The Controversy Over Zeev Maoz the Democratic Peace Rearguard Action Or Cracks in the Wall?

The Controversy over Zeev Maoz the Democratic Peace Rearguard Action or Cracks in the Wall?

I The democratic peace proposition has emerged as the conventional wisdom of the 1990s in international political research. This result states that (1) democracies are as war and conflict prone as nondemocratic states, and (2) democracies almost never engage each other in full-scale war, and rarely clash with each other in militarized interstate disputes short of war. The evidence is seemingly overwhelming, making this the most replicated research program in the modern study of international politics.’ Yet many critics question both the empirical validity of the democratic peace and-perhaps more significantly-the underlying caus- ality attributed to regime structure in the prevention of war. In this article I distinguish between two types of critique: realist and cultural. Realist critiques reflect a basic reasoning that internal processes and structures play a negligible role in shaping a nation’s security policy. The notion that democracies do not fight each other is backed by overwhelming evidence and poses a seemingly fundamental challenge to this realist conception. Even more problematic to adherents of the realist paradigm is the fact that explanations of the democratic peace proposition emphasize the effects of democratic norms on the strategic behavior of nations. These explanations are also supported by empirical evidence. Thus the realist critique’s first line of defense is to question the basic result. The second line of defense, given the collapse of the first, is to challenge the various explanations of the democratic peace result,

Zeeu Maoz is Professor of Political Science and Head of the Iaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is author of Domestic Sources of Global Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Israeli Political Science Association, Tel Aviv, May 28, 1995. I wish to thank Allison Astorino-Courtois, William Dixon, Ben Mor, John Oneal, James Lee Ray, Bruce Russett, and Gerrald Sorokin for their useful comments. Any errors are mine alone.

1. For reviews of this literature, see Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); James Lee Ray, Democracy and International Conflict (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996); and James Lee Ray, ”The Pacifying Impact of Democracy: Indubitable or Chimerical?” Mimeo, Vanderbilt University (January 1997).

International Security, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer 1997), pp. 162-198 0 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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by arguing that they are flawed or that factors other than regime structure or norms account for the democratic peace phenomenon.’ Cultural critiques arise from a basic discomfort with the normative and prescriptive implications stemming from the democratic peace re~ult.~This finding may seem culturally and politically loaded, thus raising concerns that it can serve as a scientific permit to missionary foreign and security policies by Western democracies. Such concerns have generated incentives to take a skeptical view of this finding and to question the extent to which it is really based on ”objective” notions of democracy and international conflict. Both the realist and cultural critiques are no doubt motivated also by a healthy skepticism based on several decades of empirical research that has failed to produce a single meaningful lawlike generalization in international relations research. This track record of nonfindings in empirical international relations research may suggest that the fate of the democratic peace literature would be just like other bodies of research in the field. It would-at best-leave us with a pervasive debate among various schools of thought, and-at worst- it would go down in the intellectual history of the discipline as another issue that, after substantial research, went n~where.~ Whether the democratic peace literature is yet another major disappoint- ment in the search for lawlike empirical generalizations in international relations depends on both the logical soundness and the empirical validity of these critiques. In assessing recent realist and cultural critiques of the democratic peace literature, this study attempts to evaluate if, and to what extent, they damage this seemingly robust and persuasive finding. This evaluation is done in terms of new evidence on the subject of democratic peace. The results of

2. An example of this critique is given by John D. Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War,” International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Sununer 1990), pp. 5-56. This study is not discussed here because it does not present empirical evidence to substantiate these claims. Other studies of this genre are discussed below. 3. Some of the first studies to examine the democratic peace issue hinted at the danger involved in extrapolating prescriptive guidelines from the fact that democracies seemingly do not fight each other. See Melvin Small and J. David Singer, ”The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes,” ]en- Salem journal of International Relations, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 1976), pp. 46-61, and Jack E. Vincent, ”Freedom and International Conflict: Another Look,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1 (March 1987), pp. 103-112. 4. See, for example, the pessimistic status reports on international conflict and war in Ted Robert Gurr, ed., Handbook of Political Conflict (New York Free Press, 1980), especially the articles by Dina Zinncs and Michael Stohl. Another more recent and basically pessimistic review is provided by Jack S. Levy, ”The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence,” in Philip E. Tetlock, Roy Radner, and Robert Axelrod, eds., Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 209-333. One review that views the full half of the research glass is John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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this review are that, although these critiques raise important issues concerning the democratic peace proposition, none of the arguments raised by critics damages either the empirical validity of the proposition or the various explanations of the relative absence of conflict among democracies. The new evidence in fact suggests stronger and more consistent support for the democratic peace proposition.

The Realist Critiques

The notion that internal processes and structures have international implications challenges the cornerstones of the realist and system perspective^.^ The basic themes of realist critiques of the democratic peace result are twofold: (1) the result is either an empirical artifact or it is limited to the nuclear era, and (2) realpolitik factors, such as power and interests, rather than democracy, are the main determinants of war and peace among states.

THE INSIGNIFICANCE OR TEMPORAL LIMITATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE John Mearsheimer has made the point about the insignificance or temporal boundedness of the democratic peace result most forcefully. Others, including David Spiro, and Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa, have sought to document it with quantitative evidence.6 Realists argue that statistical analyses of the democratic peace proposition have been based on improper aggregation of units or of temporal subperiods. Spiro’s major argument is that the proper unit of analysis is the year. Given the number of dyads, the number of liberal dyads, and the number of disputes/wars at any particular year, the difference between the expected frequency and the observed frequency of liberal dyads at war is not significant. His analysis (based on all dyads in the international system) suggests that in most years-with the exception of the World War I1 years (193945)-the number of democratic-democratic wars is not significantly different from the expected number of wars. Spiro argues that the low frequency of war between liberals is a result of the extremely low propor-

5. Zeev Maoz, Domestic Sources of Global Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), chaps. 1 and 7; Bruce Russett, ”Processes of Dyadic Choice for War and Peace,” World Politics, Vol. 47, No. 2 (January 1995), pp. 26S282; Bruce Russett, ”And Yet It Moves,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Spring 1995), pp. 164175; and Ray, Democracy and International Conflict. 6. Mearsheimer, ”Back to the Future”; David E. Spiro, ”The Insignificance of the Democratic Peace,” lnternational Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 5046; and Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa, ”Polities and Peace,” International Security, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 123- 146.

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tion of liberal dyads in the entire population of possible dyads in the interstate system. Spiro’s argument, however, is not supported by his logic and data analyses, even in terms of his biased interpretation of certain cases. If we add up his expected frequencies of war between liberals over the entire 1816-1980 period, we reach the following conclusion: Spiro’s own analysis would leads us to expect no less than 56.08 war dyads between liberals over this peri~d.~This is almost twice the number of expected wars according to Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali for the 1816-1976 period.8 Even if we accept Spiro’s biased coding of the Finland-Allies conflict as a war between liberals to account for 17 war dyads, we still conclude that his analysis identifies a total expected number of warring liberal dyads that is more than three times the actually observed number of warring liberal dyads. The aggregated difference between 56 expected war dyads and 17 observed war dyads makes for a minimum chi- square statistic of 27.23 which, with one degree of freedom, is significant at p < 0.001. Thus, by Spiro’s own standards, the democratic peace generalization is highly significant. Using the following analogy, we can interpret the logical implications of Spiro’s slicing method. Suppose I put a bowl of sugar in the yard on a hot summer day and pick it up after several hours. Would I expect to find a lot of ants in the bowl? Would I be surprised if I found only very few ants in the bowl? The answer to the first question is: Definitely yes. But the answer to the second question is: It depends on how we look at it. If we look at the bowl as a whole and observe very few ants in it, this would be a major surprise. If, however, we inspect the grains of sugar for ants, one at a time, we will hardly be surprised, because the probability of finding an ant on a single grain of sugar is extremely low. In fact, if we examine only those dyads that have a high a priori probability to engage in conflict, those that Maoz and Russet call “politically relevant dyads,”’ and if we perform an identical operation to that of Spiro over the 1816-1986 period, we expect to find a total of 57.63 liberal

7. Spiro, “The Insignificance of the Democratic Peace,” Appendix, pp. 82-86, column 9. 8. Zeev Maoz and Nasrin Abdolali, ”Regime Type and International Conflict, 1816-1976,” Iournal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 33, No. 1 (March 19891, p. 25. 9. Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, ”Alliance, Wealth Contiguity, and Political Stability: Is the Lack of Conflict Between Democracies a Statistical Artifact?” International Interactions, Vol. 17, No. 4 (January 1992), pp. 245-267, and Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, ”Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 624638. Politically relevant dyads are dyads that are directly or indirectly contiguous or those in which one member is a major power with a global reach capacity or a regional power with a regional reach capacity.

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dyads at war. Instead, we find only one: the Spanish-American War of 1898.” Again, the difference is very significant. With respect to militarized interstate disputes, we expect to find no less than 284.41 democratic dyads in disputes. Instead, we observe only 73 such dyads. For the twentieth century, with the increase in the number of politically relevant democratic dyads, the figures are even more significant. We expect to find 244 democratic dispute dyads but find only 44. Likewise, we expect to find 55.27 democratic dyads at war but find none. In their analysis Farber and Gowa break down the 1816-1980 period into five subperiods: 1816-1913, World War I (1914-18), the interwar period (1919- 38), World War I1 (1939-45), and the post-World War I1 period (1946-80). The empirical analysis based on this breakdown suggests that the relationship between joint democracy and peace applies only to the post-World War I1 period. This exercise in slicing is devoid of theoretical content and strictly ad hoc. Several scholars have made a distinction between the international politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and others have made a distinction between the nuclear era and other eras. Thus it may make sense to examine cross-temporal differences in findings, but it is not analytically correct to base the temporal breakdown on levels of the dependent variable. The democratic peace proposition refers to the effect of regime structure on a state’s (or dyad’s) likelihood to go to war. No theoretical reason exists to distinguish between a ”regular” war and a ”general” war, nor is there anything in the democratic peace literature that suggests a difference between a multilateral war and a bilateral one, or between a short and long war. The statistical implication of this slicing strategy is similar to Spiro‘s, that is, reducing the base period for examining expected and observed frequencies so that the number of democracies in a given time period would be made so small as to render statistically insignificant any difference between observed and expected frequency. The most problematic facet of this analysis, however, arises from an attempt to replicate Farber and Gowa’s analysis. My replication expands their analysis in two ways. First, I examine the entire population of dyads as well as the more theoretically meaningful population of politically relevant dyads. Second,

10. I differ with James Lee Ray, ”War Between Democracies: Rare or Nonexistent?” International Interactions, Vol. 18, No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 251-276, and Ray, Democracy and International Conflict, as well as with my findings in Maoz and Abdolali, “Regime Type,” due to a modified coding that allows for the changing nature of democracy over time. See Maoz, Domestic Sources, chap. 2, Appendix.

