Academic consensus proves democracy solves war.

Recently, many scholars have highlighted the ways in which domestic institutions pacify interstate relations. This literature, commonly known as the Democratic Peace literature, argues that democracies tend not to fight (Maoz & Russett, 1993; Oneal et al., 1996; Bueno de Mesquita et al., 1999; Russett & Oneal, 2001). As one scholar puts it, ‘the absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations’ (Levy, 1989). This finding, having survived multiple operationalizations, empirical specifications, and econometric models, is now a standard control variable in the literature. How does democratic regime type operate to pacify international relations? One of the main mechanisms that scholars point to when explaining the democratic peace focuses on the role of audience costs in constraining leaders and helping them to signal their resolve (Fearon, 1994). Importantly, this audience cost mechanism relies on the assumption that there is uncertainty over each leader’s willingness to go to war. Proponents of the audience cost theory suggest that the greater ability that a leader’s relevant domestic audience has to punish leaders who lose disputes or escalate crises, the more one learns about the leader’s resolve (Fearon, 1995). Thus, the potential for domestic audiences to punish leaders for losing disputes or escalating crises reveals information that helps states to settle their disputes without going to war. Several scholars have tested and found evidence for this audience costs explanation (Gelpi, 2001; Tomz, 2007).2