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Argument: The desire to get re-elected constrains war-making

Issue Report: Democratic peace theory

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Immanuel Kant. “Perpetual Peace.”. 1795 – But there is another important theoretical thrust regarding the impact of regime type that relies less on the idea that democracy evokes normative commitments to the peaceful resolution of conflicts, and more on the idea that “leaders in democracies might avoid wars against other democratic states…because they feel that fighting such wars might be harmful to their chances of staying in power” (Ray 1995, p. 40). Bueno de Mesquita et al (1992), Bueno de Mesquita & Siverson (1995) find that interstate wars do 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.

Recently a formal model was developed (B Bueno de Mesquita, R Siverson, unpublished data) based on the axiom that political leaders in democracies, autocracies, military juntas, monarchies, and other forms of government share a common feature: “They desire to remain in office” (emphasis in the original). Bueno de Mesquita & Siverson claim that this model can account not only for the absence of wars among democratic states, but also for five additional, related, important empirical regularities: (a) the tendency for democratic states to fight other kinds of states with considerable regularity, (b) the tendency for democratic states to win the wars in which they participate, (c) the tendency for democratic states to experience fewer battle deaths in the wars they initiate, (d) the tendency for disputes between democracies to reach peaceful settlements, and (e) the tendency for major-power democracies to be more constrained to avoid war than less powerful democracies.

This list is potentially instructive because debates about competing explanations of the democratic peace are more likely to be resolved by successful subsumption of the absence of war between democratic states within related patterns and propositions than direct, increasingly detailed empirical examination of the relationship between joint democracy and the incidence of war, or analysis of individual cases (see Elman 1997). The list generated by Bueno de Mesquita & Siverson is also interesting because it omits one important pattern in the relationship between regime type and international conflict, the tendency for democratic pairs of states to be less likely than other pairs to become involved in serious, militarized disputes, convincingly demonstrated by Bremer (1993), Maoz & Russett (1993) among others.

It is possible that the leaders of democratic states, once they become involved in relatively serious disputes, avoid wars against other democratic states for the strategic, logical, or self-interested reasons, e.g. the impact of lost wars on their personal political fates, stressed by Bueno de Mesquita & Siverson (unpublished data). It is also possible that democratic states get into serious disputes with each other at a significantly lower rate than other kinds of states because of the normative or cultural constraints emphasized by a related, but nevertheless partially competitive, strand of research on the democratic peace proposition.