The Democratic Peace Debate: Theory and Fact

The concept of a Democratic Peace (DP) is a major theoretical strand within International Relations (IR).  Depending on precisely how democracy is defined, the number of wars between such states over the last two centuries varies from zero to a handful.  Moreover, democratic states have never fought on opposing sides in a general war involving all, or nearly all, the great powers.  Such a record cannot be claimed by any other form of government – monarchies, Communist and authoritarian states have all fought against one another.  The only zone of peace that is grounded in a shared political system is that of liberal democracies.  In a field in which there are relatively few empirical regularities of even modest strength, scholars were energized to validate or invalidate the findings.  Thus, DP provides an almost perfect focal point to grapple with contentious issues involving theory in IR.  First, DP will be differentiated from the liberal (or Kantian) peace, a concept with which it is often conflated.  Second, the main debates about theory within IR that DP helps to illuminate will be discussed.  These debates can be categorized as follows:  1)  Rationalist vs. Reflexivist (paradigm debate);  2)  Quantitative vs. Qualitative (methodology debate);  and, 3)  Methodological Unity vs. Methodological Pluralism (philosophy of science debate).  Hence, concerns about theory-building in IR (as reflected through DP) are delineated:  defining variables, confounding of variable effects, and fleshing out causal mechanisms that connect the variables to each other.  The position taken here is that methodological pluralism is a pre-requisite and, furthermore, such a flexible and wide-ranging approach should also prove highly beneficial for delineating real-world connections.