An interactive model of democratic peace
| Author | David Altman,Francisco Urdinez,Federico Rojas-de-Galarreta |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0022343319883672 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
An interactive model of democratic peace
David Altman
Federico Rojas-de-Galarreta
Francisco Urdinez
Instituto de Ciencia Polı
´tica, Pontificia Universidad Cato
´lica de Chile
Abstract
Democracies do not take up arms against each other. Although this axiom has attained the status of a mantra
in the field of international relations, this statement is much more complex than it appears, in part because it is
highly contingent on the definitions and operationalizations of both democracy and conflict. This article
revisits democratic peace theory, combining both institutional constraints and similarity-based arguments.
Interactions between the democratic level of the dyad (the average democratic level of its members) and its
democratic spread (difference between the democratic scores of its members) create a dyadic triangle that
encompasses all possible combinations of cases, revisiting which dyads are more prone to conflict. The findings
partially confirm and partially refute both the institutional constraints and the similarity-based arguments,
leading to a nuanced alternative theory: the Interactive Model of Democratic Peace. Akin to democratic peace
theory, our evidence shows that the higher a dyad’s level of democracy is, the lower the probability of fatal
militarized interstate disputes between that pair of states. However, contrary to democratic peace theory, we
find that dissimilar-regime dyads can still be peaceful as long as they have a high mean of democracy.
Following the theory of regime similarity, we consider the democratic spread of each dyad, but we find that
being similar is not a sufficient condition for peacebetweenthemembersofadyad.Fromtheempirical
evidence, the article derives three heuristic zones of conflict, filling much of the gray area that has been left
unexplained by previous models.
Keywords
democratic mean, democratic peace, democratic spread, dyadic triangle, fatal MIDs, institutional constraints, regime
similarity
Introduction
In 1795, Immanuel Kant postulated that, in a world of
constitutional republics, there would be no room for
war. Thomas Paine (1776) and Alexis de Tocqueville
(1835–40) also defended republics and democracies by
stressing their lower propensity to war. However, it was
not until the second half of the 20th century that these
ideas gained empirical traction from the ground-
breaking work of Babst (1964), Rummel (1983), and
Doyle (1986). The combination of these ideas, hypoth-
eses, and tests is collectively known as the theory of
democratic peace.
Although diverse empirical tests confirm that wars (or
military conflicts) between democracies are extremely
rare – to the point of being almost non-existent (Gle-
ditsch, 1992; Maoz & Russett, 1993) – according to the
views of Paine and de Tocqueville, it is not that democ-
racies do not go to war (they do); rather, they rarely go to
war against each other (Bremer, 1992; Dixon, 1994).
Consequently, the contemporary theory of democratic
peace maintains that democracies are less likely to go to
Corresponding author:
daltman@uc.cl
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(3) 384–398
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319883672
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