No impact to democracy

Resolution of this controversy is fundamental to the study and practice of international relations. The observation of democratic peace is ‘‘the closest thing we have to an empirical law’’ in the study of global politics (Levy, 1988: 662), and carries the profound implication that the spread of democracy will end war. New economic norms theory, on the other hand, yields the contrary implication that universal democracy will not end war. Instead, it is market-oriented development that creates a culture of contracting, and this culture legitimates democracy within nations and causes peace among them. The policy implications could hardly be more divergent: to end war (and support democracy), the contractualist democracies should promote the economies of nations at risk (Krieger and Meierrieks, 2015; Meierrieks, 2012; Mousseau, 2000, 2009, 2012a, 2013; Nieman, 2015).

In the literature are five factual claims for why we should continue to believe that democracy causes peace: (1) an assertion that in three of the five studies that overturned the democratic peace (Mousseau, 2013; Mousseau et al., 2013a, b), the insignificance of democracy controlling for contractualist economy is due to the treatment of missing data for contractualist economy (Dafoe et al., 2013, henceforth DOR); (2) a claim of error in the measure for conflict (DOR) that appears in one of the five studies that overturned the democratic peace (Mousseau, 2013); (3) an alleged misinterpretation of an interaction term that appears in one of the five studies (Mousseau, 2009) that overturned the democratic peace, along with in inference of democratic causality from an interaction of democracy with contractualist economy (Dafoe and Russett, 2013; DOR); (4) a claim of reverse causality, of democracy causing contractualist economy (Ray, 2013); and (5) a report of multiple regressions with most said to show democratic significance after controlling for contractualist economy (DOR).

This study investigates all five of these factual claims. I begin by addressing the issue of missing data by constructing two entirely new measures for contractualist economy. I then take up possible measurement error in the dependent variable by reporting tests using both my own (Mousseau, 2013) and DOR’s measures for conflict. Next, I disaggregate the data to investigate a causal interaction of democracy with contractualist economy. I then examine the evidence for reverse causality, and scrutinize the competing test models to pinpoint the exact factors that can account for differences in test outcomes.

The results are consistent across all tests: there is no credible evidence supporting democracy as a cause of peace. Using DOR’s base model, the impact of democracy is zero regardless of how contractualist economy or interstate conflict is measured. There is no misinterpreted interaction term in any study that has overturned the democratic peace, and the disaggregation of the data yields no support for a causal interaction of democracy with contractualist economy. Ray’s (2013) evidence for reverse causality from democracy to contractualist economy is shown to be based on an erroneous research design. And of DOR’s 120 separate regressions that consider contractualist economy, 116 contain controversial measurement and specification practices; the remaining four are analyses of all (fatal and non-fatal) disputes, where the correlation of democracy with peace is limited to mixedeconomic dyads, those where one state has a contractualist economy and the other does not, a subset that includes only 27% of dyads from 1951 to 2001, including only 50% of democratic dyads. It is further shown that this marginal peace is a statistical artifact since it does not exist among neighbors where everyone has an equal opportunity to fight.