The democratic peace and the new evolution of an old idea

Abstract

Since the democratic peace was ‘rediscovered’ in the 1970s, the phenomenon has become a mainstream research agenda. Significant attention and page space has been dedicated to large- N statistical tests of the phenomenon. Indeed, the methodological composition of the field is significantly tilted toward quantitative studies, creating significant lacunae in our understanding of the underlying mechanisms that generate the democratic peace. The central argument in this review is that academics need to pay much greater attention to the underlying mechanisms of the democratic peace, and in the process of doing so, the democratic peace has the potential to expand into a much more significant field of study: democratic security.