Leader Change Ends Wars More Often in Autocracies Than Democracies

Why This Question Matters

Alejandro Quiroz Flores asks whether leadership transitions themselves help end interstate wars — and whether the answer depends on regime type. Many studies treat leader change as an exogenous trigger for war termination, but Flores tests that assumption directly and shows that the causal link between leader transitions and the end of war varies sharply across political systems.

How Exogeneity Is Tested

The paper uses a bivariate discrete-time survival framework to jointly model (1) the timing of leader change and (2) the timing of war termination, allowing a direct test of whether leader transitions are exogenous to the process that ends wars. This approach avoids biased estimates that can arise when leader change is assumed to be unrelated to unobserved factors affecting war termination.

Modeling Different Kinds of Leader Transitions

Flores extends the analysis with a competing-risks specification to differentiate types of leader transitions and their distinct effects on the hazard of war termination. That lets the analysis capture whether the effect of leadership turnover depends on the political coalition or regime characteristics that produced the new leader.

Key Findings

• Leader change in large-coalition systems never increases the probability of war termination, while leader change in small-coalition systems never reduces that probability. (The paper interprets these coalition-size patterns in terms of democratic versus autocratic systems.)
• Overall, leader transitions in autocratic systems are more likely to bring interstate war to an end than leader transitions in democratic ones.
• The marginal effect of leader change on ending war declines as conflicts persist: leadership turnover has a stronger effect early in a war and fades as the war progresses.
• Wars exhibit negative duration-dependence in these models, meaning the instantaneous probability of termination falls as conflict duration increases.

What This Means for Research and Policy

By explicitly modeling the joint timing of leader turnover and war termination, Flores demonstrates that claims about leadership change shortening wars need to account for endogeneity and regime context. The results imply that studies and policymakers should treat leader transitions not as a uniform mechanism but as one whose impact depends on political institutions and the stage of the conflict.