Fledgling regimes: Is the case of inter‐war Germany generalizable?

This paper formulates a three‐phase model of regime change, domestic conflict, and interstate conflict inspired by the case of Germany between the First and Second World Wars. In the first phase of the German case, democratization during the Weimar regime was followed by chronic political instability and conflict. During the second phase, a weak Weimar regime set the stage for the emergence of the National Socialists and the erosion, and subsequent elimination, of democracy under the dictatorship of Adolph Hitler. In the third phase, automatization of the German state was followed by an increasingly aggressive foreign policy during the late 1930s ‐ the prelude to the Second World War. I examine whether this familiar, if spectacular, example of democratization, instability, democratic erosion, and aggressive foreign policy is generalizable across a larger spatial and temporal domain. Testing hypotheses derived from the model's three phases, I draw the following primary conclusions. First, new democracies are subject to significant levels of mild and severe forms of domestic conflict, although the findings suggest that new autocratic states are also subject to more severe domestic conflict for a longer duration than conflict experienced by new democracies. The empirical results for the second phase of the model indicate that polities afflicted with high levels of domestic conflict are more likely to become more autocratic. Lastly, I find support for the model's third hypothesis that new autocracies are more likely to originate conflict with other states, and this relationship is fairly strong across pre‐and post‐WWII samples. Interestingly, new democracies are found to be more likely to initiate disputes in the pre‐WWII sample, but not in the post‐WWII sample.