively appealing explanation in many cases. But the extensive empirical literature on the topic has generated mostly negative or mixed support for the diversionary war argument. We argue that the results have been unsupportive primarily because the literature has neglected to distinguish among different forms of domestic strife. Not all conflict at home generates conflict abroad. Further, we argue, conflict at home can motivate domestic repression as well as foreign aggression: diversionary war must be seen as a special case of a larger theory of violence. We accordingly specify the particular form of domestic strife, the contestation of political institutions, most likely to spur leaders to violence. We then statistically examine the effects of contested institutions on the use of violence at home and abroad, using panel data spanning 110 countries and 157 years. Our tests, which are cast at the level of individual states, are based on a fixed-effects duration dependent logit model. Our analysis controls for regime type and regime change, among other factors. The evidence strongly supports our argument. On the basis of this evidence, we conclude that much of the effects of regime type and regime change on the use of force is actually due to contested institutions.