Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986

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Introduction to Democratic Peace

• Democratic states are generally as conflict-prone as non-democracies, but rarely engage in violent conflict with each other.

• Democracy, among other factors, contributes to this relative lack of conflict.

• Two primary explanatory models exist:

  • Normative Model: Norms of compromise and cooperation prevent conflicts of interest from escalating to violence.

  • Structural Model: Complex political mobilization processes impose institutional constraints, making violent conflict unfeasible between democracies.

• The democratic peace phenomenon is a significant product of the scientific study of world politics.

• It consists of two parts:

  • Democracies are as conflict-prone as non-democracies.

  • Democracies rarely clash in violent conflict and virtually never engage in full-scale war with each other.

• The relationship between democracy and peace is likely not spurious.

• This study addresses the following questions:

  • Does the degree of democratization reduce the likelihood of conflict in a dyad?

  • What factors in democratic societies prevent them from fighting each other?

  • Why do these factors not reduce the general rate of conflict involvement of democratic states?

• Two principal explanations (normative and structural models) are examined to account for the democratic-peace phenomenon.

Theoretical Considerations

• The democratic-peace proposition presents a seeming paradox due to a contradiction between its two parts.

• Any explanation must account for two observations connecting democratic political systems to international conflict.

• The normative and structural models are regarded as the most general and potentially powerful explanations.

Normative Model

• Elements can be traced back to political thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Woodrow Wilson.

• Based on two basic assumptions:

  • Normative Assumption 1: States externalize their domestic political processes and institutions' norms of behavior.

  • Normative Assumption 2: The anarchic nature of international politics implies clashes between democratic and nondemocratic norms are dominated by the latter.

• Different norms of domestic political conduct result in different patterns of international behavior.

• Democratic regimes emphasize regulated political competition through peaceful means, compromise, and stability.

• Nondemocratic regimes are more zero-sum, with conflicts resolved through violence and coercion, creating mistrust and fear.

• States prioritize survival in the international system.

• Democracies may shift norms when confronted by a nondemocratic rival to avoid exploitation or elimination.

• Conflicts between democracies are prevented from escalating due to the effective application of democratic norms.

• Conflicts between nondemocracies are more likely to escalate into war due to forceful conduct.

• Expectation of peaceful settlement lowers the benefit of violence in disputes between democracies.

• Political culture and norms transmit images to the external environment, with democracies communicating political stability.

• Perceptions of instability may encourage the use of force, especially by or against unstable regimes.

• Instability may be based on:

  • Recency and immaturity of democratic processes and norms.

  • High degree of violent opposition to the democratic government.

  • Incomplete practice of democratic forms of government.

Structural Model

• Discussed by modern students of international conflict.

• Rests upon the following assumptions:

  • Structural Assumption 1: International challenges require political leaders to mobilize domestic support.

  • Structural Assumption 2: Shortcuts to political mobilization can only be accomplished in emergencies.

• International action in democracies requires mobilizing public opinion and government institutions.

• Few goals justify fighting wars in democracies, making national mobilization difficult and cumbersome.

• Nondemocratic governments can launch policies with less regard for public opinion once key legitimizing groups support them.

• Democratic leaders are reluctant to wage wars, except when necessary or when war aims justify mobilization costs.

• The time required for a democratic state to prepare for war is far longer than for non-democracies.

• Conflicts between democracies allow diplomats the opportunity to find nonmilitary solutions.

• Conflicts between a democracy and a nondemocracy are driven by the lack of structural constraints on the mobilization and escalation process of the latter.

• Conflicts between nondemocratic systems are likely to escalate rapidly due to few structural constraints.

Comparing the Models

• The two explanations are not mutually exclusive but emphasize different facets of democratic politics.

• The structural model views constitutional and legal constraints as key.

• The normative model focuses on the effects of domestic political behavior norms on international politics.

• Distinguishing between the models in terms of contradictory predictions is extremely difficult.

• Both models claim that the tendency toward conflict decreases with political participation.

• The normative model explains this in terms of a correlation between political participation and democratic norms.

• The structural model explains this in terms of a correlation between political participation and structural constraints on the executive.

• Areas where the models differ in their predictions:

  • Democratic norms take time to develop; hence, older democracies should be less likely to clash.

  • Presidential systems should be less constrained than parliamentary systems.

  • The normative model does not expect variation within democratic political systems.

Other Potential Causes of Democratic Peace

• Three other potential causes of democratic peace should be considered:

  • Rich states do not fight one another because they have far more to lose than to gain by doing so. The costs of a war would be enormous and the benefits would be little.

  • Rapidly growing states would harm themselves by engaging in conflict against other rapidly growing states-again, because conflict and war would harm the economic benefits associated with growth.

  • Most democracies in the post-World War II era have been in some sort of a direct or indirect alliance with one another. These alliance bonds, rather than their political system, prevented them from fighting one another.

• Geographic contiguity and military capability ratios are examined as potentially confounding effects.

