Democracy, as demonstrated by the democratic peace, can be a pacifying influence in the world. True, democracies are prepared to fight against nondemocratic regimes, but they rarely, if ever, fight against each other. This is not because of some great democratic virtue so much as the equilibrium strategic behavior of survival-oriented political leaders who must answer to a large winning coalition. Still, it is encouraging to realize that the world would probably be a more pacific place if it were more universally democratic. Indeed, the spread of democracy through internal national choices and revolutions, especially since the late 1980s, has been accompanied by a great diminution in the incidence of interstate wars. As encouraging as the democratic peace is, it also carries within its logic reason to be skeptical that democratization is likely to be promoted by democratic governments.

Although the leaders of states that intervene in other states frequently assert that the democratization of the target states is one of their main goals, we have seen lots of evidence suggesting that this goal is rarely achieved. More often than not, the leaders of intervening states are faced with a choice between trying to satisfy the policy interests of their own constituents to remain in office and promoting the democratic aspirations of the citizens of targeted states. Because the citizens in a transformed democratic target state are likely to have different policy priorities than those of the intervener’s own winning coalition back home, the intervening state will tend to pass up the opportunity to establish a liberal democracy in favor of establishing an autocratic or rigged-election polity that it expects will be more willing to implement the policies it desires. As a result, intervention does little to promote democracy; instead, it often leads to its erosion and the substitution of largely symbolic reforms for the real thing.

This outcome is not particularly surprising in the case of autocratic interveners, but in the case of democratic interveners, many are likely to find it disappointing. Although it is tempting to blame this outcome on a failure of the quality of leadership that exists in the intervening democratic countries, selectorate theory suggests that it is more indicative of the constraint of democratic institutions themselves and the nature of democratic representation. Democratic leaders are constitutionally charged with being the agents of their domestic constituencies and their voters’ policy priorities are rarely identical with those of the citizens of target states. The fault, if there is one, lies less in the motives of the democratic executive than in the policy priorities of democratic voters and the incentives created by democratic institutions.