Democracy and peace: putting the cart before the horse?

Abstract

The idea that democracies do not fight other democracies has attracted a considerable amount of analytical energy in recent years. It is a theme that appeals to a variety of people. It emphasizes type of political system as a principal explanatory variable, which attracts partisans of domestic politics explanations in international politics. It can be seen as another nail in the coffin of realism. Moreover, the basic generalization that democracies do not launch wars against other democracies seems to hold up despite repeated attacks on its claim to validity. It therefore appeals to social scientists who have found few other generalizations to hold up as well in the study of international politics. One leading analyst, Jack Levy, has bestowed law-like status on the generalization. 1 Another, Bruce Russett, refers to it as "one of the strongest nontrivial and nontautological generalizations that can be made about international relations." 2 Moreover, the general extrapolation that more democracies implies fewer wars is seductive to optimists who contend that the nature of world politics has changed radically in the last decade of the twentieth century thanks to the end of history, the triumph of the free world in the cold war, or the increasing rejection of war as a plausible instrument of policy in some parts of the world.Despite the many rigorous analyses of the democracy-war question some major problems of interpretation remain. 3 Perhaps the most significant problem is one of explanation. If it is true that democracies do not fight other democracies and, in the process, create zones of peace that expand as the number of democratic states increases, why is that the case? The usual response is to fall back on attributes associated with the obvious causal I am grateful to Jeff Isaac, George Modelski, John Odell, and several anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on improving earlier versions of this article.

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