Regime type is an important variable in international relations. Numerous scholars have theorized its effects on actors’ crisis behavior and outcomes. Despite regime type's importance, the literature has not focused on the role its uncertainty might play in interstate politics. This is in stark contrast to the scholarly attention given to uncertainty about other similarly important variables like actor capabilities, intentions, or fighting costs. In this paper, we aim to address this gap in the literature by providing a theory of regime uncertainty's effects on conflict and developing a novel measure of uncertainty about regime type in interstate relations to test our hypotheses. We find that regime uncertainty breeds caution rather than conflict: higher uncertainty about the opponent's regime type makes conflict initiation and escalation less likely in disputes, and dyads with more uncertainty are less likely to experience conflict onset.

中文翻译：

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政权不确定性和州际冲突

政权类型是国际关系中的一个重要变量。许多学者已经对其对行为者的危机行为和结果的影响进行了理论分析。尽管政权类型很重要，但文献并未关注其不确定性在州际政治中可能发挥的作用。这与学术界对其他类似重要变量（如行动者能力、意图或战斗成本）的不确定性的关注形成鲜明对比。在本文中，我们旨在通过提供政权不确定性对冲突影响的理论并开发一种新的衡量州际关系中政权类型不确定性的新方法来检验我们的假设，从而解决文献中的这一空白。我们发现政权的不确定性会引发谨慎而不是冲突：对手的不确定性更高