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I use alternative measures of democracy: the Farber-Gowa measure as well as the Maoz-Russett democracy scale. The results are given in Table 1.” In interpreting the results in Table 1, it is important to note the following. First, the reported rate of militarized interstate disputes involving democratic- democratic dyads in the nineteenth century (and in the 1816-1913 period used by Farber and Gowa) is higher than expected by chance alone. But this is not new.12 Second, Farber and Gowa’s findings on the higher war rates and the lack of significant differences between democratic-democratic dyads and other dyads in the pre-1946 periods were not replicated by the present analysis. With respect to dyadic war, the results suggest that democracy has a significant effect on peace, while in the twentieth century, democracy has a strong effect on peace. The key to the lack of correspondence between my results and those of Farber and Gowa may be that Farber and Gowa missed a number of dyads and quite a few disputes. While they generally got the number of democratic- democratic dyads right, their overall count of dyads is low. Consider the following figures. In the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) data set,I3 there are 1,569 non-war dispute dyads begun, not the 1,103 dispute dyads reported by Farber and Gowa,I4 a difference of 30 percent. The number of war dyads Farber and Gowa” reported is 232. In the Correlates of War (COW) data set there are 356 war dyads, a difference of nearly 36 percent.16Over the 1816-1980 period Farber and Gowa identify 284,602 dyad-years. The actual number for this period is 360,148, a difference of 21 percent. The discrepancies in the numbers account for the dramatically different interpretation of the results of Farber and Gowa. Even if we accept Farber and Gowa’s atheoretical slicing of

11. Despite my objection to the Farber-Gowa breakdown of the temporal domain, I use their subperiods rather than those of Maoz and Abdolali. The Maoz-Russett democracy scale is given in Maoz and Russett, “Normative and Structural Causes.” Table 1 reports only the analysis on all possible dyads. The results on politically relevant dyads are given in Zeev Maoz, ”Realist and Cultural Critiques of the Democratic Peace: A Theoretical and Empirical Re-Assessment,” Interna- tional Interactions (forthcoming). 12. Maoz and Abdolali, ”Regime Type,” pp. 24-26. 13. Charles S. Gochman and Zeev Maoz, ”Militarized Interstate Disputes, 18161976: Procedures, Patterns, Insights,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 29, No. 4 (December 1984), pp. 585-615. 14. Farber and Gowa, ”Polities and Peace,” p. 139. 15. Ibid., p. 132. 16. Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1982). My figures differ only marginally from Spiro’s, “The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace,” on nation dyads and democratic-democratic dyads. Spiro’s war dyads figures are larger than mine because in multilateral wars he includes non-war dyads as war participants. See discussion below on this point.

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Table 1. Conflict between Democracies, 1816-1986. Dyad Type Number of Dyad-Years MID Years New MlDs Wars Period Dem-Dem Nondem Dem-Dem Nondem Dem-Dem Nondem Dem-Dem Nondem All Dyads, Maoz-Russett Democracy Index 1816-1913 1,970 51,299 39 696 37 47 5 1 129 (0.0198) (0.0136) (0.0188) (0.0093) (0.0188) (0.0025) x2= 5.14; x2= 18.07; x2= 3.14; mb = -1.00; mb = -0.96; mb = 0.96; p = 0.02 p = 0.00 p = 0.08 1914-18 600 3,838 7 251 5 125 0 113 (0.0117) (0.0654) (0.0083) (0.0323) (0.0000~ (0.0294) x2= 27.36; x2= 10.72; x2= 18.13; mb = 0.82; mb = 0.84; mb = 0.84; p = 0.00 p = 0.00 p = 0.00 1919-38 7,OO 30,934 15 196 13 196 0 18 (0.0020) (0.0063) (0.0017) (0.0063) (0.0000) (0.0006) x2= 16.34; x2= 18.86; x2 = 4.37; fTlb = 0.81; mb = 0.80; mb = 0.80; p = 0.00 p = 0.00 p = 0.04 N 1939-45 1,018 10,820 6 380 6 259 0 195 (0.006) (0.035) (0.0059) (0.0239) (0.0000) (0.0180) x2= 20.79; ~2 = 13.84; x2= 18.65; mb = 0.88; mb = 0.89; mb = 0.90; p = 0.00 p = 0.00 p = 0.00 1946-86 30,312 232,728 70 1315 87 1150 0 232 (0.002) (0.006) (0.0029) (0.0049) (0.0000) (0.0010) x2= 57.16; x2= 24.58; x2= 30.24; mb = 0.88; mb = 0.88; mb = 0.88; p = 0.00 p = 0.00 p = 0.00

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1816-1913 1,475 62,764 31 759 29 523 1 134 (0.0210) (0.0121) (0.0197) (0.0083) (0.0021) (0.0021) Y x2 = 9.45; x2= 21.71; x2= 2.87; z lllb = -0.97; mb = -0.96; mb = 0.95; p = 0.00 p = 0.00 p = 0.09 1914-18 356 4,350 6 277 4 135 0 122 (0.0169) (0.0637) (0.0112) (0.0310) (0.0000) (0.0280) x2= 12.77; x2= 4.50; x2= 16.68; mb = 0.87; mb = 0.89; mb = 0.82; p = 0.00 p = 0.03 p = 0.00 s 3 1919-38 5,919 33,360 22 216 21 202 0 22 (0.0037) (0.0065) (0.0035) (0.0061) (0.0000) (0.0006) x2 = 3.90; x2= 5.60; x2 = 7.22; mb = 0.85; mb = 0.84; mb = 0.75; p = 0.05 p = 0.02 p = 0.01 1939-45 748 11,213 6 380 5 260 0 147 (0.0080) (0.0339) (0.0067) (0.0232) (0.0000) (0.0131) x2 = 15.02; x2= 8.82; x2= 16.11; mb = 0.90; mb = 0.92; mb = 0.85; p = 0.00 p = 0.00 p = 0.00 1946-86 28,498 310,632 55 1387 71 1,212 0 141 (0.0019) (0.0045) (0.0025) (0.0039) (0.0000) (0.0 00 5 ) x2= 36.62; x2= 13,79; x2= 28.98; mb = 0.99; mb = 0.91; mb = 0.82; p = 0.00 p = 0.00 p = 0.00

SOURCE: For the mb statistic, see Zeev Maoz, Domestic Sources of Global Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 130-132. Entries are raw frequencies; entries in parentheses are relative frequencies. International Security 22:1 1 170

the twentieth century into four subperiods, the results of this replication provide consistent support for the democratic peace proposition. Another aspect of the criticism of the choice of the dyad-year as the unit of aggregation is the valid argument Spiro makes about the need to look at dyads over their entire duration, rather than at dyad-years. Spiro claims that doing this would refute the democratic peace re~u1t.l~Although Spiro does not test this claim, it is certainly an interesting test of the democratic peace hypothesis. Such an analysis focuses on three different populations: (1) all dyads over the 1816-1986 period (a total of 459,307 dyad-years, making for 14,071 dyads, of which 5,781 dyads had at least one year of a different regime type); (2) the population of politically relevant dyads over the same period (67,112 dyad- years, making for 1,474 dyads, of which 607 had at least one year of a different regime type); and (3) the population of enduring rivals, that is, states that had at lease five militarized interstate disputes between them.” This population consists of 15,805 dyad-years (making for 182 dyads, of which 160 dyads had at least one year of a different regime type). There are three types of dyadic aggregations: Dem-Dem dyads that consist of jointly democratic states, Mixed dyads in which one member is democratic and the other is not; and Nondem dyads in which neither dyad had a democratic regime. (Note that a given dyad may move from one type to another over time.) A Dem-Dem dyad may become Mixed as one of the states becomes nondemocratic. Likewise, a Nondem dyad may be transformed into a Dem- Dem dyad when both members become democracies. Table 2 examines the extent to which the political characteristics of the dyad are associated with dispute and war behavior. The results of Table 2 show clearly that jointly democratic dyads experience significantly less conflict and war than either mixed dyads or nondemocratic dyads. Note that the probability of dyadic conflict and war increases substantially with the type of baseline population. Politically relevant dyads average four to nine times more disputes and wars (or dispute and war years) than all dyads. Enduring rivals average three to four times more disputes and wars or

17. Spiro, ”The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace,” pp. 77-79. 18. See Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “Enduring Rivalries: Theoretical Constructs and Empirical Patterns,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2 (June 1993), pp. 147-171, and Zeev Maoz and Ben D. Mor, ”Enduring Rivalries: The Early Years,” International Political Science Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 1996), pp. 141-160, for the definition of the concept of enduring rivalries. Paul Hensel, Gary Goertz, and Paul F. Diehl, in “The Democratic Peace and Rivalries: A Longitudinal Investigation of Regimes, Regime Change, and Conflict,” Mimeo, Florida State University, 1996, provide similar results.

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Table 2. Dyad Types and Conflict Involvement, 1816-1986.

