A small bargaining range, in turn, makes it more likely for factors such as commitment problems and private information to cause bargaining to fail. In chapter 3, Weeks finds that Machines are just as likely as democracies to prevail in wars and MIDs, whereas Bosses and Strongmen are significantly more likely to lose.

In this cogent analysis of the important variation among autocratic regimes when it comes to decisions about war and peace, Jessica L. Regimes where a civilian leader is vulnerable to removal by a civilian domestic audience are known as Machines, whereas Juntas consist of governments where a military leader faces an audience of military officers who are capable of removing him. This book combines parsimonious yet powerful theorizing with rigorous and thoughtful multimethod analysis, to answer crucial policy questions about war and peace. For example, concluding that contemporary China is a Machine regime (Weeks generally classifies China after 1976 as being a Machine) would suggest that China is generally unlikely to initiate dangerous militarized disputes over issues such as the South China Sea and the political status of Taiwan. A final example of a case that fits uneasily into Weeks’s typology is Egypt at the time of the Six-Day War.

Within the constrained and unconstrained categories, juntas and strongmen are somewhat more bellicose than their civilian-led counterparts owing to military officers' positive views on force. Jessica Weeks is Associate Professor and Trice Faculty Scholar in the department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As he notes, I differentiate regimes around two dimensions: first, whether or not the leader faces a powerful domestic audience, and second, whether the key decisionmakers in the regime are civilians or military officers. Regimes in which leaders are immune from removal differ only in whether the leader has a civilian ( boss) or military ( strongman) background. At a minimum, civilian officials had no input on the formation of military strategy and it was unclear who had the authority to make strategic commitments on behalf of Germany.

Machines and Juntas will thus not behave appreciably differently from democracies because their leaders cannot avoid being dislodged from power for their mistakes. As a result the analysis is weak when it moves from the onset of a dispute to the onset of war, since it takes only one to start a dispute [24], but two to start a war. Leaders of juntas, I argue in the book, are more likely to use force because their audience can benefit from arms buildups and war, and because they tend to be more pessimistic about the efficacy of alternatives to war such as diplomacy.Indeed, some types of autocracies are no more belligerent or reckless than democracies, casting doubt on the common view that democracies are more selective about war than autocracies.

Therefore, by my definition, Japan is considered a junta regime when it went to war against China in 1937, even though the leader at the time, Prime Minister Konoe, was a civilian. In my understanding, exciting ongoing data collection efforts by Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz will allow scholars to construct measures of regime type that are comparable to those I use in my book, and check whether the results change. Weeks (78) codes Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1967 as a Strongman—a leader with a military background constrained by no audience—but Brooks depicts Nasser as locked in a fierce competition for power with his military chief, Abdel Hakim Amer.Thus, Weeks dismisses fears of punishment as a motivator in Argentinean Junta leader General Galtieri’s decision making, pointing out that few of his direct predecessors in Argentina and his contemporary colleagues from Latin America suffered from punishment after they lost office. One puzzle, which Weeks does not address, is why the Junta chose to invade the Falklands while accepting the diplomatic process that resulted in an unfavorable settlement to the Beagle Channel dispute with Chile during the same period. For Weeks, Strongmen like Nasser are the central decision-makers on war and peace, and Nasser could provoke war with Israel with little fear for his political fate given his personal control over the security forces.