DEMOCRACIES REALLY ARE MORE PACIFIC (IN GENERAL) - REEXAMINING REGIMETYPE AND WAR INVOLVEMENT

Current consensus in the field of democratic peace research holds that democratic states go to war in general no less than nondemocratic sta tes. The author challenges this consensus by reevaluating the main emp irical studies on which it rests, using information that previous stud ies ignored and statistical techniques unused or even unknown at the t imer The results indicate that from 1960 to 1980, democratic nations w ere less involved in military conflict than other regime types. Estima tes of this relationship are robust to different operational definitio ns 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 signific ant findings have less to do with the data than with the methods used to analyze them.