The democratic peace unraveled: it's the economy

Abstract

Recent studies show that the democratic peace correlation is not significant once the potentially confounding variable that can cause both democracy and peace, contract-intensive economy, is considered; this pattern holds in analyses of wars, fatal militarized interstate conflicts (Mousseau 2009), and interstate crises (Mousseau etal. 2013). These studies rescind the primary evidence for democracy being a cause of the democratic peace and indicate that contract-intensive economy is the more likely explanation for it. This article addresses all recent defenses of the democratic peace correlation, reports results using a new measure of contract flows, and extends the investigation to all militarized interstate conflicts. Analyses of most nations from 1961 to 2001 show that there is no correlation of democracy with peace, and contract-intensive economy is one of the most powerful nontrivial variables in international conflict. The era of the democratic peace appears to be at an end, subsumed by an economic peace.