INTRODUCTION
The United States has attempted to export liberal democratic institutions through military occupation and reconstruction throughout its history, with mixed results. For every West Germany or Japan, there is a Cuba, Haiti, Somalia, or Vietnam. Why do we observe such different outcomes in military interventions? Do efforts to export democracy help more than they hurt?
At a November 26, 2007 Cato Book Forum, Christopher J. Coyne, assistant professor of economics at West Virginia University and author of After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, and Tamara Cofman Wittes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, examined the problems with installing democracy.
