The Democratic Peace Unraveled: It’s the Economy
نویسنده
چکیده
Recent studies show that the democratic peace correlation is not significant once the potentially confounding variable that can cause both democracy and peace, contract-intensive economy, is considered; this pattern holds in analyses of wars, fatal militarized interstate conflicts (Mousseau 2009), and interstate crises (Mousseau et al. 2013). These studies rescind the primary evidence for democracy being a cause of the democratic peace and indicate that contract-intensive economy is the more likely explanation for it. This article addresses all recent defenses of the democratic peace correlation, reports results using a new measure of contract flows, and extends the investigation to all militarized interstate conflicts. Analyses of most nations from 1961 to 2001 show that there is no correlation of democracy with peace, and contract-intensive economy is one of the most powerful nontrivial variables in international conflict. The era of the democratic peace appears to be at an end, subsumed by an economic peace.
منابع مشابه
Grasping the scientific evidence: The contractualist peace supersedes the democratic peace
This article draws on new data and analyses to investigate whether the contractualist peace supersedes the democratic peace. A series of studies have shown that contractualist economy accounts for the democratic peace, but defenders of the democratic peace claim that these studies contain measurement errors, that democracy correlates with peace at least in interaction with contractualist econom...
متن کاملAt the Expense of the Country: Multi-level War Economy in Afghanistan and the Implication for Peace
متن کامل
WIDER Working Paper No. 2013/144 Aid to Africa: The changing context
To continue its economic growth and create new and better livelihoods, Africa must transform the productive side of its economy. Ongoing globalization—in trade, finance, and technology—opens up new possibilities for structural transformation, but also new risks as Africa’s integration with the global economy evolves. Climate change is impacting productive sectors and the livelihoods linked to t...
متن کاملThucydides and Democratic Peace
Thucydides is an important author for any discussion of the possibilities for an ancient Greek democratic peace. Though democratic peace did not, in fact, seem to function in classical Greece, a number of passages in Thucydides show that an affinity did exist among democratic factions and city-states in the context of hostile competition between democratic and oligarchic regimes. Thucydides rem...
متن کاملCapitalist Development and Civil War
Capitalism has emerged as a force for peace in studies of interstate conflict. Is capitalism also a force for peace within nations? This article shows how a market-capitalist economy—one where most citizens normally obtain their livelihoods contracting in the market—creates citizen-wide preferences for universal freedom, peace, and the democratic rule of law. Prior research has corroborated the...
متن کامل