Democratic vs. Capitalist Peace: A Test in the Developing World

Abstract

This paper aims to test the capitalist and democratic peace arguments within the developing world. Notwithstanding the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence which indicate two different dynamics of interstate conflict in the developing and the developed worlds, the proponents of both “democratic peace” and “capitalist peace” arguments did not take into account the distinction between developing and developed countries and tested their hypotheses within samples that included “all dyads” in different time periods. This study aims to fill this gap by testing capitalist and democratic peace arguments within the developing world. It tests the capitalist and democratic peace arguments through statistical analysis (logistic regression) of the militarized interstate disputes in the developing world between 1951 and 2000. The results support the “capitalist peace” argument and suggest that, within the developing world, economic development leads to interstate peace, whereas democracy does not. The findings are robust to different measures of conflict, democracy and economic development.