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A democratic peace theory or simply democratic peace (often DPT and sometimes democratic pacifism) is a theory in international relations, political science, and philosophy which holds that democracies—specifically, liberal democracies—never or almost never go to war with one another. A more general version is that all kinds of systematic violence is rare in and by liberal democracies. It can trace its philosophical roots to Immanuel Kant.

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[edit] History

See main article: Perpetual peace
Immanuel Kant
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Immanuel Kant

At least partly because of the low frequency of democratic governments, and of sociologists, before the 19th century, democratic peace theory is a relatively new development. No ancient author seems to have considered it true.

In early modern times, the word democracy usually meant direct democracy, which was treated with suspicion. Even the idea that republics tend to be peaceful is recent; Nicolo Machiavelli believed that republics were by nature excellent war-makers and empire-builders, citing Rome as the prime example. Interesingly, Islamic tradition holds that peace will prevail within the dar al-Islam or "house of submission" to the faith, but war, including jihad, beyond that zone.

Immanuel Kant, in his essay Perpetual Peace (1795),[1] affirmed that responsible governments would not lightly go to war with each other, although he thought that this was only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace. The hope of a democratic peace was the content of the First World War slogans: "a war to end all war" [dubious — see talk page] (originated by H.G. Wells) and "a world safe for democracy". "Woodrow Wilson expressed the same vision [as Kant] for the twentieth century. This normative political basis of Wilson’s vision of world order, evident as early as 1894, grew naturally from his progressive inclinations in domestic politics; and his Fourteen Points sound almost as though Kant were guiding Wilson’s writing hand. They included Kant’s cosmopolitan law and pacific union." The third of the Points specified the removal of economic barriers between peaceful nations; the fourteenth for the League of Nations. [2]

In 1964, Dean Babst, a Wisconsin criminologist, published the first theory of democratic peace; his two papers, which appeared in obscure journals, were ignored. The first prominent DPT was stated by R. J. Rummel, of the University of Hawaii, beginning in the mid-seventies. Thereafter an increasing amount of research has been done on the theory and related subjects. (For the numerous researchers on the subject, see Rummel's bibliography, under External links.)

Presidents of both the major American parties have expressed support for the theory. Former President Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party: "Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don't attack each other." [3] Current President George W. Bush of the Republican Party: "And the reason why I'm so strong on democracy is democracies don't go to war with each other. And the reason why is the people of most societies don't like war, and they understand what war means.... I've got great faith in democracies to promote peace. And that's why I'm such a strong believer that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to promote democracy." [4] However, such use of democratic peace theory to justify a foreign policy that includes military action, such as the 2003 Iraq War, has proved controversial [5]

Michael Doyle wrote a lengthy paper, in 1983, attempting to analyse and reconcile three schools of policy analysis: the conservative liberals, the welfare liberals, and the realists. In the process of this, he asserted that no two liberal regimes have ever gone to war, with a couple of marginal exceptions. He reintroduced Kant into the subject, and began the present surge of papers on the subject. [6]

There have been numerous studies in the field since. (See the bibliography linked to under External links, below, which cites more than a hundred authors, and omits some noteworthy and some recent papers.) Most studies have found some form of democratic peace exists; although neither methodological disputes nor doubtful cases are entirely resolved. [7]. Many of these papers are discussed elsewhere in this article.

[edit] Types of Theories

Monadic theories claim that democracies tend to conduct their affairs more peaceably, whether with other democracies or not. A recent paper claims that democracies fight fewer wars, start fewer wars and lesser conflcts, and reach more negotiated settlements. [8]

Dyadic theories claim that democracies are more peaceable with each other; but make various assertions about their relations to other states. Separate peace theories claim that democracies are more likely to go to war with non-democracies than non-democracies are with each other. The militant democracy theory divides democracies into militant and pacifist types. Militant democracies have a tendency to distrust and use confrontational policies against dictatorships; which could actually make war more likely between a democracy and a non-democracy than in the case of relations between two non-democracies. Moreover, a democratic crusade corollary suggests that the belief in the validity DPT itself could become a cause of war. [9] In the case of the United States intervention in World War I and recent invasion of Iraq, the promise of democratization bringing an end to war was used as a justification for war.