Population Dyad Type Disputes Wars Disputes + Year Wars + Year All Dyads Dem-Dem 0.030a 0.0005a 0.001 4a 0.00007a N = 2,211 (0.257) (0.021) (0.017) (0.0003) Dem-Nondem 0.120b 0.0333b 0.0051 0.001 1 N = 10,859 (1.026) (0.427) (0.048) (0.018) Nondem-Nondem 0.261 0.0566 0.0069 0.001 6 N = 6,782 (1.470) (0.537) (0.041) (0.023) Grand Mean 0.1581 0.0376 0.0053 0.001 1 St. Dev. 1.1498 0.4550 0.0435 0.0187 N = 19,582 F = 46.66 f = 14.40 F = 13.36 f = 5.81 p < .001 p < .001 p < .001 p < .003

Politically Dem-Dem 0.1 38ga 0.003Ia 0.0085a 0.00001a Relevant N = 324 (0.536) (0.056) (0.039) (0.001) Dyads Dem-Nondem 1.0185b 0.1 110 0.0406 0.0098 N = 919 (2.976) (0.429) (0.116) (0.051) Nondem-Nondem 1.3305 0.1432 0.0454 0.0099 N = 838 (3.044) (0.472) (0.103) (0.055) Grand Mean 1.0072 0.1072 0.0375 0.0083 St. Dev. 2.7730 0.4142 0.1022 0.0487 N = 2.081 F = 21.59 f = 13.44 f = 16.02 f = 5.49 p <.001 p < .001 p < .001 p < .004

Enduring Dem-Dem 0.2857a 0.015ga 0.0248a 0.0003a Rivals N=63 (0.792) (0.126) ( 0.0 7 6 ) (0.002) Dem-Nondem ,9583 0.4097 0.2003 0.0340 N = 144 (6.080) (0.880) (0.275) (0.107) Nondem-Nondem 6.0672 0.5746 0.1731 0.0354 N = 134 (5.539) (0.913) (0.1 54) (0.101) Grand Mean 4.5308 0.41 18 0.1572 0.0283 St. Dev. 5.2750 0.9125 0.2059 0.0940 N = 341 F = 26.56 F = 10.17 f = 16.58 F = 3.44 D < ,001 D < .001 D < ,001 D < .034

NOTES: 1. Entries are mean (standard deviation) number of conflicts (disputes, wars). In the last two columns (disputes + year and wars + year) entries are mean number of conflicts per year. 2. Sources and measures are iven in the methodological appendix. Multiple comparison results: 'Mean significantly different from next two regime-type levels. Mean significantly different from next regime-type level.

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disputes per year or wars per year than politically relevant dyads. This increase in dispute frequency takes place irrespective of the regime characteristics of the dyad.’’ What is striking, however, is that jointly democratic enduring rivals have a significantly lower frequency of disputes and wars than politically relevant dyads that are not jointly democratic. Jointly democratic politically relevant dyads have a significantly lower frequency of conflict than non-jointly democratic dyads that are not politically relevant dyads. Thus the actual frequency of disputes and war between states that have a very high a priori probability to engage in conflict, but are jointly democratic, is significantly lower than between states that are not theoretically expected to engage in conflict but are not jointly democratic. This is a powerful result in support of the democratic peace proposition. In addition to the aggregate statistical evidence for this aspect of the democratic peace proposition, it is useful to examine some of the examples behind the overall figures. Many of these dyads are among the most rivalrous pairs of states over the 1816-1986 period. The following examples demonstrate how democracy affects the likelihood of conflict in extreme cases. 1. The U.S.-U.K. dyad accounts for a total of 171 dyad-years, of which 42 years are those in which at least one member was nondemocratic. During these years the dyad experienced 11 militarized interstate disputes (an average of 0.26 disputes per year). In the remaining 129 years, where both states were democratic, the dyad experienced only one dispute (an average of 0.008 disputes per year). 2. The U.S.-Spain dyad accounts for 110 years during which at least one member was nondemocratic. During these years, the states experienced 14 disputes (an average of 0.127 disputes per year), but no war. During the remaining 61 years, when both states were democratic, they engaged in only two disputes (an average of 0.033 disputes per year). One of these disputes, however, was the Spanish-American War of 1898. So this is the only coun- terexample of a democratic-democratic war.

19. This is consistent with the emerging knowledge about the characteristics of conflict in the modem era. Specifically, we now know that most militarized disputes and war were waged between politically relevant dyads. See Maoz, Domestic Sources, chap. 5. We also know that many of these politically relevant dyads were disproportionately likely to evolve into enduring rivalries, characterized by extremely high dispute and war frequencies. See Goertz and Diehl, ”The Empiri- cal Importance of Enduring Rivalries,” International Interactions, Vol. 18, No. 2 (June 1992), pp. 151- 163.

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3. The U.K.-France dyad accounts for 67 years wherein at least one state was nondemocratic. Seven disputes occurred during these years (an average of 0.104 disputes per year) and one war (during the Vichy regime in 194041). In the remaining 104 years of joint democracy, this dyad experienced only one dispute-the Fashoda crisis4an annual average of less than 0.01 disputes) and no war. 4. The France-Germany dyad accounts for a total of 19 disputes and 4 wars over the 1816-1986 period, all of which took place when at least one state was nondemocratic (128 years, with an average of 0.146 disputes and 0.031 wars per year). None of these disputes or wars took place during the 40-year period when both states were democracies. An identical pattern is observed in the U.K.-Germany dyad. 5. The Greece-Turkey dyad accounts for 29 disputes, of which four were full-scale wars that occurred over a 157-year period. Of these, 26 disputes and all four wars occurred during the 133-year period wherein at least one state was not a democracy (an average of 0.195 disputes and 0.031 wars per year). Only three disputes and no wars occurred during the 24-year period when both states were democracies (an average of 0.125 disputes per year). 6. The India-Pakistan dyad accounts for a total of 28 disputes and three wars. Of these, 25 disputes and all three wars took place during times when at least one state was nondemocratic (an average of 0.75 disputes and 0.09 wars per year), and only three (0.375 disputes per year) over the eight years wherein both have been jointly democratic?’ These examples indicate that the most conflict-prone dyads reduced significantly their conflict behavior when both members became democratic. Spiro’s assertion concerning the need to aggregate units over dyadic histories is useful because it provides more powerful proof for the validity of the democratic peace result. And as in other aspects of his critique, Spiro’s expec- tation that such a test would refute the democratic peace result does not find support in the empirical data.

POWER, COMMON INTERESTS, AND DEMOCRATIC PEACE The presumed causal mechanisms that prevent democracies from fighting each other-namely, the structural constraints on the use of force imposed on democratic executives, emphasized by the structural model of the democratic

20. A comprehensive list of all states with more than five disputes in their common history is given in Maoz, ”Realist and Cultural Critiques.”

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peace, or the tendency of democracies to externalize norms of peaceful conflict resolution, emphasized by the normative explanation of the democratic peace-challenge the core assumptions of the realist paradigm. The empirical evidence for these models is also damaging.” Hence the realist criticism of the normative and structural models of the democratic peace is twofold: First, it questions the validity of the normative and structural explanations. Second, it argues that the factors that prevent wars between states in general, including wars between democracies, are realist in nature, particularly with respect to power balances and common interests. An examination of the first aspect of this critique, however, is beyond the scope of this study.” A central theme of Farber and Gowa’s study is that common interests, rather than common polity type, are the principal factors that prevent states from going to war with each other. Likewise, Christopher Layne argues that in crises between democracies, the principal factor that has averted war is power-related calculations, rather than regime-related constraints or the democratic nature of the ~pponent.’~Specifically, democracies, like any other type of state, are reluctant to escalate crises when the balance of power with the opponent, democracy or not, is ~nfavorable.’~ Farber and Gowa’s argument is not tested, but rather is included as an axiom. They reject controlling for alliances as indicators of common interests in multivariate tests of the democratic peace proposition. Their reasoning is that ”both alliances and serious disputes are likely to be affected by a common set of unmeasured variables (e.g., variables measuring the congruity of interests). As a result of these omitted variables, the use of alliances as an independent variable in a multivariate regression analysis of disputes will create biased parameter estimate^."'^ They do not tell us what these variables are that tap the congruity of interests, but this statement suffices to reject the classical

21. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, pp. 30-42, and Maoz and Russett, “Normative and Structural Causes.” 22. An extensive analysis of the Farber and Gowa critique of the normative and structural models is given in Maoz, ”Realist and Cultural Critiques.” 23. Christopher Layne, ”Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 549. 24. It must be noted that realists do not agree on the question of the balance of power and conflict. Some argue that balance promotes stability. See, for example, Kenneth E. Waltz, Theory of Interna- tional Politics (Menlo Park, Calif.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), and Mearsheimer, ”Back to the Future.” Others claim that balance promotes conflict. See, for example, A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York Free Press, 1988). The empirical evidence mentioned above leans heavily in favor of the latter argument. 25. Farber and Gowa, “Polities and Peace,” p. 138.

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realist and neorealist studies of world politics, which emphasize international alignment as one of the key responses to security threats in an anarchical international system.26 Even assuming that it does not make sense to use parametric methods to estimate the effects of alliances and regime type on war and conflict behavior, alliance relations still may be a useful indicator of common interests, at least in the negative sense. It is reasonable to assume that states with conflicting interests would not enter into an alliance. How should we test the argument that common interests, rather than common polities, produce relative peace between states? Both Layne‘s emphasis on power-related calculations in crisis management and Farber and Gowa’s argument about common interests as a key dampening factor offer competing explanations of the democratic peace hypothesis. Yet the extent to which one explanation is superior or inferior to the other when both explanations seem to be empirically related to a given dependent variable is based on “critical cases,” that is, cases in which the two explanations offer contradictory predictions regarding the variable in q~estion.’~ The critical test approach allows us to distinguish between realist and liberal explanations of conflict and crisis escalation. Farber and Gowa’s argument is that common interests are a deterrent for the escalation of interstate relations, not only from the level of militarized disputes to war but also for the escalation of interstate relations to the dispute level. On the other hand, Layne’s argument centers on the effect of regime-related or power-related factors on dispute management and thus on the war/no-war outcome of the disputes. This requires separate critical tests of these two arguments. To perform a critical test of the realist versus democratic peace arguments, I propose the following approach. I select the hypothesized cases in which the

26. See, for example, Waltz, Theory of International Politics; George Liska, Nations in Alliance: The Limits of Interdependence (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962); Hans J. Morgen- thau, Politics Among Nations (New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1948); Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981); Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987); James D. Morrow, ”Alliances and Asymmetry: An Alternative to the Capability Aggregation Models of Alliances, ” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 35, No. 44 (December 1991), pp. 904-933; and Randolph M. Siverson and Harvey Starr, “Regime Change and the Restructuring of Alliances,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 38, No. 1 (March 1994), pp. 145-161. 27. Charles Lave and James G. March, Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), and Benjamin Most and Harvey Starr, Inquiry, Logic, and International Politics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). For an application of this approach in research on the democratic peace, see Maoz and Russett, ”Normative and Structural Causes.”

