To the Editors (William G. Nomikos writes): Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten’s article “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign- Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization” offers important contribu- tions to the study of foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC). 1 The authors should be commended for their use of advanced empirical methods to tackle such an important substantive question. According to Downes and Monten, past research on the democra- tizing effect of foreign-imposed regime change has overemphasized the characteristics of the intervener and underemphasized the existing preconditions for democracy in the state targeted for intervention. Rather than the FIRC itself, it is these preconditions, Downes and Monten suggest, that explain whether a given state will or will not democ- ratize. That is, their argument posits that targets of FIRC that democratize would have done so independently of the foreign intervention. Although Downes and Monten offer promising results in support of their hypothe- ses, two factors should make scholars skeptical of the conclusions drawn from their in- terpretation of the evidence. First, even though Downes and Monten duly explore the efªcacy of varieties of FIRC, they omit the most critical analytical category related to the dependent variable. In evaluating the ability of FIRC to produce democracy, one should focus on cases of foreign-imposed democratization (FID) where the intervener intended to replace a nondemocratic regime with a democratic one. Second, the nature of FIRC operations has changed over time in ways unaccounted for by Downes and Monten. For historical and theoretical reasons outlined in this letter, FIRC carried out before World War I looks signiªcantly different from FIRC carried out since 1918. A closer examination of the targets of FID after World War I reveals a fairly remarkable success rate: thirteen out of seventeen targets transitioned to consolidated democracies within ten years of the intervention (see table 1). Such a record should give us pause be- fore concluding that FIRC has little or no independent effect on a state’s democratiza- tion prospects. Correspondence: Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Correspondence William G. Nomikos Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten Reevaluating Foreign-Imposed Regime Change William G. Nomikos is a doctoral student at Yale University. He thanks Allan Dafoe, Jason Lyall, Nuno Monteiro, and Nicholas Sambanis for their constructive comments and guidance. The data, code, and addi- tional coding notes are available from the author upon request. Alexander B. Downes is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Wash- ington University. Jonathan Monten is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma. They would like to thank William Nomikos for sharing his list of foreign-imposed democratizations. 1. Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Re- gime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Spring 2013), pp. 90–131. Additional references to this article appear parenthetically in the text. International Security, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Winter 2013/14), pp. 184–195, doi:10.1162/ISEC_c_00152 © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 184