Fateful Transitions. Daniel M. Kliman
central to authoritarian government obscure a state’s intentions. With foreign policy an exclusive domain, the details of internal discussions remain closely held. Add to this sweeping state secrecy laws, and the potential for information leaks is low. Straitjacketed media have little capacity to report on policy deliberations within an autocracy, and because of state controls, outsiders largely discount whatever information the media do convey. Centralized authority and nontransparency thus generate considerable uncertainty about a state’s ambitions.
The institutions associated with autocratic government also deprive outsiders of opportunities to shape strategic behavior. Centralized authority is inimical to access. Foreign policy decisions at most involve a handful of domestic actors. Business and civil society groups that might become points of access in a democracy are relegated to the sidelines. The concentration of power that underpins autocracy also decreases the probability of internal divisions that outsiders can exploit.
Nontransparency further restricts opportunities for access. Pervasive secrecy and the consequent lack of a free press prevent outsiders from understanding the landscape of power within an autocracy. It is difficult to determine who to cultivate, who to lobby, and who to manipulate. And obtaining such information would prove of little value because nontransparency applies to how citizens of an autocracy relate to foreigners. A regime that prizes secrecy will regulate interactions with outsiders, particularly on sensitive issues like foreign policy. There are inherent limits to engaging domestic actors within an authoritarian state.
Autocracy exacerbates the concerns accompanying a powerful state’s emergence. The problem created by a lack of transparency is less the possibility of a surprise attack and more the uncertainty that overhangs a rising autocracy’s ambitions. Outsiders confront an unanswerable question: will the ascendant state be content to peacefully accumulate influence or will it use force to rewrite international rules of the road? The new power’s military capabilities will inevitably loom large as a key indicator of intentions when external observers lack alternative sources of information. Against a backdrop of uncertainty, a rising power’s military buildup will trigger growing mistrust. So will the dearth of access opportunities. When outsiders lack the ability to shape strategic behavior, they become highly vulnerable to the potential downside of another power’s rise. Table 3 encapsulates how authoritarian rule amplifies mistrust of an ascendant state.
Implications for Democratic Leaders
The regime type of a rising state sets the broad boundaries for democratic leaders navigating a power transition. Democracy in the ascendant nation reduces risk and bolsters trust by clarifying intentions and opening up opportunities to shape strategic behavior. This removes the need for outsiders to hedge: democratic leaders can forgo enhanced military capabilities and strengthened alliances and pursue a course of accommodation.
Table 3: Autocracy and Power Transitions
| Institutions | Implications |
| Centralized authority | Unclear intentions |
| Nontransparency | Few access opportunities |
Although integration offers the most favorable tradeoff between resources and outcomes, this strategy can only succeed over a long time horizon. To the extent that international institutions can impose constraints on behavior, these constraints do not emerge overnight. Rather, they strengthen over time as a rising state becomes increasingly invested in a growing array of bilateral agreements and multilateral regimes.29 Likewise, international institutions hold the potential to reshape a rising state’s interests only after an extended period of participation.
To ensure the time needed for integration to succeed, democratic leaders will tend to favor a course of appeasement at the onset of another democracy’s rise. Appeasement removes points of conflict that could become future impediments to embedding a democracy in international institutions as its rise accelerates. The stability cemented by appeasement creates conditions conducive to long-term integration. In this sense, appeasement is a bridge to the strategy democratic leaders inherently prefer when confronting a new power’s rise.
By contrast, at the start of an autocracy’s ascendance, a democracy will likely favor a different, less accommodating approach. A rising autocracy’s opaque intentions and lack of access opportunities generate risk and foster mistrust. Democratic leaders will shy away from appeasement, which offers insufficient protection against the possibility that an autocracy will grow into a powerful adversary. Containment will, at least initially, appear to carry an excessive price tag. Democratic leaders will therefore favor a two-pronged approach. They will try to integrate the rising autocracy in the hope that international institutions will constrain its behavior and ultimately transform its interests. At the same time, they will develop military capabilities and alliances to hedge against the uncertainty accompanying the autocracy’s emergence on the world stage.
This dual strategy is inherently fragile. It will endure so long as the rising autocracy’s behavior demonstrates restraint—a sign to democratic leaders that the combination of integration and hedging remains sufficient. However, if over time the rising autocracy engages in diplomatic or military brinksmanship, democratic leaders will increasingly question the viability of integration. Lacking alternative sources of information that might offer a more nuanced view of the rising autocracy’s behavior, they will have little recourse but to treat diplomatic and military brinksmanship as a decisive indicator of antagonism. The apparent failure of integration coupled with perceived evidence of the other state’s hostility will motivate a shift to containment. Figure 1 visualizes how democratic leaders select strategies during power shifts.
Figure 1. Democratic strategy during fateful transitions.
The decision-making process illustrated in Figure 1 revolves around the clarity of a rising state’s intentions and the availability of access opportunities. Democratic leaders make choices based on these byproducts of regime type, not on their perceptions of a new power’s form of government.30 As they navigate power transitions, democratic leaders may never refer to the rising state’s regime type as a driver of strategy, and they may even dismiss common values as a foundation of foreign policy. Yet the rising power’s domestic institutions still frame leaders’ choices, because they are responding to whether they possess information about the other state’s ambitions and whether they can locate opportunities to influence that state’s strategic behavior from within.
Defining Regime Type
Regime type will reappear in subsequent chapters as a key factor that shapes power transitions. It is therefore important to define regime type in a way that is historically consistent and relevant to the book’s main argument. One potential measure of regime type is Polity IV, a quantitative dataset commonly used in scholarship on the democratic peace. This dataset aggregates indicators of executive recruitment, executive independence, and political competition into a single numerical score. The positive end of the polity scale (+10) denotes a strongly democratic regime, while the negative end (–10) indicates a strongly autocratic regime. Although polity scores at either extreme accurately capture regime type, the middle of the scale offers a more “muddled” picture of a state’s domestic institutions.31 Polity IV data therefore serves as a first cut when assessing the regime type of an ascendant state. To ensure accuracy—and more closely link measurements of democracy and autocracy to the book’s argument—the diffusion of political authority and domestic transparency provide a second set of criteria for defining the regime type of the rising power.
The World Bank Database of Political Institutions contains a robust methodology for measuring centralization of power within a regime. This database calculates the number of checks and balances by counting domestic