An Interactive Model of the Democratic Peace: Revisiting the Theory with Elastic Measures

Abstract

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg with almost ten staff, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers (PMs), 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the VDem project is one of the largest ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: AbstractDemocracies do not take up arms against each other. This axiom has attained the status of a mantra in the field of international relations. As previous research has shown, however, the truth of this statement is highly contingent on the definitions of both democracy and conflict. Based on this fact, this project has two aims: one empirical and one theoretical. Empirically, it revises this literature, making three substantial improvements: 1) it uses a more robust and transparent measure of democracy (V-DEM); 2) it does not rely on arbitrary cut points between democratic and non-democratic regimes; and 3) it combines the theoretical perspectives of similarity-based and normative views on the reasons behind the peace among regimes. These methodological improvements allow us to generate a new theory of democratic peace, which complements both similarity-based and institutional arguments. We find robust evidence that the higher a dyad's level of democracy, and the smaller the difference between the democratic scores of its members ('democratic spread'), the lower the probability of war (and also militarized interstate disputes, MID) between that pair of states. Thus, not only is the core principle of the democratic peace revealed to be strong enough to withstand different measures of democracy, but it also offers an alternative explanation of conflict.3

An interactive model of democratic peace

“…We thank the referees of the Journal of Peace Research for their suggestions. A previous version of this article appeared as a working paper of the Varieties of Democracy Institute (Altman, Rojas-de-Galarreta & Urdinez, 2018). All caveats apply.…”