Polities and Peace

Farber, Henry S.; Gowa, Joanne

doi:10.2307/2539231

Cited by 199 publications

(121 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…That is, for this particular definition of democratic dyads, the MIDs involving non-democracies became more preventable after 1951 by a margin of 11.6 percentage points. This finding is interesting and also consistent with the earler results by Farber and Gowa (1995). However, this gap effectively vanishes when the threshold is set at levels higher than five.…”

Section: Democracy and International Conflictsupporting

confidence: 90%

Understanding the Past: Statistical Analysis of Causal Attribution

Yamamoto

2011

American J Political Sci

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Would the third-wave democracies have been democratized without prior modernization? What proportion of the past militarized disputes between non-democracies would have been prevented had those dyads been democratic? Although political scientists often ask these questions of causal attribution, existing quantitative methods fail to address them. This paper proposes an alternative statistical methodology based on the widely accepted counterfactual framework of causal inference. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, the paper clarifies differences between causal attribution and causal effects by specifying the type of research questions to which each quantity is relevant. Second, it provides a clear resolution of the long-standing methodological debate on "selection on the dependent variable." Third, the paper derives new nonparametric identification results, showing that the complier probability of causal attribution can be identified using an instrumental variable. The proposed framework is illustrated via empirical examples from three subfields of political science.

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Section: Democracy and International Conflictsupporting

confidence: 90%

Understanding the Past: Statistical Analysis of Causal Attribution

Yamamoto

2011

American J Political Sci

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“…The empirical evidence for this claim is, in fact, quite strong (Maoz and Abdolali 1989;Bremer 1992;Oneal and Russett 1997;Ray 1995). Recent efforts to cast this empirical observation in doubt notwithstanding (Layne 1994;Spiro 1994;Farber and Gowa 1995;Schwartz and Skinner 1997), extensive, rigorous statistical tests all show a signi¯cant propensity for democracies to have been virtually immune from wars with one another (Russett 1995;Maoz 1998). Associated with this observation of what has come to be termed the \democratic peace" are seven additional empirical regularities that relate war-proneness and democracy.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace

et al. 1999

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We examine formally the link between domestic political institutions and policy choices in the context of eight empirical regularities that constitute the democratic peace. We demonstrate that democratic leaders, when faced with war, are more inclined to shift extra resources into the war effort than are autocrats. This follows because the survival of political leaders with larger winning coalitions hinges on successful policy. The extra effort made by democrats provides a military advantage over autocrats. This makes democrats unattractive targets, since their institutional constraints cause them to mobilize resources for the war effort. In addition to trying harder, democrats are more selective in their choice of targets. Because defeat is more likely to lead to domestic replacement for democrats than for autocrats, democrats only initiate wars they expect to win. These two factors lead to the interaction between polities that is often referred to as the democratic peace.

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“…Since neo-realism was at least then the most prominent theoretical alternative to the liberal theories of the Democratic Peace, its proponents were particularly eager to demonstrate that the Democratic Peace is better attributed to international power politics than to regime type (cf. Farber/Gowa 1995).…”

Section: The Core Of Democratic Distinctiveness: the "Democratic mentioning

confidence: 99%