Some dyadic theories, such as those forwarded by Babst, Rummel, and Doyle claim that democracies, properly defined, have never made war on each other. For example, Rummel classifies 155 of the wars since Waterloo as between democracies and non-democracies, 198 as between non-democracies. Given the limited number of democracies he acknowledges, democracies -in his sense of the word- have gone to war more often than other states, but not with each other. Doyle argues that this is only to be expected: the same ideologies that cause liberal states to be at peace with each other inspire idealistic wars with the illiberal, whether to defend oppressed foreign minorities or avenge countrymen settled abroad. [10] These theorists then argue that there are special reasons why wars between democracies do not occur.

Some democratic peace theorists also hold that internal violence, especially mass violence, is less common within democracies. The most democratic and the most authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes the most. In the long run, since intermediate regimes are less stable than autocracies, which in turn are less stable than democracies, durable democracy is the most probable end-point of the process of democratization.[11]

[edit] Claims

A democratic peace theory has to define what it means by "democracy" and what it means by "peace" (or, more often, "war"), and what it claims as the link between the two.

[edit] Democracy

Democratic peace theorists have used different terms for the class of states they consider peaceable; Babst called them elective, Rummell liberal democracies, Doyle liberal regimes. In general, these usually require not only that the government and legislature be chosen by free and actually contested elections, but more. Studies claiming absolute democratic peace require variously that two-thirds of adult males, or half the whole adult population, be able to vote (requiring universal suffrage including women would mean no war between democracies was even possible before 1894; also secret ballot (Babst), or a waiting time for the democracy to stabilize.

Doyle has a much looser standard for suffrage: either 30% of the adult males were able to vote or it was possible for every man to acquire voting rights, as by buying a freehold. He requires that women's suffrage be granted within a generation of it being demanded. He also allows greater power to hereditary monarchs; for example, he counts the reign of Louis-Philippe of France as a liberal regíme. He describes Wilhelmine Germany as "a difficult case....In practice, a liberal state under republican law for domestic affairs...divorced from the control of its citizenry in foreign affairs."[12]

Researchers often use Ted Gurr's Polity Data Set which scores each state on two scales, one of democracy and one for autocracy, for each year since 1800; as well as others. [13] The use of this has varied. Some researchers have done correlations between the democracy scale and belligerence; others have treated it as a binary classification by (as its maker does) calling all states with a high democracy score and a low autocracy score democracies.

Some recent papers have found that proportional representation is associated with less external and internal systematic violence.[14]

[edit] War

Many theorists have used the convenient list at the Correlates of War Project [15] at the University of Michigan, which compiled the wars from 1816 to 1991 with at least a thousand battlefield deaths. This data is particularly convenient for statistical analysis, and the large-scale statistical studies cited below have generally used this definition. (Also the Falklands War, although it killed only 910 (or 936, or 960) soldiers, satisfied most other criteria to be a full-scale war, and a few dozen deaths should not exclude it.)

Doyle excluded one possible exception from his theory on the grounds that both sides had recently been subject to illiberal regimes, and so the culture of liberalism was not yet established. Other peace theorists, especially of an absolute peace, extend this to excluding all wars in which either side has been a democracy for less than three years. [16]

[edit] Kantian peace

Kant's plan for a perpetual peace included more than a government answerable to the people. He proposed a League of Nations to keep the peace; and a right to "hospitality" which should be recognized everywhere. This latter was a freedom of international travel and commerce, which in some ways resembles the European Union, including the Schengen Agreement. (He also proposed preliminary confidence-building measures, including disarmament; but these were a means rather than an end.)

Michael Doyle reintroduced Kant's three articles into democratic peace theory. He argued that a pacific union of liberal states has been growing for the past two centuries. He denies that a pair of states will be peaceful simply because they are both liberal democracies; if that were enough, liberal states would not be aggressive towards weak non-liberal states (as the history of American relations with Mexico shows they are). Rather, liberal democracy is a necessary condition for international organization and hospitality (which are Kant's other two articles) — and all three are sufficient to produce peace. [17]

Several theorists, led by Bruce Russett and John R. Oneal have found multiple causes for such general peace as we have seen; quite often three which resemble Kant's. Several of these theorists call their result the Kantian peace.[18] Some Kantian theorists have found that joint democracy has no pacifying effect on the relations of states below a certain level of prosperity [19]

[edit] Statistical Studies

Each theory of democratic peace has had its statistical studies, which have found confirmation for it and sometimes denied others; there have also been studies which denied democratic peace theories without affirming another. [20] However, democratic peace theories are highly controversial, and the findings of individual studies are often vigorously disputed.

