Domestic institutional similarity and militarized interstate dispute, 1970-2001

Scholars who pay attention to the link of conflict and peace with domestic institutions rely extensively on the discussion of the effects of political institutions, yet few of them ask if and how economic institutions can do the same thing. Based on the arguments of democratic peace theory, power transition theory, and new institutionalism, in this dissertation I ask how institutional similarity, being it political and economic, shapes international conflict and peace behaviors. I argue that countries with similar political and economic systems tend to experience less severe conflicts, lower likelihood of conflict onset, and shorter dispute duration. This is because institutional similarity reduces the costs of communication and transaction among these states.;Though my work largely confirms what previous studies examined about institutional similarity and conflict onset and severity, I argue that economic institutional similarity indeed plays a more prominent role in shaping conflict behavior. To test my argument, I develop extensively three econometric models. In Chapter 3, I firstly develop the model to test the relationship between domestic institutional similarity and conflict duration by using Cox and Weibull models. I then use the multinomial logit model to ask how institutional similarity allows countries to experience less severe conflicts, and the generalized estimating equation (GEE) model is then applied to answer how such effect reduces the likelihood of conflict onset. In a dyad two countries tend to experience less severe conflicts, lower likelihood of conflict, and solve their disputes quicker if they can especially reach economic institutional homogenization. This argument is consistent with the current development of world political economy.