Alliance, contiguity, wealth, and political stability: Is the lack of conflict among democracies a statistical artifact?

Abstract

Scholars increasingly are accepting the empirical generalization that democracies almost never go to war with each other, and infrequently even engage in militarized disputes with each other. It has not been clear, however, whether the rarity of conflict between democracies is caused by some aspect of being democratic, or whether it is caused by some other variable or variables that may be correlated with democracy. Using data on all independent states for the period 1946-1986, we examine the effects of political system type, distance, wealth, economic growth, alliances, and political stability. The results suggest that, although most of the other variables do have an effect, as hypothesized, there still seems to be an independent effect of political system type: democracies engage in militarized disputes with each other less than would be expected by chance. The effect may be enhanced by political stability; that is, states which can be perceived as stable democracies are less likely to be involved in disputes with other democracies.

Constructing Multivariate Analyses (of Dangerous Dyads)

“…Published at about the same time as Bremer's earlier paper, Maoz and Russett (1992) report several important analyses that are quite informative. They evaluate the impact of a set of possibly confounding variables one at a time.…”

“…Less fortunate is their choice to focus only on dispute involvement. Since Bremer shows that what predicts dispute involvement may not always predict war involvement, and vice versa, we cannot be certain of the implications of Maoz and Russett's (1992) results for models of interstate war.…”

“…Whether focusing on pairs of rich states alone, pairs of developing states in isolation, or pairs of states all of which are poor, Maoz and Russett (1992) find that democratic states are distinctly less likely to get involved in militarized disputes than mixed or jointly autocratic pairs of states. And, of special interest for an issue to be taken up again below, Maoz and Russett (1992, 256-257) also report that while, in general, wealthier pairs of states are less likely to become involved in militarized disputes than poorer pairs of states, among democratic states, wealthier pairs of states are more likely than less wealthy pairs to become involved in militarized disputes.…”

“…4 Maoz and Russett (1992) provide a rather stirring defense of that hypothesis. But Bremer argues that the positive bivariate relationship between alliance ties and the probability of conflict is misleading.…”

“…We can assume that richer countries are more likely to become democratic than are poor countries, and Maoz and Russett (1992) provide some evidence that wealthier pairs of countries are less likely than pairs of poor countries to get involved in disputes. This finding reinforces Bremer's (1993, 245) conclusion that "dyads composed of two more developed states are about three times less likely to originate disputes and five times less likely to originate wars than dyads that contain one or fewer less developed countries."…”