Research Design

• The normative-cultural and the structural-institutional models suggest several testable hypotheses.

• Multivariate statistical analysis allows assessment of how far each of various influences other than type of political system (e.g., contiguity, wealth, economic growth, affiance, and military capability ratio) affects conflict.

• Critical tests allow for a competitive and simultaneous assessment of the relative power of the two models.

• Three Hypotheses are tested:

  • HYPOTHESIS 1: The more democratic are both members of a pair of states, the less likely it is that militarized disputes break out between them, and the less likely it is that any disputes that do break out will escalate. This effect will operate independently of other dyadic attributes (e.g., wealth, economic growth, contiguity, alliance, capability ratio).

  • HYPOTHESIS 2 (NORMATIVE MODEL): The more deeply rooted are democratic norms in the political processes operating in two states, the lower the likelihood that disputes will break out or that disputes will escalate.

  • HYPOTHESIS 3 (STRUCTURAL MODEL) The higher the political constraints on the executives of the two states, the lower the likelihood that disputes will break out or that disputes will escalate.

Spatial-Temporal Domain

• Pairs of independent states in the world during the period 1946-86 (the Cold War era) are examined.

• This era is appropriate for three reasons:

  • The number of pairs of democratic states was three times as large in the later era than the first half of the twentieth century.

  • The role of democracy in restraining violent conflict between democratic dyads may have been stronger in the past half-century than earlier

  • Many influences put forward as confound- ing and contributing to the phenomenon of peace between democratic states were much more promi- nent after World War II.

• The unit of analysis is the dyad-year.

Data and Measurement

• Patterns of conflict are explained using conflict data from two different data sets:

  • Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data from the Correlates of War (COW) project.

  • International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project.

• The use of different measures of the concepts allows us to establish whether our conclusions remain consistent over different measures of the concepts.

Dependent Variables

• MID data:

  • Identifies each dyad-year dichotomously as having some kind of dispute or none, including both disputes begun any time in this year and ongoing disputes that continued into this year from a previous one. This variable is labeled dispute involvement.

  • Records the highest level of hostility reached by either member of the dyad in that year, using the Gochman-Maoz five-level scale of hostility. This is termed dispute escalation.

• ICB project data:

  • Defines an international crisis as "a situational change characterized by an increase in the intensity of disruptive interaction between two or more adversaries, with a high probability of military hostilities…. The high- er-than-normal conflictual interactions destabilize the existing relationships of the adversaries and pose a challenge to the existing structure of an international system-global, dominant, and/or subsystem"

• The two data sets are not strongly related due to different definitions and criteria.

Independent Variables: Democracy

• Form of government, or "regime," is the foremost independent variable.

• Data is developed from the Polity II data which updates and extends data collected earlier based on the regime classification of Eckstein and Gurr.

• The type of regime is defined as follows:

  • The level of authority of a political system as a combination of:

    • competitiveness of political participation

    • regulation of participation

    • competitiveness of executive recruitment

    • openness of executive recruitment

    • constraints on the chief executive

• A continuous index is created taking into account both democratic and autocratic features, as well as the level of power concentration:

  • $REG = PCON(DEM - AUT)$, where

    • REG = Regime Index

    • PCON = Power Concentration

    • DEM = Level of Democracy

    • AUT = Level of Autocracy

• The joint measure (JOINREG) must reflect two things simultaneously, namely, How democratic or undemo- cratic are the members of the dyad? and How differ- ent or similar in their regime types are the two states'?

  • $JOINREG = \frac{REG<em>h + REG</em>l}{\mid REG<em>h - REG</em>l \mid + 1}$, where

    • $REG_h$ is the regime score of the member with the higher score

    • $REG_l$ is that of the lower-scoring member.

• A threshold of +30 is used as the lower limit for democracies, and all states with scores from -25 onward are categorized as authoritarian.

• An alternative measure is created from data of Arthur Banks included in the Polity II data set, where democratic states are those in which both legislature and executive were selected in a competitive election and in which the legislature was at least partially effective.

Degree of Institutional Constraints

• To distinguish between the two models, several key attributes identified by Gurr and his associates are used:

  • Degree of "one-man rule" (monocratism)

  • Degree of executive constraint

  • Centralization

  • Scope of government actions

• These four measures are summed over their cate- gories to produce an overall scale of institutional constraints ranging from 4 (a totalitarian system lacking any form of constraint) to 22 (a highly constrained political system in which the government must go through a long, complex, and uncertain political process to invoke national action).

Democratic Norms

• The extent to which some norms of democratic behavior have become accepted in a political regime may not be closely related to states' political structures.

• Political stability is measured as the persistence of its political regime in years.

• Democratic norms are measured by the amount of political violence within a state using:

  • Deaths from political violence and extent of domestic conflict from data reported by Taylor and Jodice.

    • $Pol Deaths = \frac{2}{5} \sum<em>{j=1}^{-4} POLDTHS</em>{jt}$

    • where t is a given year and j is an index of the member of the dyad

  • The COPDAB domestic data set with information about both conflictual and cooperative political events within states.

