The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory

Abstract

D emocratic peace theory is probably the most powerful liberal contribution to the debate on the causes of war and peace. In this paper I examine the causal logics that underpin the theory to determine whether they offer compelling explanations for the finding of mutual democratic pacifism. I find that they do not. Democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict resolution and do not trust or respect one another when their interests clash. Moreover, elected leaders are not especially accountable to peace loving publics or pacific interest groups, democracies are not particularly slow to mobilize or incapable of surprise attack, and open political competition does not guarantee that a democracy will reveal private information about its level of resolve thereby avoiding conflict. Since the evidence suggests that the logics do not operate as stipulated by the theory's proponents, there are good reasons to believe that while there is certainly peace among democracies, it may not be caused by the democratic nature of those states.

Probabilistic Causality, Selection Bias, and the Logic of the Democratic Peace

“…The theory leads us to expect that crises that involve democracies and that end in war are precisely the ones where democracies failed to reveal information through signaling. Rosato's (2003) example refers to just such a crisis and thus lends support to the theory. 4 Pr(P | S ∧ T) reads "probability of event P conditional on events S and T occurring jointly."…”

“…Instead, these theories make probabilistic claims for two reasons we explain in the following sections. We argue that Rosato's (2003) critique does not succeed irrespective of the source of the resulting empirical nondeterminism.…”

“…The basic setup of the study is a reduction of democratic peace theories to logical statements of implication of the form D → S → P, where D stands for "state is democratic," S is a consequence implied by democracy (e.g., "state externalizes norms" or "state can signal better"), and P is the consequence of S (e.g., "states signaling or externalizing norms tend to resolve crises peacefully"). 1 Rosato (2003) seems to treat these statements as sufficient conditions. That is, D → S means that democracy is all that is needed to achieve better signaling.…”

“…Because Rosato (2003) does not fully engage some of the theories he criticizes, the critique sometimes uses cases that actually support the theory he wants to discredit. Take, for example, the 1967 crisis between Egypt and Israel preceding the Six Days War.…”

“…First, Rosato (2003) ignores fundamental issues of hypothesis testing and inference from historical data. We detail two possible interpretations of theoretical statements and show that the author's methodology does not allow him to draw the conclusions he does from either one.…”