One other minor flaw is the author's obvious personal unfamiliarity with the professional military and with the men and women who make national security decisions. The clearly articulated theoretical argument makes a compelling case for focusing on the two central variables – domestic audiences and civilian vs.

The case studies complement this analysis nicely; for example, the carefully detailed review of the extensive consultation that North Vietnamese leaders undertook during the Vietnam War makes for a compelling case that responsibility to a broader audience was largely responsible for the effective North Vietnamese military strategy. One is to understand how the politics of different kinds of authoritarian systems might compensate for a small bargaining range, or lead to war even when the bargaining range is large. According to my argument, Anaya was an important member of that audience, and I discuss his strong support for the operation explicitly through the case study. Especially since the end of the Cold War, international-relations scholars have been consumed with the scientific exploration of the democratic peace proposition. Weeks' theory helps explain not only conflict initiation but also war outcomes and the fates of wartime leaders.

The empirical analysis is admirably clear and consistently reasonable, even if the results are not always beyond dispute. Weeks deserves much credit for the originality of her contributions, and I hope and am confident that others will follow her lead. By focusing on not only domestic accountability but also the predilections of leaders and, crucially, the preferences of the domestic audiences they are accountable to, Weeks shows that some autocrats face incentives much like democracies, and therefore behave much like their democratic counterparts when it comes to questions of war and peace. Weeks] makes readers insightfully aware of the key differences among 'dictatorships' that may account for alternative foreign policies. Alternatively, variation in regime type could be linked to variation in private information, incentives to misrepresent, or commitment problems.

Indeed, it seems to me that Weeks’s theoretical arguments could, in principle, be linked to war through simple extensions of the logic of the bargaining model of war.

A final example of a case that fits uneasily into Weeks’s typology is Egypt at the time of the Six-Day War. An important assumption of Weeks’s theory is that in constrained authoritarian regimes, civilian leaders are removed only by other civilian elites, whereas military leaders are removed only by the military. Moreover, retaking the islands posed a major military challenge, requiring the British to carry out amphibious landings thousands of miles from home with no local base from which to operate. One issue that these three essays skirt, and which I wish to touch on here, concerns the policy ramifications of Weeks’s argument. There were elections and universal manhood suffrage, but the Chancellor served at the pleasure of the Kaiser and did not require the support of a majority of the Reichstag.

He argues that I do not engage enough with an alternative diversionary explanation for the war, namely that that General Galtieri had reason to fear severe punishment (such as death, imprisonment, or exile) if he lost office, which he expected would come at the hands of naval minister Jorge Anaya if he did not make progress on the Falklands. International relations scholars have traditionally characterized regime type as dichotomous: democracy versus nondemocracy. The book proposes that they do, and intriguingly finds that some kinds of dictatorships exhibit foreign policy behavior that converges with democratic foreign policy behavior. Roughly 38%, however, lost office in an irregular manner [33], and 76% of those faced severe punishment in the form of exile (52%), imprisonment (15%) and/or death (2%). P. Weeks explains why certain kinds of regimes are less likely to resort to war than others, why some are more likely to win the wars they start, and why some authoritarian leaders face domestic punishment for foreign policy failures whereas others can weather all but the most serious military defeat.For example, Weeks reports that Juntas lost three out of eight wars in which they were involved, a rate that is lower than that for personalist regimes but higher than that for democracies and Machines.