New Books Network Madison Schramm, "Why Democracies Fight Dictators" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Oct 3, 2025
Madison Schramm, an associate professor at the University of Toronto and author of "Why Democracies Fight Dictators," dives into the intricate dynamics of conflict between democracies and personalist regimes. She explores cognitive biases that drive aggressive responses, historical roots of democratic antagonism, and the impact of media on perceptions of leaders. Schramm highlights the moral justifications for intervention and warns against the pitfalls of prioritizing leader removal. She also discusses how understanding these patterns can improve decision-making in foreign policy.
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Democracies Target Personalist Regimes
- Madison Schramm finds democracies disproportionately initiate conflicts with personalist regimes over the last 75 years.
- She attributes this to cognitive biases, social identity, and emotion interacting to escalate conflicts.
Why Personalization Raises Threat Perception
- Attribution bias and vividness make individual dictators cognitively salient to liberal democracies.
- Those biases combine with liberal social identity to raise threat perception and produce anger-driven risk acceptance.
Anger Fuels Aggressive Foreign Policy
- Anger links strongly to attribution and norm violations and increases willingness to take risks.
- Schramm argues anger explains why democracies respond aggressively to personalized dictators.
