To Agree or Not to Agree: Hawks, Doves, and Regime Type in International Rivalry and Rapprochement
2025-10-28
Existing scholarship emphasizes hawks’ advantages in making peace, but it is squarely focused on electorally accountable leaders, even though most international rivalries feature at least one leader who faces no meaningful electoral check. I argue that electoral accountability moderates the relationship between foreign policy preferences and rapprochement. In low electoral accountability autocracies where citizens struggle to punish leaders, the credibility problem that doves face in selling peace at home becomes less important than their motivation to cooperate internationally. As a result, doves, not hawks, should be more successful peacemakers in autocracies. I test the theory by analyzing two prominent cases of rapprochement: the end of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s; and the end of the Egypt-Israel rivalry in the late 1970s under Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.