Disputes, Democracies, and Dependencies: A Reexamination of the Kantian Peace

Militarized interstate disputes are widely thought to be less likely among democratic countries that have high levels of trade and extensive participation in international organizations. We reexamine this broad finding of the Kantian peace literature in the context of a model that incorporates the h...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of political science 2007-07, Vol.51 (3), p.583-601
Main Authors: Ward, Michael D., Siverson, Randolph M., Cao, Xun
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Armed conflict
Conflict
Democracy
Dyadic relations
Dyadics
Economic dependence
Geographic location
International conflicts
International disputes
International organizations
International Relations
International trade
Kant, Immanuel
Kantianism
Military strategy
Modeling
Peace
Peace studies
Peacetime
Political science
Time dependence
Trade
War conflict
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Summary:Militarized interstate disputes are widely thought to be less likely among democratic countries that have high levels of trade and extensive participation in international organizations. We reexamine this broad finding of the Kantian peace literature in the context of a model that incorporates the high degree of dependency among countries. Based on in-sample statistical tests, as well as out-of-sample, predictive cross-validation, we find that results frequently cited in the literature are plagued by overfitting and cannot be characterized as identifying the underlying structure through which international conflict is influenced by democracy, trade, and international governmental organizations. We conclude that much of the statistical association typically reported in this literature apparently stems from three components: (1) geographical proximity, (2) dependence among militarized interstate disputes with the same initiator or target, and (3) the higher-order dependencies in these dyadic data. Once these are incorporated, covariates associated with the Kantian peace tripod lose most of their statistical power. We do find that higher levels of joint democracy are associated with lower probabilities of militarized interstate dispute involvement. We find that despite high statistical significance and putative substantive importance, none of the variables representing the Kantian tripod is associated with any substantial degree of predictive power.
ISSN:0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00269.x