The Hazard of War: Reassessing the Evidence for the Democratic Peace

Abstract

In this article, we re-examine the statistical evidence for the democratic peace at the dyadic level. We also investigate the seeming paradox that democracies are engaged in war as often as autocracies at the nation level. From the extensive literature on democracy and peace we have selected as our point of departure two influential contributions (one by Stuart Bremer, the other by Zeev Maoz & Bruce Russett), both of which analyse the relationship between democracy and peace at the dyadic level. Several problematic aspects of these analyses are addressed; in particular, problems concerning dependence between observational units caused by continuing war and peace, and by diffusion effects. We show that the increasing number of countries in the international system causes their assumption of a stationary probability of war at the dyadic level to be violated. It is argued that these problems cannot be solved adequately within the traditional dyad-year framework. Instead, it is proposed to model observations on the interstate dyad as a process in continuous time using Cox regression. An extensive model is developed that controls for contiguity, power status, alliances, stability, diffusion of war, and recurrence effects. A concept of relevance is introduced to account for the dependence of the dyadic probability of war on the size of the international system. The democratic peace is supported in our basic model. In a refined model, we find that the tendency of democracies to join each other in wars is much more marked than their avoidance of mutual fighting. This explains why democracies are as war-prone as autocracies.

Democracy and armed conflict

“…This conclusion is contested by Park (2013), however. 17 Raknerud & Hegre (1997), however, demonstrate that the 'autocratic peace' to a large extent is due to the tendency for democracies to ally with each other in large multi-actor wars. 18 Note that Oneal & Russett (1999) question how much the democratic peace is due to joint interests.…”

“…One aspect of the effectiveness of democracies in war is their ability to form large alliances in important wars (Doyle, 1986;Raknerud & Hegre, 1997). The empirical analysis in Gartzke & Gleditsch (2004), however, suggests that democracies are less reliable allies.…”

Population size, concentration, and civil war. A geographically disaggregated analysis

“…We use an adaption of the calendar-time Cox regression model presented in Raknerud & Hegre (1997) for this purpose. In Cox regression, the dependent variable is the transition between 'states of nature' -the transition from peace to conflict in a square.…”

“…Beck, Katz & Tucker, 1998). As in Raknerud & Hegre (1997) assume that the effect of the previous event decrease at a constant rate, and compute a decay function with half-life of α: pes = 2 (−days/α) . The variable is called 'Proximity of event in square'.…”

Democratic Jihad ? Military Intervention And Democracy

“…This is the essence of the democratic peace, confirmed in a number of studies (Doyle, 1986;Gleditsch & Hegre, 1997;Russett, 1993;Russett & Oneal, 2001). Raknerud & Hegre (1997) estimate that dyads of two democracies had a 57% lower probability than mixed dyads of onset of interstate war in the 1840-1992 period, and 35% lower probability than non-democratic dyads. The estimate is conservative since the analysis includes several dubious cases of wars between democracies such as the wars between…”