The Democratic Peace
By Some thoughts on this fine Democratic Peace post by Daniel Nexon:
I share Dan’s skepticism regarding the empirical tools used to confirm the democratic peace hypothesis. I think that the scholars who study the democratic peace are convinced that something is there (and they may be right), but don’t have a handle on precisely how to define it. This leaves wiggle room in the interpretation of the evidence, which then leads to the inclusion or exclusion of border line cases less because of their own merits than because of the need to support the hypothesis.
Dan also makes a good point by focusing on the mechanisms through which the democratic peace is supposed to operate. In short, norms (domestic and international), free trade, the ability to make credible commitments, and democratic accountability have all been presented as the causal linkage between theory and evidence. None stand up to careful scrutiny. The voting public can be manipulated. A reasonable argument can be produced to suggest that democratic regimes are more, not less, likely to back out of agreements. The international norm argument is rather nebulous, and ought to apply to a fair number of autocracies. The domestic norm argument is perhaps the most theoretically attractive (the idea that people in democracies have developed non-violent means of settling political disputes), but again it has difficulty accounting for the reliability with which democracies go to war against autocratic states. Democratic peace theory still faces the difficulty of being an empirical finding without a compelling theoretical justification. Chris Layne wrote a nice piece several years ago detailing situations in which democratic states were saved from war almost by accident.
I’m inclined to think that there is something to the democratic peace, even if we can’t get a handle on it. I would be very cautious, however, in making democratic peace theory the centerpiece of foreign security policy strategy. I’m not convinced that lots of democracies will make the world a safer place, or more congenial to US hegemony. Democracy is valuable in and of itself, and to the extent that we promote democracy it should be for its intrinsic, rather than strategic, value.