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two models produce contradictory predictions. For example, from the perspective of the Farber-Gowa arguments, democracies that are not aligned with each other (and thus presumably do not share common strategic interests) should be more likely to engage in conflict than non-jointly democratic dyads that are aligned. On the other hand, the democratic peace argument would be just the opposite: nonaligned democracies should be less conflict prone than aligned nondemocracies. Using Layne’s argument, equally balanced democracies should be more likely to escalate disputes into wars than non-jointly democratic dyads in which one member is militarily preponderant. The democratic peace prediction for such cases is that equally balanced democracies are less likely to escalate disputes than non-jointly democratic dyads in which one state is militarily preponderant. Examining the actual and expected frequencies of disputes or wars in those critical areas allows an assessment regarding which model provides a more compelling explanation. Table 3 shows the results of this analysis on various populations and two different measures of joint democracy? The findings indicate clearly that democracy, rather than alliance, prevents conflict and war. Nonaligned democracies are considerably less likely to fight each other than aligned nondemocracies. Two states that share common interests but do not share a democratic system are considerably more likely to fight each other than democracies that do not show an affinity of interests. These results are highly significant irrespective of the definition of democracy, of the type of cases, or of the definition of the dependent dispute/war variable. It may be that both alliances and joint regime structure are correlated with the same measures of interests; but when the predictions of interests-based models contradict regime-based predictions, realist theories perform quite poorly. To test Layne’s notion about the effect of power balances-as opposed to common regime structure-on the management and escalation of militarized disputes, I performed a similar critical test on the dependent variable of escalation/no escalation. I agree with Layne’s argument that ”democratic peace theory, if valid, should account powerfully for the fact that serious crises between democratic states ended in near misses rather than in war.”29Yet this is not what Layne’s case studies do, because his tests include cases in which realist and democratic peace models do not yield contradictory predictions

28. The first and second panels of Table 3 test the democratic peace theory against the Farber-Gowa interest-driven conflict theory. They cover all dyads and all politically relevant dyads. The third panel tests the democratic peace theory against Layne’s proposition of power-balance-driven escalation of disputes, and focuses only on dispute outcomes in terms of war/no war. 29. Layne, “The Myth of the Democratic Peace,” p. 13.

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about the outcomes of crises. According to his analysis, all of these cases represent crises between democracies that are characterized by a military preponderance of one of the members of the dyad. To properly test the democratic peace theory competitively against, for example, the power-balance explanation, the difference between the crisis behavior patterns of democracies and nondemocracies must be established. The third panel of Table 3 provides the results of the critical test. The findings again strongly support the democratic peace theory rather than Layne's notion that it is balance-of-power- related calculations that avert escalation to war in militarized disputes. The reason that the chi-square statistics are not significant in the case of new dispute escalation is because of the low frequency of disputes between balanced democracies: only 14 such cases exist when joint democracy was measured using the Maoz-Russett democracy index, and only 11 such cases exist when using the Farber-Gowa democracy index. Needless to say, none of these cases entailed escalation to war. The empirical analyses of the arguments raised by realist critics of the democratic peace proposition suggest that dispute outbreak and dispute management are driven both by realist factors and by regime-type factors. When realist theories predict behavior that contradicts regime-based predictions, however, the democratic peace predictions provide a substantially better fit to the data than either realist notions of common interests or of power balances.

Cultural Criticisms of the Democratic Peace Result

The essence of cultural criticisms of the democratic peace result is embedded in the culture of democracy or the definition of the concept itself and how the concept of democracy is perceived by scholars and political leaders.

THE NORTH ATLANTIC CULTURE OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE PROPOSITIONS Raymond Cohen dismisses the democratic peace result because (1) the democratic peace literature focuses only on international war, ignoring colonial or imperial wars (or civil wars), and (2) when short-of-war conflict is being used, it does not take into account covert interventions?' Of course, democratic

~~ ~ 30. Raymond Cohen, "Pacific Unions: A Reappraisal of the Theory That Democracies Do Not Fight One Another," Review of International Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (August 1994), pp. 207-224. See the reply to Cohen by Bruce Russett and James Lee Ray, "Raymond Cohen on Pacific Unions: A Response and a Reply," Review of International Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3 (July 1995), pp. 319-325.

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Table 3. Critical Test of Alliances versus Democracy: Alternative Populations and Democracy Measures. Democratic Peace: Realist: No Conflict; Dependent Measure of No Conflict; Democratic Peace: Variable Democracy Realist: Conflicta Conflictb Statistics All Dvads MID Years Maoz-Russett 0.0343 0.1180 x2 = 84.7Ic; N = 2,975 62 255 Yule's Q = -0.547 MID Years Farber-Gowa 0.0309 0.1221 x2 = 101.93C; N = 3,039 90 262 Yule's Q = -0.526 New MlDs Maoz-Russett 0.0467 0.1462 x2 = 77.85C; N = 3,139 70 261 Yule's Q = -0.512 New MlDs Farber-Gowa 0.0418 0.1543 x2 = 1O5.9Oc; N = 2,353 89 266 Yule's Q = -0.535 War Years Maoz-Russett 0.002 0.026 x2 = 11.41gC; N = 659 1 17 Yule's Q = -0.867 War Years Farber-Gowa 0.001 0.041 x2 = 28.78C; N = 709 1 29 Yule's Q = -0.939 No. of Wars Maoz-Russett 0.004 0.092 x2 = 13.05c; N = 237 1 19 Yule's Q = -0.880 No. of Wars Farber-Gowa 0.004 0.129 x2 = 35.33c; N = 271 1 35 Yule's Q = -0.949 Politically Relevant Dyads MID Years Maoz-Russett 0.027 0.706 x2 = 51.44c; N = 2,095 56 222 Yule's Q = -0.477 MID Years Farber-Gowa 0.0309 0.103 x2 = 33.9OC; N = 2,184 86 224 Yule's Q = -0.350 New MlDs Maoz-Russett 0.036 0.141 x2 = 55.26c N = 1,728 63 243 Yule's Q = -0.470 New MlDs Farber-Gowa 0.047 0.141 x2 = 50.32c; N = 1,782 84 252 Yule's Q = -0.412 War Years Maoz-Russett 0.002 0.033 x2 = 9.46C; N = 511 1 17 Yule's Q = -0.845 War Years Farber-Gowa 0.002 0.042 x2 = 15.44C; N = 558 1 23 Yule's Q = -0.895 No. of Wars Maoz-Russett 0.005 0.075 x2 = N=20 1 15 Yule's Q = -0.827 No. of Wars Farber-Gowa 0.004 0.116 x2 = 17.00C; N = 216 1 25 Yule's Q = -0.903 Dispute DyadoEscalation of Militarized Interstate Disputesd

MID Years Maoz-Russett 0.000 0.802 x2 = 5.49c; N War = 688 0 552 Yule's Q = -1.000 MID Years Farber-Gowa 0.000 0.807 x2 = 5.37c; N War = 747 0 603 Yule's Q = -1.000 New MlDs Maoz-Russett 0.000 0.836 x2 = 2.38; N War = 220 0 184 Yule's Q = -1.000 New MlDs Farber-Gowa 0.000 0.850 x2 = 2.07; N War = 253 0 215 Yule's Q = -1.000

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states intervened covertly in other democratic states. The covert U.S. intervention in Chile in 1973 is the usual example that is given. The notion that democracies have been involved in interventions in the internal affairs of other democracies was subject to several tests. The results generally support the democratic peace proposition. Not only are democracies less likely to engage in-overt and covert-military intervention in other democracies, but they are less likely to become the targets of military intervention by other states.31 Two differences between the proponents and the opponents of the democratic proposition are notable. First, proponents of this proposition typically back their arguments with hard empirical evidence and clearly articulated measures of the phenomenon under investigation. Opponents tend to rely on untested arguments and selective examples. Second, proponents of the democratic peace proposition specify just how generalizable it really is. (Note that the problem of generalizing across levels of analysis is still unresolved.) The opponents-and Cohen's article is a good exampl-riticize the democratic peace proposition in terms of aspects of political behavior that go well beyond these limits, for example, by questioning a proposition that relates regime type to interstate conflict and war, because it does not deal with the covert behavior of democracies. Cohen argues that students of quantitative research have been tinkering with the definition of democracy, and accuses them of relaxing the definition of

31. Charles W. Kegley Jr. and Margaret G. Hermann, "Military Intervention and the Democratic Peace," International Interactions, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1995), pp. 1-21, and Margaret G. Hermann and Charles W. Kegley Jr., "Ballots, a Barrier Against the Use of Bullets and Bombs: Democratiztion and Military Intervention," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 40, No. 1 (September 1996), pp. 436- 459.

a Democratic Peace: No Conflict; Realist: Conflict: Upper row in a given cell for this column represents the relative frequency of conflictlwar for dyads that are jointly democratic but that-according to the realist perspective-should end up in conflict or war because they are either nonaligned (Farber-Gowa) or are militarily balanced (Layne). Lower row for this cell represents the relevant number of conflicts/wars for this category. Realist: No Conflict; Democratic Peace: Conflict: Upper row in a given cell for this column represents the relative frequency of conflictlwar for dyads that are not jointly democratic, but that-according to the realist perspective-should not escalate into conflict or war because they are either aligned (Farber-Gowa) or reflect a considerable capability disparity (Layne). Lower row for this cell represents the relevant number of conflicts/wars for this category. p < 0.01. Test of Layne's power-balance proposition on cases of conflict escalation in ongoing disputes.

