Democracy and War: Choice, Learning and Security Communities

Abstract

The growing literature on the relationship between democracy and war has focused on two questions-Whether democracies are more pacific than other types of government, and why democracies do not seem to go to war against each other. In the spirit of Lakatosian cumulativeness - looking for explanations with excess empirical content - this commentary supports one explanation of the `why democracies do not fight democracies' question. The model supported is an expected utility formulation by Bueno de Mesquita & Lalman based on the logical relationships between states which are `doves' and `non-doves'. The same explanation for democracy-to-democracy peace provided by the Bueno de Mesquita-Lalman analytics, based on the ability to `separate' states into doves and non-doves, can be used to explain the linkages between integration and the Deutschian concept of `security community'.