Studies have also argued that lesser conflicts (Militarized Interstate Disputes in the jargon) have been more violent, but less bloody, and less likely to spread.[21] Most such disputes involving democracies since 1950 have involved only four nations: the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and India.[22]


The Human Security Report, released in October 2005 by the Human Security Centre, documents the improved peace since the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It chiefly credits the end of the struggles of the Cold War and decolonization; but asserts also the underlying force of all the articles of the Kantian triad, which it calls interdependent. [23] The improvement in the peace of the world since the end of the Cold War has been tabulated here.[24]

There are also extensive difficulties in the application of statistical methods to the problem, especially to question of causation.[25]

[edit] Causes

One idea is that liberal democracies have a common culture and that this creates good relations. However, there have been many wars between non-democracies that share a common culture. Democracies are however characterized by rule of law, and therefore the inhabitants may be used to resolve disputes through arbitration rather than by force. This may reduce the use of force between democracies.

Another idea is that democracy gives influence to those most likely to be killed or wounded in wars, and their relatives and friends (and to those who pay the bulk of the war taxes). This was Kant's argument; and the mechanism is supported by the example of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which the Sejm resisted and vetoed royal proposals for war. [26] This monadic theory must, however, explain why democracies do attack non-democratic states. One explanation is that these democracies were threatened or otherwise were provoked by the non-democratic states.

R. J. Rummel dismisses these as superficial,[27] relying on Kurt Lewin and Andrew Ushenko's proposition that democracy involves a pervasive social mechanism (called a "social field") in which, "The primary mode of power is exchange, [the] political system is democratic, and [the] democratic government is but one of many groups and pyramids of power." In contrast, authoritarian systems involve a "social anti-field", "[which] divides its members into those who command and those who must obey, thus creating a schism separating all members and dividing all issues, a latent conflict front along which violence can break out." Thus, the citizens of a democracy are habituated to compromise, conflict resolution, and to viewing unfavorable outcomes as temporary and/or tolerable.

David E. Spiro points out at some length that much of the democratic peace is in fact peace between allied democratic states, which have (unlike other alliances), not broken down into war between the allies. He regards this effect as the reality of the demcratic peace; ascribing the rest of it to chance. Conversely, Christopher Layne analysed the crises and brinkmanship that took place between non-allied democratic great powers, during the relatively brief period when such existed. He found no evidence either of institutional or cultural constraints against war; indeed, there was popular sentiment in favor of war on both sides. Instead, in all cases, one side concluded that it could not afford to risk that war at that time, and made the necessary concessions. As he observes, most crises do not result in war. [28]

A study argues that democratic states are more likely than autocratic states to win the wars. One explanation is that democracies, for internal political and economic reasons, have greater resources. This might mean that democratic leaders are unlikely to select other democratic states as targets because they perceive them to be particularly formidable opponents. One study finds that interstate wars have important impacts on the fate of political regimes, and that the probability that a political leader will fall from power in the wake of a lost war is particularly high in democratic states. .[29]

On the other hand, Mansfield and Snyder argue that democratizing leaders are more likely to fight wars, whether or not they win, as a means of handling internal tension.[30]

Two of the militant democracies listed above were dominant naval powers, and therefore had greater choice whether and where to fight.[31]


A game-theoretic explanation is that the participation of the public and the open debate send clear and reliable information regarding the intentions of democracies to other states. In contrast, it is difficult to know the intentions of nondemocratic leaders, what effect concessions will have, and if promises will be kept. Thus there will be mistrust and unwillingness to make concessions if at least one of the parties in a dispute is a nondemocracy. [32]

The book Never at War explains the democratic and also a related oligarchic peace by the human tendency to classify other humans into ingroup and outgroup.

[edit] Criticisms

There are at least four logically distinguishable classes of criticism of any theory of democratic peace.

  • That the theorist has not applied his criteria, for democracy or war or both, accurately to the historical record.
  • That the criteria are not reasonable. For example, critics may prefer that liberal democracy should exclude or include both of Germany and the United Kingdom at the time of WWI, rather than count one as democratic and the other non-democratic, when they were quite similar societies.
  • That the theory may not actually mean very much, because it has limited its data below the level of significance, or because it promises only a limited peace, involving only a small class of states; for example, democracies have fought many offensive colonial and imperialistic wars.
  • That it is not democracy itself but some other external factor(s) which happened to be associated with democratic states that explain the peace.

Often, the same theory will be seen as vulnerable to several of these criticisms at the same time.

