The Controversy over the Democratic Peace: Rearguard Action or Cracks in the Wall?

Abstract

I The democratic peace proposition has emerged as the conventional wisdom of the 1990s in international political research. This result states that (1) democracies are as war and conflict prone as nondemocratic states, and (2) democracies almost never engage each other in full-scale war, and rarely clash with each other in militarized interstate disputes short of war. The evidence is seemingly overwhelming, making this the most replicated research program in the modern study of international politics.’ Yet many critics question both the empirical validity of the democratic peace and-perhaps more significantly-the underlying causality attributed to regime structure in the prevention of war. In this article I distinguish between two types of critique: realist and cultural. Realist critiques reflect a basic reasoning that internal processes and structures play a negligible role in shaping a nation’s security policy. The notion that democracies do not fight each other is backed by overwhelming evidence and poses a seemingly fundamental challenge to this realist conception. Even more problematic to adherents of the realist paradigm is the fact that explanations of the democratic peace proposition emphasize the effects of democratic norms on the strategic behavior of nations. These explanations are also supported by empirical evidence. Thus the realist critique’s first line of defense is to question the basic result. The second line of defense, given the collapse of the first, is to challenge the various explanations of the democratic peace result,