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democracy to tilt the evidence toward the democratic peace prop~sition.~’But relaxing the definition of democracy does just the opposite. If the baseline finding is that democracies do not fight each other, then one may criticize the finding by arguing that the definition of democracy is overly re~trictive.~~ Therefore states that are close to the threshold of democracy, which may have fought each other, do not enter into the definition of democracy. Lowering the threshold actually increases rather than decreases the a priori probability of war between democracies. The democratic peace literature is meticulous in its efforts to test this proposition for robustness, using multiple indicators of democracy and multiple conflict data sets. This may be the key reason why the democratic peace result is so overwhelming that it has withstood numerous efforts at refutation. Cohen’s last resort is to argue that the democratic peace result holds true only for the North Atlantic community in the post-World War I1 era. This argument is similar to Farber and Gowa’s. Yet if there is a North Atlantic culture that imposes stability in states’ dealings with each other, where was this culture during the two world wars, which were more destructive than any other war in history? Why is it that until 1945 most major European states featured prominently in the enduring rivalry list over the 1816-1990 period?34 Could it be the formation of a collective-security community facing a common enemy that terminated the previous rivalries? If so, why did the opposing security community-which also faced a common enemy-experience two wars and over 25 short-of-war disputes? Some of the most dispute-prone dyads that had mixed regime scores are in the European and American continents. These dyads reduced their conflict involvement significantly when they became democratic; and the process of democratization seemingly coincided with the emergence of the North Atlantic security community. But there are two important issues that this critique does not account for. First, some of the changes to joint democracy took place well before the formation of the security community, and when this happened, conflict levels declined substantially. Take, for example, the U.S.-U.K., and France-U.K. dyads, and all of the conflict dyads involving Turkey and Ger- many. Turkey’s initial transition to democracy was in the mid-1920s, while Germany’s first experience with democracy occurred during the 1919-33 pe-

32. Ray, ”War Between Democracies.” 33. This is Ido Oren’s line of argument in ”The Subjectivity of the ’Democratic’Peace,” International Security, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 1995), pp. 147-184. 34. See Gochman and Maoz, ”Militarized Interstate Disputes,” pp. 611412, and Zeev Maoz, “The Onset and Initiation of Militarized Interstate Disputes in the Modem Era,” International Interactions, Vol. 19, No. 2-3 (September 1993), pp. 117-141, for a list of dispute-prone states and dyads.

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riod. In both cases the conflict activity of these states with their traditional rivals dropped significantly. Consider members of the democratic club in the North Atlantic community (e.g., Greece and Turkey) that became nondemocratic during the 1945-86 period. Whenever this happened, the conflict between them flared up. Second, and more important, the effect of democracy on the probability of dyadic conflict is a global phenomenon that reaches back into history well before the advent of nuclear weapons. Some of the most bitter rivalries occurred in Latin America (e.g., Peru-Ecuador, Chile-Argentina, Brazil- Argentina). More modern rivalries emerged in Southeast Asia (e.g., India- Pakistan). The effect of democracy on conflict and war in these dyads is identical to the effect of the North Atlantic culture. Greece and Turkey fought four wars; India and Pakistan fought three wars. None of these wars took place when both members of these dyads were democratic. Chile and Peru, and Brazil and Argentina, show similar effects. Consider also interregional dyads (e.g., U.K.-Brazil, U.K.-Argentina, Spain- Chile, Fran~e-Thailand).~~Here again we observe identical effects of democratization. Thus no matter where we look in the world, democratization has the same effect: the evidence suggests that the North Atlantic culture notion has limited explanatory power. It is difficult to find a common denominator other than democratization that can account for the reduction in the level of dyadic conflict for this spatially and temporally varied population of dyads.36 If democracy has this kind of dampening effect on dispute propensity in cases of highly dispute-prone dyads, it should-and does-have an even stronger effect on other politically relevant dyads. The evidence is highly robust. No matter how we look at it, democracy, rather than any other ad hoc explanation, accounts for the drastic reduction in levels of international conflict and brings the probability of war to near zero. If culture has a dampening effect on the likelihood of conflict, it is because a hidden notion exists that homogeneous cultural systems do not fight each other. But we have seen that the same members of the North Atlantic club Cohen mentions were fierce enemies who experienced more bloodshed than most other enemies in human history, including the Napoleonic Wars and two world wars. Moreover, other homogeneous cultures have also experienced

35. For figures on these extraregional dyads, see Maoz, ”Realist and Cultural Critiques,” Table 4. 36. See evidence on this issue in Maoz, ”Realist and Cultural Critiques,” Table 3, which shows the levels of dispute involvement and war involvement for all dyads by regime type. In all of the above-mentioned cases, periods of joint democracy for each dyad are marked by a substantial reduction in conflict activity for the dyad.

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considerable warfare. Consider conflicts and war among Arab and Moslem states (including the Yemeni civil war, the Lebanese civil war, and the Jorda- nian civil war of September 1970-all three of which were internationalized civil wars-as well as the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War).37Consider conflicts and wars among the Catholic states in Latin America. Anyone who makes a cultural argument must account for these anomalies. This is just another reason why such criticism fails to harm the democratic peace result.

THE SUBJECTIVITY OF DEMOCRACY Democratic peace scholars are accused of fundamentally misrepresenting the concept of democracy in three ways.38 First, they do not “normalize” the measures of democracy: Democracy is measured in terms of American rather than universal standards. Second, students of the democratic peace proposition are said to ignore changes in the meaning of democracy over time. Third, and most important, given that the explanation for the democratic peace proposition rests on leaders’ perceptions of the regime type of their rivals, democratic peace scholars fail to realize that the perception of democracy may change as a function of foreign policy processes. Ido Oren uses images of Germany that leading American political scientists propagated at the turn of the century as evidence for this thesis. His reading of Philip Burgess and Woodrow Wilson suggests that both scholars considered Germany an ideal of democracy, with a far more advanced and effective political system than that of other states in Europe. Only when relations between the United States and Germany soured in 1917 did Wilson change his perception of Germany. From this account Oren concludes that we cannot assume that leaders perceive other regimes using the ”objective” measures of regime structure. If this is the case, then the part of the democratic peace argument that is based on perceptions of restraint and fair play may well be fundamentally flawed.39 The logic and documentation of this argument have a number of fundamental flaws, however. First, it is important to distinguish between the focus on political scientists and the focus on political leaders. As interesting as the study of Burgess’s writings about Germany is, it is not relevant to the basic argument. The democratic peace proposition is not about political scientists refraining

37. See Zeev Maoz, “Regional Security in the Middle East: Past Trends, Present Realities, and Future Challenges,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1 (forthcoming). 38. Oren, ”The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic’ Peace.” 39. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), and Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace.

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from fighting each other: it is about democratic states not fighting each other. Perceptions of political scientists lacking political influence make for interesting anecdotes, but they hardly serve as evidence for this thesis. On the other hand, the perceptions of Woodrow Wilson may matter, because he was a political scientist turned political leader!’ Yet Oren’s account of Burgess’s writings on Germany does suggest that Burgess’s affinity for Germany clouded his own analysis of its political and educational systems. Likewise, Burgess’s mistrust of Britain may well have fueled his unfavorable perception of Britain’s political system and its foreign policy. This suggests exactly what modern political scientists claim repeatedly: Clear definitions of concepts and explicit measures allow inspection of biases-if such exist. Oren claims that Wilson’s perception of Germany was characterized by a great deal of admiration for its political system. Citations from Wilson’s works on government and public administration support this argument. Yet Oren does not mention that all these writings were published during the nineteenth century. In other words, we have a gap of 17 years in Wilson’s perception of Germany. This gap is highly significant given that Wilson went from teaching and research to academic administration and then to politics. Is it possible that some of his perceptions altered over the years, and in particular, his perception of Germany? A survey of Wilson’s papers during 1900-1741 reveals an interesting pattern. None of the references to Germany from 1900 to 1913 addresses in any direct way its political system and institutions. The few references to Germany concern its system of higher education, which Wilson praises for its effective- ness. Yet he also argues that this system is an inappropriate model of academic education for the United States because it does not advance certain values that are central to American social life. However, when World War I broke out, and as early as the fall of 1914-long before the United States entered the war-Wilson‘s remarks on Germany (or more accurately, the remarks others have attributed to him) are quite telling of his perceptions. Herbert Bruce Brougham of the New York Times reports an interview with Wilson on December 14, 1914, in which Wilson was quoted as saying:

It may be found before long that Germany is not alone responsible for the war, and that other nations will have to bear a portion of the blame in our eyes.