[edit] Specific historical cases

Any theory of democratic peace must face certain apparent wars between arguable democracies. The theories which claim an absolute democratic peace solve the following problems by restricting the definition of democracy (and sometimes of war); more recent authors observe that a few doubtful cases do not disprove the democratic peace, [33] which is a statistical tendency, and will, in the perversity of human affairs, have exceptions. Correlation studies do not admit exceptions, only outliers.

Kant held that some wars are to be expected; the resulting suffering is what will convince the nations to actually do the reasonable thing, and establish a lasting peace; some Kantian theorists prefer to follow him in this. [34] Other Kantians do not expect the democratic peace to include undeveloped states. [35]

Among those which have been mentioned are:

[edit] Limited claims

This has been a persistent class of criticism by realist critics: that "democracies have been few in number over the past two centuries, and thus there have few opportunities where cemocracies were in a position to fight one another." This is particularly cogent against the theories of absolute democratic peace, which claim that no two democracies have ever gone to war, and argue that the Confederate States of America, the Boer republics, the Second French Republic, and so on, were not real democracies for one or another reason. Only half a dosen republics or crowned republics achieved 2/3 male suffrage, and several of those only for a few years. [36]

Jeanne Gowa analyzed the claims of one of these theorists. She finds that there were so few democracies, by his definition, before 1939 that the claims of the theory are not significant.

She also finds that there were only independent, non-allied, Great Powers for a relatively short time before the Entente Cordiale of 1904; and that there were several crises and minor conflicts, between them, in several of which war was popular on both sides. While war was averted in these cases, there was only one war between Powers in that period, and the Spanish-American War was between a democracy and a borderline democracy.) [37] The democratic peace since 1945 she finds significant, but largely explained by the external cause of the Cold War (see below).

[edit] Colonial wars and imperialism

One criticism against a general peacefulness for liberal democracies is that they were involved in more colonial and imperialistic wars than other states during the 1816-1945 period. On the other hand, this relation disappears if controlling for factors like power and number of colonies. Liberal democracies have less of these wars than other states after 1945. This might be related to changes in the perception of non-European peoples, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [38]

Related to this is the human rights violations committed against native people, sometimes by liberal democracies. One response is that many of the worst crimes were committed by nondemocracies, like in the European colonies before the nineteenth century, in King Leopold II of Belgium's privately owned Congo Free State, and in Stalin's Soviet Union. England abolished slavery in British territory in 1833, immediately after the First Reform Bill had significantly increased democracy. (Of course, the abolition of the slave trade had begun under the Tories; and many DPT's would disclaim so undemocratic a state as Melbourne's England in other contexts.)

Some democratic peace theories implicitly or explicitly exclude the first years of democracies; either explicitly, or, for example, by requiring that the executive result from a substantively contested election. ("For all intents and purposes, George Washington was unopposed for election as President, both in 1789 and 1792";[39] therefore any theory that has this requirement would exclude the entire Washington Administration from the category of democracy.)

[edit] External causes

As Doyle notes, the theory of a Kantian peace contradicts the absolute theories of democratic peace: If three factors are required for a perpetual peace, no one of them can be the only thing needed.

There has also been a confluence of the old theory (dating back to Richard Cobden and Benjamin Constant) that Free Trade will produce and ensure peace,[40] with the modern theory that trade will produce democracy, or at least spread it to the non-democratic trading partner, as argued by Houshang Amiramahdi and others. According to this, democracy and peace are indeed correlated, because they arise from a common cause.

Other critics again argue that any apparent association between democracy and peace is an illusion, due in part to chance, and in part to peace being induced by other and transient causes. In particular, the presence of a common foe has frequently induced states, which happen to be democracies, to ally.

Joanne Gowa observes that much of the data used to infer an absolute democratic peace consists of Western democracies not going to war with each other while allied against the Soviet Union, and argues that this offers limited hope that non-allied democracies will remain at peace[dubious — see talk page]. This again overlaps with the third category above, since there is also an argument that the relative peace of the twenty-first century (so far), is due to the completion of decolonization. (John Mearsheimer offers a similar analysis of the Anglo-American peace before 1945, caused by the German threat.) David Spiro would reply that these stable alliances are the democratic peace [41]

Other critics have ascribed the democratic peace to the relative isolation of democratic states (particularly those not part of the Western alliance).

