Assessing the dyadic democratic peace theory

Abstract

The ideas of the democratic (separate) peace originally exposed during the Enlightenment period have been further explained during the 1980s, by entitling this issue within the academic discourse and setting up its theoretical foundations. The fruitfulness of quantitative empirical researches of the democratic peace theory had as its consequence many papers which were dedicated to these topics. Most of them have been taking into consideration very wide time framework of investigation which implied the usage of an uneven methodological data processing from different periods and have led to bad validity of the final results. This has become very significant when the authors were presenting diametrically different results using the completely same methodology. The interpretation of both results and basic theoretical foundations on which the theory is based on, also represent significant problem without achieved consensus within the academic community. This paper aims at empirically research the explanatory potential of the democratic peace theory in contemporary system of the international relations. By combining the data on conflict intensity taken from the Heidelberg Peace Research Institute (HIIK), and the data on the democratic level of states by Polity4 datasets, the authors tried to investigate the main hypothesis of the theory - whether the democratic states are less war prone in their interdependent relations? The research was conducted on 1985 registered conflicts within the 5 years term from 2010 to 2014. According to the extensive interpretations of the results, the starting hypothesis has been confirmed, but when it comes to the restrictive interpretation, the claims of the theory, that democracies are less war prone, have been rebutted.