40. Oren justifies his focus on political scientists because they represent a “control group” of today’s political scientists who subscribe to the democratic peace literature. This is irrelevant to the argument, because it deals with sociology of knowledge, not with the substantive argument. 41. Arthur A. Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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The others may be blamed, and it might be well if there were no exemplary triumph and punishment. I believe thoroughly that the settlement should be for the advantage of the European nations regarded as Peoples and not for any nation imposing its governmental will upon alien peoples. Bismarck was long-headed when he urged Germany not to take Alsace and Lorraine. It seems to me that the Government of Germany must be profoundly changed, and that Austria-Hungary will go to pieces altogether-ought to go to pieces for the welfare of Europe.42 Colonel Edward House describes a meeting he had with Wilson on Au- gust 30, 1914. I [Colonel House] was interested to hear him [Wilson] express as his opinion, what I had written him sometime ago in one of my letters from Europe, to the effect that if Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation. . . . He felt deeply the destruction of Louvain, and I found him as unsympathetic with the German attitude as is the balance of America. He goes even further than I in his condemnation of Germany’s part in this war, and almost allows his feeling to include the German people as a whole rather than the leaders alone. He said German philosophy was essentially selfish and lacking in spirituality. . . . He was particularly scornful of Germany’s disregard of treaty obligations, and was indignant at the German Chancellor’s designation of the Belgian Treaty as being ”only a scrap of paper.”43

These could hardly be described as positive perceptions of a nation with values and norms similar to those of the United States. There are of course more negative perceptions of Germany as the war progressed, but clearly the notion of Germany as a free democratic state that subscribed to norms of moral conduct does not appear to have been one Wilson espoused at the start of the war. Despite both the position of strict U.S. neutrality and mediation efforts between Germany and Britain, Wilson did make a regime-based distinction between the ”good guys” and the ”bad guys” even during the first stages of the war. Oren’s account of Wilson’s perception of Germany misses the truth by a wide margin. Inferring his perception of Germany as a politician from his perception of Germany as a political scientist is a risky venture, not only because a person’s perceptions may be shaped by the kind of office he or she holds, but because perceptions may change over time; and a 15- or 16-year gap in politics

42. Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 31, p. 459 (emphasis added). 43. Ibid., pp. 461463. House’s account of Wilson’s remarks may be biased given his pro-British attitude. Nevertheless, this fits other perceptions that Wilson directly stated in 1915-17.

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is just too wide to skip. Oren’s basic argument that perceptions of other states are influenced by foreign policy processes may well be valid; however, the evidence for this argument is weak. We cannot say for sure whether Wilson preserved or altered his perceptions of Germany in the 14 years before the outbreak of World War I. Yet it seems that Wilson’s perceptions of Germany’s government and of its international conduct were negative some time before the United States’ entry into the war. Oren admits this perceptual shift but does not discuss when it happened. By implication, one is led to believe that deterioration in U.S.-German relations was responsible for this shift, which is hardly the case. Even if perceptual change with respect to the democratic nature of a state is a result of foreign policy events rather than domestic political shifts, this does not contradict democratic peace propositions. Democratic peace theory reasons that crisis management is shaped by democratic norms of international conduct that emulate democratic norms of domestic political conduct.44Research shows that correlations between the measures of democratic norms and regime type are high but not perfect. Likewise, the correlations between indicators of democratic norms or international conduct (type of settlement) and regime type are significant but not perfe~t.4~The normative argument-put in perceptual terms-is that, to the extent that a state’s own value system is democratic and to the extent that it perceives the norms guiding another state’s behavior as democratic, it would try to use its own norms. The normative model explains international behavior in general, not only democratic behavior. Thus it is possible that the political elite of state A would perceive the norms of conduct of state B as democratic even if the regime of state B is nondemocratic. Likewise, it is possible that the political elite of state A would perceive the international norms of conduct as nondemocratic even if it perceives state B as a democracy. The notion that perception of regime type is a function of the norms of conduct that a state employs in its internal or international politics is perfectly consistent with the normative model of the democratic peace. Given that objective structures and subjective perceptions of norms are highly correlated,

44. See Maoz and Russett, ”Normative and Structural Causes”; Russett, Grusping the Democratic Peace; and William J. Dixon, “Democracy and the Management of International Conflict,” journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 37, No. 1 (March 1993), pp. 42-68. 45. Maoz, “Realist and Cultural Critiques”; William J. Dixon, “Democracy and the Peaceful Set- tlement of International Conflict,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 1 (March 1994), pp. 14-32; and Dixon, ”Democracy and the Management of International Conflict.”

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the normative model provides a plausible and empirically supported account of the democratic peace proposition. Oren attempts to denounce democratic peace theory, but is actually blessing it by noting that a change in Wilson’s perception of Germany’s regime was the result of Germany’s conduct during World War I. This is so because (1) a change in perception of regime type did occur, (2) this change was caused by behavior inconsistent with Wilson’s notion of democratic norms, and (3) this perceptual change resulted in behavioral change. This is precisely what the normative model of democratic peace claims. Oren argues that democratic peace scholars apply a parochial value judg- ment to the measurement of democracy. Democracy is “our kind.” Specifically,

American scholars are busier searching for a democratic peace not least because democracy enjoys strong normative approval in present-day America. Furthermore, the selection of the empirical criteria by which this abstract concept is described-primarily fair electoral processes and executive respon- sibility-is consistent with the dominant image of democracy in current Ameri- can culture. . . . America’s perfect democracy scores are applied to its past as much as to its present. Current American values are projected backward and other polities, past and present, are ahistorically compared to the present American

To examine the logic of this argument, I engage in a little exercise in social measurement. Suppose I want to measure levels of education in categorical terms and so I divide a given population into three categories: low, medium, and high education. Suppose, further, I decide to measure education in terms of the number of years of formal schooling. I define low educational level as primary school or less. A person with a partial or complete high school education is said to have a medium education level, and one with university education is said to have a high level of education. Because this kind of exercise is performed by people with a certain level of education-perhaps a Ph.D.- Oren would have us believe that the measure of education is biased. Those with Ph.D.s are ”our kind” and thus located at the top of the scale. Those with few years of schooling are ”their kind’’ and are located at the low end of the scale, so that those who measure education apply their own standards and thus presumably bias it. The same argument could be applied to other measures of personal or social attributes such as intelligence, wealth, industrialization, economic develop-

46. Oren, “The Subjectivity of the Democratic Peace,” p. 150.

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ment, political development, and so forth. They could also be applied to Oren’s own measure of allian~es.4~Oren employs the COW measure of formal alliances, which relies on the nature of formal treaty obligations. He distinguishes three types of alliances: defense pacts, nonaggression pacts, and ententes. But this could also be construed as a biased measure because (1) it relies on ”formal” as opposed to ”informal” treaty obligations, and (2) it puts the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on the higher end of the scale. Every measure of a social concept or phenomenon requires specification of criteria for observation. In each measurement process there is a risk that the resulting indicator will somehow be biased toward those who measure the concept. This is not a test of the ”objectivity” of a measure; rather it is one of validity with respect to the substantive meaning of the concept. Does democracy have any characteristics other than fair and open elections, freedom of expression, individual and collective rights, and constraints on the executive? If it does and the measures of democracy do not tap this meaning, then these measures are not valid even if they are not based on a notion of ”our kind.” If the measures of democracy reflect faithfully the substantive import of the term, then they are valid even if they are seemingly biased toward “our kind.” Oren launches an attack on the seeming bias in the measurement of democracy, but does not offer an alternative. If democracy was not properly measured, a proper measure should be applied. Perhaps Oren has in mind a proper measure of joint democracy based on subjective perceptions of leaders, but if he does, he has yet to share it with the scientific community, apply it to data, and use it to reevaluate the democratic peace proposition!8 Unfortunately, Oren’s notion of an unbiased concept of democracy remains a secret. Until it is revealed, we must rely on the available-if possibly biased, but quite clearly valid-measures of regime types, and on the empirical association they exhibit with patterns of conflict among nations. The remarkable feature of the democratic peace literature is its sensitivity to the difficulty of measuring regime structure. Hence quite a few measures have been used. Not only have different studies employed different measures of democracy, but multiple measures of the concept have been used in the frame-

47. Ido Oren, ”The War Proneness of Alliances,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 34, No. 2 (June 1990), pp. 208-233. 48. For a study that examines perceptual aspects of ”coding” of states as democracies, see John M. Owen, ”How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 87-125. Owen’s article is an example of case study-type research. Oren’s criticism, however, is not about method, but rather about systematic coding.

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work of a single The convergence on the democratic peace result is significant not in the least because of the use of multiple indicators of democracy and multiple indicators of conflict behavior. As in other critiques of the democratic peace result, Oren’s claims reflect the tendency toward unsubstantiated accusations based on selective reading of the democratic peace literature. For example, to support his point about bias of the measure of democracy, Oren states that the United States receives the highest possible democracy score in Gurr’s data, while others (e.g., Finnish analysts) rank their own democracy much higher than the United States’.50 Oren does not mention, however, that in some of the analyses of the democratic peace proposition, continuous measures of regime structure were developed, and according to those measures the United States received relatively low democracy scores. For example, in the Maoz and Russett analysis the United States never received a democracy score above +40 on a scale of -100 to The threshold for democracy we used was +30. On the other hand, states such as Finland, Sweden, Israel, and Venezuela received scores of +50 and +60 on this scale. The empirical range of the Maoz-Russett democracy scale was -80 to +60, and at no time during its history did the United States receive a score above +40.52 Oren’s second argument is that democratic peace scholars measured democracy using present standards of political structures to conceptualize past politics. Again this accusation could not be farther from the truth. The democratic peace proposition has been tested in a variety of substantive, historical, and political settings. Because of the diversity of tests-some of which did not support the proposition-it was impossible to apply the same measures of democracy to every domain. Hence different criteria of measurement and classification were used in different settings. Russett and William Antholis

49. See, for example, Maoz and Abdolali, ”Regime Type”; Stuart Bremer, “Dangerous Dyads: Conditions Affecting the Likelihood of Interstate War, 1816-1965,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 36, No. 2 (June 1992), pp. 309-341; Stuart Bremer, ”Democracy and Militarized Interstate Conflict, 18161965,” International Interactions, Vol. 18, No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 231-249; Maoz and Russett, “Normative and Structural Changes”; and Ray, Democracy and International Conflict. 50. Oren, ”The Subjectivity of the Democratic Peace,” p. 150, fn. 9. 51. Maoz and Russett, ”Normative and Structural Causes.” 52. Ted Robert Gurr and his associates have produced an updated version of the Polity I1 data set, which served as the basis for the Maoz and Russett regime measure. This data set is docu- mented in Keith Jaggers and Ted Robert Gun; ”Tracking Democracy’s Third Wave with the Polity 111 Data,” journal of Peace Research, Vol. 32, No. 4 (December 1995), pp. 453-468. Using this data set, I have recalculated the regime score of the states mentioned herein. The United States never exceeded a regime score of +50 given a scale that ranged from -90 to +70 in the new Polity I11 data set, contrary to Oren’s claim.

