Democratic Peace in the post-Cold War Era

Abstract

This study examines the continuation of democratic peace in the post-Cold War era. The democratic peace refers to the interstate phenomenon that democratic countries rarely fight each other. Other things being equal, the rate of conflict is lower for country pairs of democracy-democracy than those of autocracy-autocracy and democracy-autocracy. While the phenomenon itself is accepted, it is disputed whether the relationship between democracy and peace is causal or spurious. Skeptics argue that the democratic peace is an artifact of the Cold War bipolar politics. They expect that because cold war security interests, not democracy, produced the phenomenon, the democratic peace will soon disappear in the post-Cold War era. The binary time-series cross-sectional analysis of this study covers both politically relevant dyads and all dyads for the 1950-2010 period. It finds that beyond the Cold War period (1950-1989), the democratic peace continues to be statistically significant in the post-Cold War period (1990-2010).