A growing literature in international relations concludes that democratic states pursue distinctive foreign policies. Specifically, democracies do not engage each other in war and only rarely engage each other in serious disputes short of war. Scholars have offered three basic explanations to...

This article examines the effects of party politics and presidential election cycles on U.S. recourse to force abroad. I analyze a game-theoretic model to generate predictions about these effects. In the unique time-consistent equilibrium outcome of the one-shot game, policy varies across...