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examined war between democracies in ancient Greece using Thucydides’ Peloponnesiun Wars as well as more modern historical accounts of that period.53 Their awareness of the nature of regime structures during that time (and of the different meaning of states and polities, and of warfare) resulted in a fairly elaborate, time-sensitive procedure for measuring regime type, political status, and warfare. Their coding rules were explicit, and so were their results. Carol Ember, Melvin Ember, and Bruce Russett studied political participa- tion and warfare in premodern s0cieties.5~The notion of political structure in such societies is very different from those existing in modern societies, as are the criteria for distinguishing between participatory and authoritarian politics in primitive societies. Consequently, measures sensitive to the substantive setting were developed. While far from perfect, it is impossible to argue that these criteria are not sensitive to the setting. In the studies of the relationship between democracy and conflict in an international context, some of the studies also exhibited a sensitivity to the changing nature of democracy. Maoz varied the thresholds for democracy for different temporal periods.55 The changing levels of democracy reflect the changing standards of democratization over time, including widespread suffrage that includes women in the twentieth century, increased constraints on executive action, and improved standards of individual and collective freedoms. Yet Oren’s argument suggests that to establish the scope of generalizability of the democratic peace result, we need a more refined analysis of the relationship between regime structure and conflict. Nation-level analyses have examined the relationship between specific regime attributes and conflict, but they have not extended this analysis to the dyadic Given that measures of democracy are aggregates of several attributes, and because some other regime attributes do not enter into these measures, it is important to examine whether this relationship is sensitive to the specific aggregation procedure used to classify states by regime type. Moreover, it is important to note whether this relationship changed over time.

53. Bruce Russett and William Antholis, “Do Democracies Fight Each Other? Evidence from the Peloponnesian War,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 29, No. 4 (December 1992), pp. 415434, and Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace. 54. Carol Ember, Melvin Ember, and Bruce Russett, ”Peace Between Participatory Polities,” in Bruce Russett and William Antholis, “A Cross-National Test of the ‘Democracies Rarely Fight Each Other’ Hypothesis,” World Politics, Vol. 44, No. 4 (July 1992), pp. 573-593. 55. Maoz, Domestic Sources, chap. 2, Appendix. 56. Maoz and Abdolali, ”Regime Type.”

