Democracies in Conflict

Christopher Gelpi

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2017, vol. 61, issue 9, 1925-1949

Abstract: The vast literature on the impact of democratic political institutions on foreign policy behavior has yielded some of the most important developments in our understanding of violence and war over the past thirty years. The Journal of Conflict Resolution has played a prominent role in this growth and development. Critics of the democratic peace have dismissed this literature as a correlation in search of an explanation. However, I argue that the democratic peace literature and its various descendants represent a surprisingly productive example of an empirically focused and puzzle-oriented research program that has produced cumulative scientific knowledge regarding our understanding of international politics. This sustained investigation of democracy and foreign policy has yielded an increasingly robust and sophisticated model of democratic constraint that is the consequence of a progressive research program that compares favorably to earlier research programs that emphasized clashing paradigms of international politics.

Keywords: foreign policy; domestic politics; democratic peace; conflict (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002717721386 (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:jocore:v:61:y:2017:i:9:p:1925-1949

DOI: 10.1177/0022002717721386

Access Statistics for this article

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