The Election Effect: Democratic Leaders in Inter-Group Conflict

How does the experience of being elected alter subsequent leader behavior at the international level? We argue for the existence of an election effect, through which a democratic election intensifies in-group identification and generates a sense of obligation to voters, while simultaneously increasing out-group hostility. These combined effects cause leaders to overexert costly efforts in competitive situations against other groups. Using an online laboratory experiment, we show that democratic leader selection increases effort in inter-group contest games, which share key features with interstate conflicts. We use a carefully specified decomposition strategy to distinguish the election effect from better-known selection effects, wherein eventual leaders are nonrandomly chosen. Our results show that a democratic election has negative implications in inter-group games, despite the near-universally positive effects of democracy found in intra-group ones.