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An analysis of this sort was performed in a related study. The regime of any given dyad was unpacked in terms of the specific attributes that characterize a given regime type.57The results suggest that the elements of democracy that affect dispute and war behavior include: competitiveness of executive recruitment, executive constraints, parliamentary regulation, and competitiveness of parliamentary selection. Other elements of democracy suggest cross-temporal differences, beyond those already indicated, that preclude generalization. Ac- cording to the results, the components of democracy, as well as the composite index, have consistent effects on dyadic conflict and war measures. The relationship between elements of democracy and peace increases over time, and is the result of several factors. First, it is a function of the growth in the number of democratic dyads and their increased proportion in the interstate system. In the nineteenth century jointly democratic dyads constituted an annual average of less than 2 percent of all politically relevant dyads. In the 190045 period, jointly democratic dyads averaged over 13 percent of all dyads, and in the nuclear era (1946-86) jointly democratic dyads averaged over 11 percent of all possible dyads. Given the exponential growth of the interstate system in terms of interaction opportunities over the 1946-86 period?8 the fact that the proportion of democratic-democratic dyads in the twentieth century is nearly six times higher than in the nineteenth century is highly significant. The increased association over time between indicators of democracy and peace is even more impressive given that the expected probability of conflict between democracies actually rises with the growth in the proportion of democracies in the system. It is also impressive given that the proportion of democratic-democratic dyads within the population of states that is actually most likely to get involved in disputes has grown faster than the average level of growth of democracy in the entire population of states. Second, Oren’s argument that the very nature of democracy has changed over time is on the mark. The implications of this argument, however, are diametrically opposed to the inference he makes about the subjectivity of the democratic peace result. The institutionalization of democratic practices in the twentieth century is evident in the higher levels of democracy achieved by various states. This institutionalization is reflected in the formalization of relations between branches of government, in the increase in general suffrage

~~~ 57. Maoz, “Realist and Cultural Critiques.” 58. The number of dyad-years during the 41-year period following World War I1 is 71 percent of all dyad-years over the 1816-1986 period, although the length of this period is less than 24 percent of the entire period. See Maoz, ”Realist and Cultural Critiques.”

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that encompasses women and ethnic minorities, and in improved individual freedoms and collective rights. The changing nature of democracy over time is reflected in the measures of democracy used by scholars. These changes imply the use of higher standards to satisfy the definition of democracy. They are also reflected in the fact that, despite increasingly higher thresholds of democratization over time, more states have adopted these standards; for example, in the nineteenth century no politically relevant dyad received a minimum democracy score of +9 or +lo. The politically relevant dyads that had a minimum score of +6 made up only 2.9 percent of all politically relevant dyads. (Using the Farber-Gowa threshold of a minimum democracy score of +7 on the Gurr, Jaggers, and Moore Polity I1 scale, we get only 1.8 percent of all politically relevant dyads that are jointly democratic.) In the 1900-45 period, 16.5 percent of all politically relevant dyads share a minimum democracy score of +6 or above. The upper category of dyads with a minimum democracy score of +10 constituted as much as 6.1 percent of all politically relevant dyads. Dyads with a minimum democracy score of +10 on the Gurr et al. scale make for 10.1 percent of all politically relevant dyads. Thus, as the standards of democracy tightened, the association with peace also strengthened. This is not only consistent with the democratic peace result as an empirical generalization, it is also consistent with the models that account for this generalization. As more states adopted higher standards of democracy, as the norms of conduct became more rooted, and as the institutional constraints became increasingly higher, the tendency of democracies to engage in conflict with each other lessened. Thus over time the higher number and higher proportion of jointly democratic dyads have increased the a priori probability of conflict between them, thereby reducing the expected support for the democratic peace result. The empirical record suggests, however, that the democratic peace result receives considerably stronger support in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth century, and in the second part of the twentieth century than in the first part. This is because of the increase in the number of democratic dyads and the raising of the standards of democracy. Oren is correct on an objective level: Democracy has changed over time, but it is this change in the nature of democracy that accounts for the increased prevalence of the democratic peace. This expansion and institutionalization of democracy generates structures and norms that inhibit conflict between such states, despite the fact that their larger numbers should have resulted in more conflict between modern democracies.

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As in the case of the realist critique of the democratic peace result, the cultural criticisms seem to fail in terms of their own logic and standards of evidence. The empirically testable arguments these criticisms make have led to the development of new tests that seem to strengthen the democratic peace result.

Conclusion

The years 1994-97 have witnessed a resurgence in criticism of the democratic peace literature from a wide variety of sources. These critiques address many issues in the democratic peace 1iteratu1-e.~~The common denominator among them is the refusal to accept the fact of peace between democracies and the rejection of the various explanations used to account for it. This study examines some of the key points the critics raise, and attempts to review them in terms of new evidence on regime type and dispute and war behavior. None of these critiques damages the democratic peace result in any significant way. Science requires constant reexamination of what we think we know. As Karl Popper writes: Every solution of a problem raises new problems; the more so the deeper the original problem and the bolder its solution. The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance-the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.60 The critiques of the democratic peace help elucidate the limits of this proposition, and in this respect they are very helpful. The critiques stemming from an explicit realist or neorealist agenda are useful because they draw our

59. Other criticisms not mentioned here include Douglas Lemke and William Reed, in ”Regime Types and Status Quo Evaluations: Power Transition Theory and the Democratic Peace,” Interna- tional Interactions, Vol. 22, No. 2 (June 1996), pp. 143-164, who claim that the democratic peace theory is a subset of the power transition theory, because most democracies tend to be status quooriented (satisfied) states and therefore do not fight each other. Patrick James and Glenn E. Mitchell 11, in ”Targets of Covert Pressure: The Hidden Victims of the Democratic Peace,” Interna- tional Interactions, Vol. 21, No. l (March 1995), pp. 85107, develop a formal model of crisis interactions and argue that weak, change-oriented democracies may become targets of powerful democratic adversaries. Scott Gates, Torbjo L. Knusten, and Jonathan W. Moses, in ”Democracy and Peace: A More Skeptical View,” journal of Peace Research, Vol. 33, No. 1 (February 1996), pp. 1-10, accuse the democratic peace literature of research design problems and theoretical poverty. 60. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientijic Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968).

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attention to the fact that states’ behavior in international contexts is significantly affected by power-related strategic calculations. This applies to democracies and nondemocracies alike. The evidence on this point is abundantly clear. Realist critiques create the impression that political realism and democratic peace are mutually exclusive. This is hardly the case. The relationship between realist and liberal notions of world politics must be better explored. An amazing-but totally neglected-by-product of the democratic peace research program is that it has generated more empirical support for nation- and dyadic-level propositions derived from realist perspectives of world politics than any other research program, including strict-realist research programs.61 In fact, democratic peace literature adds credence to realist perspectives rather than detracts from them. This suggests that the realist and liberal perspectives of world politics may complement each other quite well. Yet zero-sum views of the disciplines-be they realist or liberal-do not provide a meaningful account of international behavior. The cultural critiques draw our attention to the question of the relationship between “objective” coding of regime type by scholars searching for regulari- ties in international politics using aggregate data and ”subjective” coding of regimes by political leaders engaged in either routine strategic planning or crisis management. The point that some of these scholars make is basically valid: What matters in such strategic situations is not what happens in ”objective” reality; rather it is how leaders act on their beliefs.62To make progress in this endeavor, however, there is no need to put up democratic peace theory as a straw man. As Margaret Hermann and Charles Kegley point out, political- psychological approaches that focus on political leaders’ orientations and perceptions could complement, refine, and even delimit the more aggregate evidence democratic peace scholars suggest.63The relationship between “objective” regime structures, norms of behavior, and perception of these issues

61. For example, the studies by Bremer, Dixon, Maoz and Russett, and Hensel, Goertz, and Diehl as well as Oneal, Oneal, Maoz, and Russett, ”The Liberal Peace: Interdependence, Democracy, and International Conflict, 1950-1985,” Iournal of Peace Research, Vol. 33, No. 1 (February 1996), pp. 11- 28, all support propositions relating alliances, power parity, and power status to dyadic conflict. Zeev Maoz, in “The Strategic Behavior of Nations, 1816-1986,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Peace Science Society (International) Houston, Texas, October 1996, provides considerable evidence on this point at the nation level of analysis. These studies exhibit more consensus on empirical patterns involving realpolitik variables than much of the realpolitik literature itself. 62. This is the point made by Margaret G. Hermann and Charles W. Kegley Jr., in ”Rethinking Democracy and International Peace: Perspectives from Political Psychology,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 1995), p. 529. 63. Hermann and Kegley, ”Rethinking Democracy and International Peace,” p. 528, and Owen, “How Liberalism Produces.”

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by political leaders is thus an important area of future research that may combine psychological, cultural, and interactive approaches in accounts of peace and war among nations. This kind of debate about the basic elements of the dyadic version of democratic peace theory, however, diverts attention from the fact that the democratic peace proposition leaves open many issues, even if empirical evidence supports some of its aspects. For example, the level of analysis problem is still unresolved. Partial solutions have been suggested,@but a more general explanation is required that would account for the following three facts simul- taneously: (1) democracies are as likely to engage in war and conflict as are other states, (2) democracies rarely clash with one another and almost never fight each other, and (3) as the proportion of democracies in the system increases, the number of conflicts either rises or does not necessarily drop. This reevaluation of the democratic peace literature and its critics suggests that the tasks ahead are not less challenging than those in the past. The fact of the democratic peace opens new possibilities for theory construction and empirical analysis. It is better to explore those new possibilities than engage, once again, in old debates whose time has passed.

Methodological Note

In this note I discuss the empirical issues covered in the article. A more elaborate discussion of these issues is given el~ewhere.~~

Data and Data Sources

Throughout the statistical analyses, I relied on the following data sources.66 1. Conflict data sets: I used two principal sources of conflict data. First, the Correlates of War (COW) Project’s Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set covers the period of 1816-1976.67I conducted an update through Decem- ber 1986. The updated data is available upon request. The original data set

64. Maoz, Domestic Sources. 65. Maoz, ”Realist and Cultural Critiques,” Appendix. 66. All data sets discussed in this study are available from the author upon request. 67. Gochman and Maoz, “Militarized Interstate Disputes,” and Daniel M. Jones, Stuart A. Bremer, and J. David Singer, ”Militarized Interstate Disputes, 18161992: Rationale, Coding Rules, and Empirical Patterns,” Conflict Management and Peace Science, Vol. 15, No. 2 (December 1966), pp. 163- 213.

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is available from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research of the University of Michigan (ICPSR). Second, the New Milita- rized Interstate Data Set (New MID) was released in 1996 with the ICPSR. This data set is also available on the Internet at: http:/ /www.polsci.bing hamton.edu/peacesci.html. It is based on similar coding rules as the old MID data set, but there are some differences. The war data are derived from the COW data 2. Regime data: Virtually all of the regime data are based on the Ted Robert Gurr, Keith Jaggers, and Will Moore Polity I1 data set. These data include both the aggregate regime scores and their elements (e.g., executive constraints, openness of executive and parliamentary recruitment, et~.).~~ 3. Alliance data: The principal source is the COW project’s formal alliance data. Updates of this data set follow various sources, including a data set provided by Alan Ned Sabrosky, Oren’s update of the COW data set, and my additional coding for questionable cases. The data set goes up to 1986 and is available from the author upon request.70 4. Contiguity data set: Contiguity data were used to define politically relevant dyads. I use a version of the COW contiguity data set updated by Charles Gochman. This data set was revised to reflect indirect (colonial) contiguity, that is, contiguity between nations bordering the colony of a given state.

Spatial and Temporal Domain and Levels of Analysis

This study focuses on the period 1816-1986. Where data are available, I report results for the 1816-1992 period. In some analyses I break down the entire period to several subperiods. In replicating Farber and Gowa, I use their breakdown of the period into five subperiods (1816-1913, 1914-18, 1919-38, 1939-45, and 1946-86). In most other analyses I break down the entire period into three subperiods: the nineteenth century (1816-99), the pre-nuclear twentieth century (190045), and the nuclear era (1946-86). The principal unit of analysis in most cases is the dyad-year. A dyad‘s attributes and behavior are recorded for each year of the dyad’s existence. A dyad becomes an observation from the year its “youngest” member became an independent state. It persists as a unit as long as both members remain

68. Small and Singer, Resort to Arms. 69. Ted Robert Gum, Keith Jaggers, and Will Moore, Polity II Handbook (Boulder: University of Colorado, 1989). See Jaggers and Gum, “Tracking Democracy’s Third Wave,” for details on updates. 70. Oren, ”The War Proneness of Alliances,” Appendix.

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independent, and ends with the demise of one of its members or at the end of the observation period. Thus the U.S.-U.K. dyad accounted for 171 dyad-years, whereas the India-Pakistan dyad accounted for 40 dyad-years. For certain analyses, I use a regime dyad as a unit of observation. The dyad‘s history is divided into two (or three) subperiods: one when both members of the dyad were democracies, and the other when at least one member of the dyad was not a democracy (or when neither was a dem~cracy).~~ In general, I focus on all of the dyads in the system. For some of the analyses, however, I use two subpopulations that carry special significance in terms of the issues under investigation. The population of politically relevant dyads includes all those dyads that have-for strategic and geopolitical reasons-a high a priori probability of conflict.72The third population comprises enduring rivalries, which consist of dyads with an empirical history of recurrent conflicts.73I use a fairly loose version that includes any dyad that had at least five militarized interstate disputes. The reason for this is not to bias the results in favor of extremely highly conflictual enduring dyads. This was also the practice Hensel, Goertz, and Diehl followed.74

Operational Definitions of Key Variables

Most of the variables I use in this study have been adapted from other studies. I discuss some of the key variables used here and refer to the original sources for definitions and measures of the other variables.

CONFLICT MEASURES I use two different measures of these variables throughout this study. 1. War occurrence and war years: War occurrence is defined as a dichotomous variable that gets a score of 1 for the year of war outbreak and zero otherwise. War years refers to war under way and are defined as 1 for each year during which a war is in progress, and zero for each year in which no war has taken place between a pair of states. Several authors claimed that

71. See fn. 58 above for a definition of the population. Analyses for all dyads, irrespective of whether they changed regime, yield very similar results. 72. Maoz and Russett, “Alliances, Contiguity, Wealth and Political Stability”; Maoz and Russett, ”Normative and Structural Changes”; and Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace; and Maoz, Domestic Sources. 73. Hensel, Goertz and Diehl, ”Enduring Rivalries,” and Maoz and Mor, ”Enduring International Rivalries: The Early Years,” p. 142. 74. Hensel, Goertz, and Diehl, ”Enduring Rivalries.”

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observation of war should be restricted to the year of war outbreak, otherwise war observations are dependent.75 I disagree with this argument, because if war years are serially dependent, the same applies to peace years. To examine robustness, however, I use both war years and war outbreaks in separate analyses. As the results in most of the cases show, there is no meaningful difference between the measures. 2. Dispute years and dispute occurrence: To increase variability in the analyses, I use the old MID data set for dispute years (or disputes under way), and the new MID data set for dispute occurrence (coded only for the first year of the dispute). In this case, too, results are generally similar.76 3. Measures of regime type: Several measures of democracy are used. First, at the nation level, I use three different measures of democracy. The first (called the Farber-Gowa measure) is derived directly from the Gurr et al. democracy scale and follows Farber and Gowa’s measure, which states that each state with a score of +7 or above on this scale is a democracy. (And a dyad is a democratic-democratic dyad if and only if both states score +7 or above on the Gurr et al. democracy scale.) The Maoz-Russett measure has three versions: continuous, dichotomous, and trichotomous. Using the Gurr et al. scales of democracy, autocracy, and concentration of power, a regime scale is defined as:

Regime = (Democracy - Autocracy) x Concentration.

This measure varies in principle from -100 to +loo, but in practice its range is -80 to +60. States’ ordinal regime type is divided into three categories: Autoc- racy is a state with a score of -25 or lower. Anocracy is a state that scores from -25 to the minimum threshold of democracy at a given period. (Note that this t-threshold varies over time.) And a democracy is a state that scores above zero for the 1816-32 period, +10 or above from 1833 to 1870, +15 or above from 1871 to 1899, +21 or above from 1900 to 1923, and +30 or above as of 1924.n This moving scale is designed to reflect changes in the standards of democracy. The United Kingdom was used as the litmus test for this scale. Dyadic scores were obtained using the ordinal levels of each state’s regime employed as thresholds for distinguishing between jointly democratic dyads and others.78

75. This argument is made by Farber and Gowa, “Polities and Peace.” 76. Maoz, ”The Strategic Behavior of Nations,” reports very high correlations between war begun and war occurrence (0.60 < r < 0.88, depending on the level of analysis), and between dispute begun and dispute occurrence (0.66 < r < 0.7). 77. Maoz, Domestic Sources, pp. 53-54. 78. Dixon, ”Democracy and the Managment of International Conflict.”

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4. Alliances: Using the COW formal alliance indices, a dyad is said to have an alliance if it is connected in either a defense pact, a nonaggression pact, or an entente. For the present analysis, I do not distinguish among types of alliances, because the question is whether some common interest, even a minimal one, binds two actors. Again, data on these issues are available upon request.

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