Democratic peace versus contractualism

James Lee Ray and Allan Dafoe
Additional contact information
James Lee Ray: Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, USA
Allan Dafoe: Department of Political Science, Yale University, USA

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2018, vol. 35, issue 2, 193-203

Abstract: If contractualism causes both democracy and peace, the correlation between democracy and peace is spurious. But the definition of contractualism is sufficiently unclear as to create doubts that it has such an impact. In addition, if democracy has an impact on contractualism, then, even with an otherwise perfectly specified model, controlling for contractualism will bias estimates of the effect of democracy on peace. International trade involves contracting behavior between strangers in different states. In addition, unlike contracting behavior within states, trade involves interactions in the same arena where interstate conflict needs to be deterred. Contractualist states have existed in significant numbers only recently. This limits contractualism’s ability to compete with democracy as a predictor of peace. Mousseau’s previous findings have been extraordinarily fragile. Finally, observational data should be complemented by multiple streams of evidence. Some experimental data support democratic peace theory; analogous experiments would almost certainly not provide evidence to support contractualism.

Keywords: Conflict; contractualism; democratic peace theory; economic norms; war (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0738894216683648 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:compsc:v:35:y:2018:i:2:p:193-203

DOI: 10.1177/0738894216683648

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Conflict Management and Peace Science from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().