Some Simple Calculations on Democracy and War Involvement

Abstract

The empirical evidence on democracy and war involvement indicates two quite robust findings. First, democracies do not differ from other regimes in their degree of war involvement. Second, war is extremely rare between democracies. So, the pacifying impact of democracy is restricted to relations between democracies. This finding is at odds with some of my previous empirical work (Weede, 1983, 1989), where only extended deterrence by superpower alliance and subordination of other states under superpowers have been treated as pacifying conditions. In this article, the previous design and data are used again, but a `peace among democracies' proposition replaces the earlier `peace by subordination (under some superpower)' proposition. By and large, this substitution can better explain why some dyads go to war, but most dyads generally do not. Although there has been no war between democracies in the 1962-80 period analyzed here, it is not easily possible to establish the significance of this relationship. Moving from wars to more frequent militarized interstate disputes demonstrates that even these lower intensity conflicts are much less frequent between democracies than elsewhere.