Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
12-1996
Abstract
Current consensus in the field of democratic peace research holds that democratic states go to war in general no less than nondemocratic states. The author challenges this consensus by reevaluating the main empirical studies on which it rests, using information that previous studies ignored and statistical techniques unused or even unknown at the time. The results indicate that from 1960 to 1980, democratic nations were less involved in military conflict than other regime types. Estimates of this relationship are robust to different operational definitions of both war and democracy, to the addition of control variables for other possible correlates of war, and to the application of different statistical techniques. This indicates that lack of previous significant findings have less to do with the data than with the methods used to analyze them.
Discipline
Models and Methods | Political Science
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
Journal of Conflict Resolution
Volume
40
Issue
4
First Page
636
Last Page
657
ISSN
0022-0027
Identifier
10.1177/0022002796040004006
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Citation
BENOIT, Kenneth.(1996). Democracies really are more pacific (in general): Reexamining regime type and war involvement. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 40(4), 636-657.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4009
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002796040004006