Identifying the Place of Democratic Norms in Democratic Peace1

Abstract

This essay contributes two arguments on the place of democratic norms in democratic peace. First, the literature under-appreciates the inter-democracy moral constraint hypothesis: the hypothesis is ignored in the “critical test” of the most frequently cited article on democratic peace and research finding that joint democracy has consistently contributed to peace since the early twentieth century, particularly among developed states; fits with inter-democracy fights in the ancient world; is attuned to the possibilities that democracy carries less moral weight in joint democracy dyads with non-Western states and imposing regime-change can bring resentment that countervails respect deriving from joint democraticness; and is free of the presumptions of democratic moral superiority abroad and autocratic inclination toward aggression. Second, the absence of a determinate correspondence between domestic and external agency, structure, and action makes inevitable that members of democracies will hold competing views on “extending” domestic norms abroad; yet, just as this diminishes the extension hypothesis as a general explanation of democratic peace, it makes government-level orientation on the extension of domestic norms an important shaper of democracy war-proneness and the ways in which democracies get involved in wars. Various democratic peace research designs are inconclusive if a government foreign policy orientation variable is omitted. The study’s two arguments provide insight into specifying foreign policy orientations.