Assessing the Progress of the Democratic Peace Research Program

Abstract

Ungerer, Jameson Lee. (2012) Assessing the Progress of the Democratic Peace Research Program. International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/j.1468‐2486.2012.01103.x This article analyzes the evolution of the democratic peace, beginning from the initial observation of a lack of wars and rarity of conflicts between democratic regimes to a number of competing and/or compatible explanations over the causality of the observed peace. A Lakatosian methodology is applied as a foundation for assessing the progress of the research program, according to the four traditionally recognized concepts: a hard core; a positive heuristic; a negative heuristic; and the auxiliary hypotheses. Theories are distinguished based on their theoretical and empirical progressiveness, as well as progressive intra‐program problem‐shifts. Explanations over the active causal process have often been seen as competitors, yet a Lakatosian framework enables seemingly inconsistent hypotheses to be grafted onto an existing research program, which can be determined to be progressive if they provide increased explanatory power and novel predictions that receive empirical corroboration. By these criteria, the research on capitalist development and the ongoing democratic peace research are not incompatible, provided that further additions to the research program ascertain the progressive criteria. Furthermore, by highlighting the areas that can best explain and predict the democratic peace phenomenon, the Lakatosian analysis offers insights for future progression in the field, as well as the areas upon which research should be focused.

The Democratic Peace Unraveled: It’s the Economy1

“…This was the problem Lakatos ([1970]1978) sought to address as he developed a standard for gauging emendations to research programs. Using Lakatosian standards widely used in the field of International Relations (for example, James 2002; Vasquez and Elman 2002; Ungerer 2012), Dafoe’s post‐hoc adjustment in the measure of democracy is clearly degenerating, since he offered no excess empirical content obtained from the emendation, and his explicit motivation was to save the democratic peace hypothesis. A move to +10 democracy also brings with it the troubling question of whether all the studies of democratic peace over the past two decades would have obtained the same levels of significance if the +10 measure had been adopted, given that it would have left far fewer democratic dyads in the samples.…”

“…Lakatos ([1970]1978) explicitly identifies examples of inconsistent theories being grafted onto existing research programs, eventually overtaking the original programs. This is constitutive of a progressive problem‐shift, while in some interpretations it could even be conceived of as an ideal form (Ungerer 2012:23). With such a shift, there is potential for a great deal of progress, with a wide open frontier of promising research needed on the possible causes of both contract‐intensive economy and its precise linkages with both peace and cooperation, within and among nations; the field is also wide open for modeling strategic interactions in various economic kinds of dyads and, among nations with contract‐intensive economies, collective action problems in their management and preservation of the global market order.…”

Grasping the scientific evidence: The contractualist peace supersedes the democratic peace

“…The economic norms account for how contractualist economy can cause both democracy and peace has been explicated in numerous prior studies and need not be repeated here (Mousseau, 2000, 2009, 2012a, 2013). An abundance of prior studies have also corroborated various novel predictions of the theory in wider domains (Ungerer, 2012), and no one has disputed the multiple reports that contractualist economy is the strongest non-trivial predictor of peace both within (Mousseau, 2012b) and between nations (Mousseau, 2013; see also Nieman, 2015). The only matter in controversy is whether democracy has any observable impact on peace between nations after consideration of contractualist economy.…”

Regime Type, Peace, and Reciprocal Effects

“…Over the course of the last decade, the neo‐Kantian research agenda has continued its rapid pace, as a number of critical debates remain unresolved (Ungerer, ). In this section we highlight two with particular implications for a forthcoming attempt to create a state‐of‐the‐art multiple equation model: (1) many of the variables used in the study of the relationship between democracy and peace remain subject to criticisms about their validity; and (2) the issue of the proper methodological approach to the study of this relationship remains an open question, and the relatively scarcity of “systems of equations” approaches remains striking.…”

“…It is understood that Polity represents an institutional , as opposed to a more inclusively liberal, treatment of the concept of democracy (Bosin, ). Elaboration of models focusing on conflict processes allow for the latter point in an indirect way; see Ungerer () on the underlying question of what does (or does not) belong within the democratic peace research program.…”