Agreeing to fight: An explanation of the democratic peace

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 5, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 305-320

  Patty, John W ^a   Weber, Roberto A ^b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

democratic peace; international relations; war

Indexed keywords

EID: 34948837491     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X06068302     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. A few examples include John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, ‘The Kantian Peace: The Pacific Benefits of Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885-1992’, World Politics 52 (1999): 1-37; David L. Rousseau, Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter and Paul K. Huth, ‘Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace’, American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 512-33; Stuart A. Bremer, ‘Dangerous Dyads: Conditions Affecting the Likelihood of Interstate War, 1816-1965’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 36 (1992): 309-41; William J. Dixon, ‘Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict’, American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 14-32; B. Russett, ‘The Fact of the Democratic Peace’, in Debating the Democratic Peace, edited by Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
2. Joanne S. Gowa, Ballots and Bullets (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Thomas Schwartz and Kiron K. Skinner, ‘The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, Orbis 46 (2002): 159-72.
3. This result has been extended to speculative trade to show that no such trade should occur based on differences in information. See, for example, Paul Milgrom and Nancy Stokey, ‘Information, Trade, and Common Knowledge’, Journal of Economic Theory 26 (1982): 17-27.
4. Rousseau et al., ‘Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace’; Russett, ‘The Fact of the Democratic Peace’; Erik Gartzke, ‘Kant We All Just Get Along? Opportunity, Willingness and the Origins of the Democratic Peace’, American Journal of Political Science 42 (1998): 1-27.
5. Oneal and Russett, ‘The Kantian Peace: The Pacific Benefits of Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885-1992’. The democratic peace is often associated with the term ‘Kantian peace’ due to Kant's argument that the blossoming of democracy, trade, and international cooperation would lead to a decline in the frequency of war.
6. Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, ‘Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986’, American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 624-38.
7. Rousseau et al., ‘Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace’, p. 527.
8. Gartzke, ‘Kant We All Just Get Along? Opportunity, Willingness and the Origins of the Democratic Peace’.
9. Maoz and Russett, ‘Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986’; Bruce Russett, ‘Why Democratic Peace?’ in Debating the Democratic Peace, edited by Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
10. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson and Alastair Smith, ‘An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace’, American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 791-807; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
11. Robert J. Aumann, ‘Agreeing to Disagree’, Annals of Statistics 4 (1976): 1236-9.
12. This is why the common knowledge of rationality is so important: if one decisionmaker believes that the other one might be crazy (conceptualized here as wanting to lose the bet), then the beliefs do not necessarily converge, and a bet (that is, a ‘war’) might occur. This is exactly how the result, we believe, fits in with the notion of the democratic peace as a ‘deliberative peace’. For an early application of this logic to asymmetric information in exchange situations, see George A. Akerlof, ‘The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (1970): 488-500.
13. This point has been made by many authors. Two famous discussions of this are William H. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (New York: Waveland, 1982) and Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951).
14. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values.
15. This is the basis of a large literature on ‘jury theorems’, which examines the impact of institutions, preferences, and behavior on group information aggregation. Some examples of this literature include Bernard Grofman, Guillermo Owen and Scott L. Feld, ‘Thirteen Theorems in Search of the Truth’, Theory and Decision 15 (1983): 261-78; Bernard Grofman and Scott L. Feld, ‘Rousseau's General Will: A Condorcetian Perspective’, American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 567-76; Krishna K. Lahda, ‘The Condorcet Jury Theorem, Free Speech and Correlated Votes’, American Journal of Political Science 36 (1992): 617-34; David Austen- Smith and Jeffrey S. Banks, ‘Information Aggregation, Rationality and the Condorcet Jury Theorem’, American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 34-45; Christian List and Robert E. Goodin, ‘Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem’, Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (2001): 277-306.
16. Werner W. Pommerehne, ‘The Empirical Relevance of Comparative Institutional Analysis’, European Economic Review 34 (1990): 458-69.
17. Werner W. Pommerehne and Friedrich Schneider, ‘Unbalanced Growth Between Public and Private Sectors: An Empirical Examination’, in Public Finance and Public Employment, edited by Robert H. Haveman (Detriot, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1982).
18. Lars P. Feld and Marcel R. Savioz, ‘Direct Democracy Matters for Economic Performance: An Empirical Investigation’, Kyklos 50 (1997): 507-38.
19. Gayle W. Hill, ‘Group Versus Individual Performance: Are N + 1 Heads Better Than One?’ Psychological Bulletin 91 (1982): 517-39.
20. Frederick C. Miner, Jr, ‘Group Versus Individual Decision Making: An Investigation of Performance Measures, Decision Strategies, and Process Losses/Gains’, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 33 (1984): 112-24.
21. Robert A. Cooke and John A. Kernaghan, ‘Estimating the Difference Between Group Versus Individual Performance on Problem-Solving Tasks’, Group and Organization Studies 12 (1987): 319-42.
22. Douglas D. Davis and David W. Harless, ‘Group vs. Individual Performance in a Price-Searching Experiment’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 66 (1996): 215-27.
23. Alan S. Blinder and John Morgan, ‘Are Two Heads Better than One? An Experimental Analysis of Group Versus Individual Decision Making’, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 37 (2005): 789-811.
24. Milgrom and Stokey, ‘Information, Trade, and Common Knowledge’.
25. John R. Owen, ‘How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace’, in Debating the Democratic Peace, edited by Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
26. Schwartz and Skinner, ‘The Myth of the Democratic Peace’.