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      Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict.

      American Political Science Review
      JSTOR

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          Abstract

          The research reported here develops an explanation for the often-noted absence of international war between democratic states. This explanation is derived from a theoretical rationale centered on universal democratic norms for reconciling competing values and interests. I argue that democratic states locked in disputes are better equipped than others with the means for diffusing conflict situations at an early stage before they have an opportunity to escalate to military violence. Not only is this explanatory logic consistent with the published findings on democracy and war, but it also entails the novel empirical proposition that disputes between democracies are more amenable than are other disputes to peaceful settlements, the hypothesis I examine here. Analyses of contemporary interstate disputes reveal that even when potentially confounding factors are controlled, democratic opponents are significantly more likely to reach peaceful settlements than other types of disputants.

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          Most cited references40

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          Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy

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            Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946–1986.

            Democratic states are in general about as conflict- and war-prone as nondemocracies, but democracies have rarely clashed with one another in violent conflict. We first show that democracy, as well as other factors, accounts for the relative lack of conflict. Then we examine two explanatory models. The normative model suggests that democracies do not fight each other because norms of compromise and cooperation prevent their conflicts of interest from escalating into violent clashes. The structural model asserts that complex political mobilization processes impose institutional constraints on the leaders of two democracies confronting each other to make violent conflict unfeasible. Using different data sets of international conflict and a multiplicity of indicators, we find that (1) democracy, in and of itself, has a consistent and robust negative effect on the likelihood of conflict or escalation in a dyad; (2) both the normative and structural models are supported by the data; and (3) support for the normative model is more robust and consistent.
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              Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                applab
                American Political Science Review
                Am Polit Sci Rev
                JSTOR
                0003-0554
                1537-5943
                March 1994
                September 2013
                : 88
                : 01
                : 14-32
                Article
                10.2307/2944879
                918b56c6-2ff4-4636-8a99-e1d917e805c2
                © 1994
                History

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