Democracies Really Are More Pacific (in General)

Abstract

Current consensus in the field of democratic peace research holds that democratic states go to war in general no less than nondemocratic states. The author challenges this consensus by reevaluating the main empirical studies on which it rests, using information that previous studies ignored and statistical techniques unused or even unknown at the time. The results indicate that from 1960 to 1980, democratic nations were less involved in military conflict than other regime types. Estimates of this relationship are robust to different operational definitions of both war and democracy, to the addition of control variables for other possible correlates of war, and to the application of different statistical techniques. This indicates that lack of previous significant findings have less to do with the data than with the methods used to analyze them.