Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict

Abstract

The research reported here develops an explanation for the often-noted absence of international war between democratic states. This explanation is derived from a theoretical rationale centered on universal democratic norms for reconciling competing values and interests. I argue that democratic states locked in disputes are better equipped than others with the means for diffusing conflict situations at an early stage before they have an opportunity to escalate to military violence. Not only is this explanatory logic consistent with the published findings on democracy and war, but it also entails the novel empirical proposition that disputes between democracies are more amenable than are other disputes to peaceful settlements, the hypothesis I examine here. Analyses of contemporary interstate disputes reveal that even when potentially confounding factors are controlled, democratic opponents are significantly more likely to reach peaceful settlements than other types of disputants.

Treaty Compliance and Violation

“…The idea that mass publics might play a role in the socialization of governments to comply with their international agreements is central to Ideational theories have also been advanced linking democratic forms of domestic governance to better international law compliance. The normative argument for better treaty performance from more democratic governments has been framed in terms of "universal democratic norms for reconciling competing values and interests" (Dixon 1994) which draws from the broader literature in international relations on normative explanations for the democratic peace. Democracies rest on a robust form of constitutionalism, which puts law at the heart of public legitimacy, and subjects all forms of public authority to principled limitations on the exercise of power.…”

An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace

“…1 democracies tend to win a disproportionate share of the wars they¯ght (Lake 1992;Reiter and Stam 1998a); when disputes do emerge, democratic dyads choose more peaceful processes of dispute settlement than do other pairings of states (Brecher and Wilkenfeld 1998;Dixon 1994;Mousseau 1998;Raymond 1994); democracies are more likely to initiate wars against autocracies than are autocracies against democracies (Bennett and Stam 1998); in wars they initiate, democracies pay fewer costs in terms of human life and¯ght shorter wars than nondemocratic states (Bennett and Stam 1996;Siverson 1995); transitional democracies appear more likely to¯ght than stable regimes (Mans¯eld and Snyder 1995;Ward and Gleditsch 1998); and larger democracies seem more constrained to avoid war than are smaller democracies (Morgan and Campbell 1991).…”

Democracy and peace: Reply to oneal and russett

“…If not JOINREG, however, what then? One option might be DEM LJ the lower score for DEMOC -AUTOC (from Polity III), which is used by Oneal and Russett (1997a, p. 274) and represented as a theoretical step forward because of its consistency with the "weak link" assumption developed by Dixon (1994). 11 10 We are pleased that OR were able to replicate our REGIME equation.…”