    • $Conf Event = \frac{2}{6} \sum_{t=-5}^{0} (SumConfit - SumCoopit)$

    • where SumConf and SumCoop are, in a given year, the weighted sums of conflictual and cooperative events, respectively.

Wealth

• Average levels of income were rising over the period, so a measure of relative rather than absolute wealth is needed.

Economic Growth

• Economic growth is the percentage change in a state's gross domestic product (in constant 1980 prices) from one year to the next, computed as the average growth rate over the three years preceding the first year.

Alliance

• Alliance data have been compiled as part of the COW project, to which we added a category for indirect alliance with the United States.

Contiguity

• A revised version of a COW data set listing several degrees of contiguity, to which we added colonial contiguity for cases where one state bordered another's colony or trusteeship, is used.

Military Capability Ratio

• The widely employed COW military capability index is used, where that composite index weights about equally (two separate indices for each) military forces in being, economic strength, and demography.

Data Analysis Methods

• Data analysis was done in three steps:

  • A multivariate analysis of the various factors that may support the hypothesis that the democratic-peace phenomenon is spurious.

  • Jointly examining the structural and normative models of democratic peace.

  • A critical test if both models received some empirical support.

Design-related Problems

• Use of the dyad-year involves a statistical problem in that a particular dyad's conflict status is not independent from one year to the next.

• Sensitivity checks indicate that our treatment of continuing conflicts does not materially change the results.

Results

• Hypothesis 1 is-with some exceptions-supported by the data.

• The multivariate analysis corroborates Bremer's findings regarding alliance effects on dispute involvement and dispute escalation.

• A strong, independent, and fairly robust role for joint democracy remains evident.

• The relationship of the structural model to conflict occurrence is not nearly as robust as the normative results.

Conclusion

• Four conclusions are drawn:

  1. The democratic peace phenomenon is probably not a spurious correlation.

  2. These results are robust.

  3. Both political constraints and democratic norms provide reasonably good explanations of why democracies rarely fight each other.

  4. The normative model may be a better overall account of the democratic-peace phenomenon than the structural model.

• Domestic political processes and structures significantly affect state behavior.

• Strict top-down or outside-in models developed by system theorists are in deep trouble.

• Newly created democracies may still experience some significant amount of interstate conflict while their political systems are in the process of transition to democracy.

• The process of global democratization may carry long-term prospects of international stability that arises not out of the missile launchers but out of popular control of governments and of norms of peaceful resolution of political conflicts associated with democratic political systems.

• Major features of the international system can be socially constructed from the bottom up.

• A system created by autocracies may be recreated by a critical mass of democratic states.

The democratic peace phenomenon posits that democratic states are generally as conflict-prone as non-democracies but rarely engage in violent conflict with each other. Democracy contributes to this lack of conflict through two primary explanatory models: the Normative Model, which emphasizes norms of compromise and cooperation, and the Structural Model, which highlights institutional constraints on political mobilization that inhibit conflict between democracies.

Theoretical Considerations

The democratic-peace proposition presents a paradox that requires explanations for the relationship between democratic political systems and international conflict, particularly why democracies rarely go to war against one another.

Normative Model

This model traces its roots to thinkers like Kant and Wilson, based on assumptions that domestic political norms influence international behavior. Democratic regimes encourage peaceful conflict resolution, while nondemocratic regimes resort to violence, leading to mistrust. When democracies face nondemocratic rivals, they may adopt more aggressive norms to avoid exploitation.

Structural Model

Modern analyses focus on how democracies require broad public support for war and face more significant hindrances in mobilizing for conflict compared to nondemocracies, which can act swiftly due to fewer constraints. This leads to a preference for diplomatic solutions in conflicts involving democracies.

Comparing the Models

The normative and structural models are complementary, each shedding light on different aspects of the democratic peace. They suggest political participation correlates with reduced conflict, with older democracies exhibiting less likelihood of war.

Other Potential Causes of Democratic Peace

Other causes include economic factors, such as wealthy states being risk-averse regarding conflict and alliances formed among democracies post-World War II that further discourage fighting.

Research Design

Empirical testing of the democratic peace theory involves multivariate analysis of various influences beyond political system type, including alliance, wealth, and military capabilities. Hypotheses derived from both models aim to test the likelihood of dispute and escalation between democracies.

Data Analysis Methods

Analysis involves assessing data sets like Militarized Interstate Dispute and International Crisis Behavior to see consistent patterns in conflict behavior among democracies.

Results

The analysis supports the central hypothesis regarding joint democracy's role in conflict reduction. The normative model shows a strong correlation, while the structural model offers less robust results.

Conclusion

The study concludes that the democratic peace phenomenon is likely not spurious, with both democratic norms and constraints significantly explaining why democracies rarely engage in conflict. Transitioning democracies, however, may still encounter conflict during their formative years. Long-term, global democratization may foster international stability based on norms of peaceful conflict resolution.