A Critique of the Democratic Peace Theory

The democratic peace theory, which originates from Kant’s theory of ‘Perpetual Peace’, states that democracies do not go to war with each other. However, it differs from Kant’s theory in the fact that the democratic peace theory sets forth the notion that democracies don’t go to war with other democracies but do go to war with states which have other forms of government (Layne 8). There are several reasons as to why this is considered a robust theory, including institutional constraints, democratic norms and cultures, implementation of one of the key postulates of liberal states, the satisfaction of liberal states with absolute gains and their economic interdependence as well as conditions of empire, hegemony and equilibrium. Perhaps the most powerful reason to believe the theory is it’s justification by empirical data and statistics. However, in this essay, I will state my reasons for disagreeing with the democratic peace theory, some of which are the vague definition of a democracy, the small sample size of empirical data, rise of democracies in a period conflict, the distinction between correlation and causation along with case studies which show that the reason two states don’t go to war may have nothing to do with the fact that they are democracies. Finally, I conclude the paper by putting forth a theory as to why democratic superpowers would back the DPT and prosper from it.

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2010

The idea that democracies are less apt to engage in conflict with each other is a central finding in international relations. Yet the operationalization of democracy in this literature has been relatively unreflective. Since the mid-1990s the majority of studies have used Polity. In this paper we raise substantial concerns about its use, notably that there is a mismatch between conceptualization of democracy as a regime type and using an interval scale to measure it. If our contention is correct, we would expect to find that models that use a dichotomous coding should either provide different results from Polity or at minimum fit the data better. We then test this contention by comparing the results of tests of the democratic peace using Polity in its interval scalar form and several common dichotomous codings of democracy. The tests are supportive of the contention that dichotomous coding better captures the notion of "democracy." At minimum we believe that findings using Polity should be verified for robustness using a dichotomous coding.

2000

In 1795 philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that if all nations were republics, the citizenry would not vote to go to war except in self-defense... The topic addressed in this paper is whether or not the democratic peace theory holds water. The idea that the study is seeking to confirm or disprove is that democracies are less likely to go to war than nondemocracies, and that democracies provide a place for a more vibrant economy.

This work tries to give a reasonable alternative explanation to the democratic peace thesis by presenting its major points and weaknesses compared to other, more convincing, counter-arguments. This thesis, which assumes that democracies do not go into war with each other and which finds the ultimate solution to war in the spread of democracy all over the world, is fragile since it does not take enough into consideration the several aspects that characterized the periods of peace and the war outbreaks.

Peace Review, 2007

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics

Is democratization good for peace? The question of whether democratization results in violence has led to a spirited and productive debate in empirical conflict studies over the past two decades. The debate, sparked by Mansfield and Snyder's foundational work, raised a challenge to the notion of a universal democratic peace and elicited numerous critical responses within the literature. One set of such responses has emphasized issues of replicability, mismatches between the research design and directionality of the proposed causal mechanism, the role of outliers, and model specification. In addition, two issues have not been discussed sufficiently in the existing literature. First, conceptually, is the issue of concept stretching, specifically the form Sartori labeled the "cat-dog" problem. While past criticisms were mainly about model specification, we debate whether Mansfield and Snyder's findings can be seen as a product of concept misformation. Second, quantitatively, are conceptual and empirical issues that Mansfield and Snyder use to capture state strength in their most recent attempts to provide ongoing evidence for their theory. The most optimistic estimates show that even when democratization has a statistically significant association with war onset at lower levels of institutional strength, the effect is substantively insignificant.

American Political Science Review, 2005

R osato (2003) claims to have discredited democratic peace theories. However, the methodological approach adopted by the study cannot reliably generate the conclusions espoused by the author. Rosato seems to misunderstand the probabilistic nature of most arguments about democratic peace and ignores issues that an appropriate research design should account for. Further, the study's use of case studies and data sets without attention to selection-bias produces examples that actually support theories it seeks to undermine. These problems place in doubt the article's findings.

The Review of Economic Studies, 2011

We build a game-theoretic model where aggression can be triggered by domestic political concerns as well as the fear of being attacked. In the model, leaders of full and limited democracies risk losing power if they do not stand up to threats from abroad. In addition, the leader of a fully democratic country loses the support of the median voter if he attacks a non-hostile country. The result is a non-monotonic relationship between democracy and peace. Using Polity data, we classify countries as full democracies, limited democracies, and dictatorships. For the period 1816-2000, Correlates of War data suggest that limited democracies are more aggressive than other regime types, including dictatorships, and not only during periods when the political regime is changing. In particular, a dyad of limited democracies is more likely to be involved in a militarized dispute than any other dyad (including "mixed" dyads, where the two countries have di¤erent regime types). Thus, while full democratization might advance the cause of peace, limited democratization might advance the cause of war. We also …nd that as the environment becomes more hostile, fully democratic countries become more aggressive faster than other regime types.