As often on academic matters, these criticisms are disputed. Papers have been done claiming significant correlation, even after controlling for such variables. [42]

[edit] See also



[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Kant:Perpetual peace 1795
  2. ^ Russett, Bruce M. Grasping the Democratic Peace : Principles for a Post-Cold War World. . p 4.
  3. ^ Clinton, Bill. 1994 State Of The Union Address. Retrieved on 2006-01-22.
  4. ^ President and Prime Minister Blair Discussed Iraq, Middle East. Retrieved on October 3, 2005.
  5. ^ Owen 2005
  6. ^ Doyle 1983
  7. ^ See Kinsella 2005
  8. ^ Müller and Wulf 2004
  9. ^ Chan 1997p.59 and papers there cited.
  10. ^ Doyle 1983, part 2
  11. ^ Hegre et al. 2001
  12. ^ Doyle 1983. Quote from footnote 8, pp.216-7. Doyle counts the northern United States as liberal throughout its history, despite the 72 years from the Seneca Convention to the Nineteenth amendment.
  13. ^ Such additional data sources include the Conflict Data Set. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Retrieved on October 3, 2005. and Data. Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation. Retrieved on October 3, 2005.
  14. ^ Binningsbø 2000; Leblang and Chan 2003
  15. ^ See the Correlates of War site. Click on Available Data Sets for particular databases.
  16. ^ Doyle 1983; Rummel 2003
  17. ^ This paragraph is entirely from Doyle 1983.
  18. ^ See, among others, Russett & Oneal Triangulating Peace and the preliminary papers Russett et al. (1998); Oneal and Russett (1999)
  19. ^ Mousseau et al. 2003 and other papers by the same suthors.
  20. ^ See Ray (1998) and Gowa Bullets and Ballots below. These are pro and con, respectively. Another critical study is Spiro 1994
  21. ^ See Wayman 2002; Russet and Oneal 2004; Beck et al. 2004; for an argument that military conflicts between any two democracies are rarely repeated, see Hensel et al. 2000. If one defines "war" as more than 1000 battlefield deaths, an "MID" will have less than that number.
  22. ^ Müller 2004; Müller and Wolff 2004
  23. ^ For which see Human Security Report 2005
  24. ^ See the Global Confilict Trends page of the Center for Systematic Peace.
  25. ^ The difficulties and disputes involved are discussed at some length in Case studies and theory development in the social sciences by Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett.
  26. ^ For a description, see Frost, Robert I.. The northern wars : war, state and society in northeastern Europe, 1558-1721. Harlow, England;New York: Longman's. 2000. Especially Pp. 9-11, 114, 181, 323.
  27. ^ See Rummel's The Conflict Helix, 2 for more.
  28. ^ Spiro 1994; Layne 1994. Layne does not discuss the second Venezuela crisis of 1902, or the Siamese crisis of 1893.
  29. ^ [citation needed]
  30. ^ Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War. EDWARD D. MANSFIELD and JACK SNYDER. : MIT Press, 2005, as reviewed in Owen 2005
  31. ^ Compare Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Influence of Sea Power on History, ad init..
  32. ^ Levy and Razin 2004
  33. ^ For example, Chan 1997; Maoz 1997 explicitly acknowledges the Spanish-American War as the (only) exception. The Six Day War and the Paquisha War come from Doyle 1983
  34. ^ Cederman 2001, p. 18-19, quoting Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784)
  35. ^ See Mousseau et al. 2003, other papers by Mousseau, and Hegre 2003
  36. ^ Quote from Mearshimer 1990, p.50; the argument is supported at length by Spiro 1994, Layne 1994.
  37. ^ See Jeanne Gowa, Bullets and Ballots. Which side of the borderline Spain falls on depends on which edition of Ted Gurr's list you read.
  38. ^ Ravlo and Glieditsch 2000
  39. ^ Quote from the National Archives of the United States.
  40. ^ See John Morley:Life of Richard Cobden and Francois Furet: Passing of an Illusion.
  41. ^ Gowa: Bullets and Ballots. Mearsheimer 1990. For the other side, Spiro 1990 .
  42. ^ For examples, seeRusset and Oneal 2004; Mousseau and Shi 1999;Reiter 2001; Reuveny and Li 2003. Other countercritical papers are cited in Rummel's website below.

[edit] References

Many of the following are from Rummel's bibliography, see #External links below.

[edit] External links

thumb|200px|right|[http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP.CHART.V19.PDF PDF link]. thumb|200px|right|[http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP.BACKSIDE.V.16.PDF PDF link].

[edit] Supportive

[edit] Critical

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