![]() ![]() More recent influences have come into play, of course, among them Woodrow Wilson. 226), for Kant a republic was a regime that respected private property and established a legal equality among citizens as subjects “on the basis of a representative government with a separation of powers.” According to him, perpetual peace would occur only when states had civil constitutions establishing republics. The most often cited classical source of the idea that democracy is an important force for peace is Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay, “Perpetual Peace.” Kant was, however, no admirer of democracy. Theoretical discussions and interpretations of relationships between the proportion of democratic states in the system and the incidence of war in the system ( Maoz & Abdolali 1989, Maoz 1996, McLaughlin 1996, Gleditsch & Hegre 1997, Senese 1997) have tended to overlook or obscure problems involved in making inferences across different levels of analysis (see Ray 1997b). Evidence provided by Morgan & Schwebach (1992), Bueno de Mesquita & Lalman (1992), Rummel (1995, 1997), Siverson (1995), Benoit (1996), Rousseau et al (1996), Huth (1996), Gleditsch & Hegre (1997), among others, casts some doubt on the validity of the widespread assumption or assertion that democratic states are just as conflict- or war-prone as undemocratic states, in general. This essay focuses on the proposition that democratic states are peaceful in their relationships with each other, and not on the related but distinct notions that democratic states are less war-prone in general, or that the greater the number of democratic states in the international system, the lower the incidence of war in that system. This review briefly traces the history of the idea that democracy is an important cause of peace and evaluates the evidence in its favor, necessarily including a discussion of its theoretical underpinnings. Nevertheless, the basic idea is an old one. The proposition that democratic states do not fight interstate wars against each other is one of the most influential ideas to appear in the academic subfield of international politics in recent years. The diverse empirical evidence and developing theoretical bases that support the democratic peace proposition warrant confidence in its validity. It has also been argued that transitions to democracy can make states war-prone, but that criticism too has been responded to persuasively. Some critics argue that common interests during the Cold War have been primarily responsible for peace among democracies, but both statistical evidence and intuitive arguments cast doubt on that contention. Since the mid-1970s, the generation of new data and the development of superior analytical techniques have enabled evaluators of the idea to generate impressive empirical evidence in favor of the democratic peace proposition, which is reinforced by substantial theoretical elaboration. ▪ AbstractThe idea that democratic states have not fought and are not likely to fight interstate wars against each other runs counter to the realist and neorealist theoretical traditions that have dominated the field of international politics. ![]()
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