PUTTING MILITARY-INTERVENTION INTO THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE - A RESEARCH NOTE

Although many empirical investigations have demonstrated that democrac ies almost never wage war against one another, there remains some doub t whether this empirical law applies to other kinds of armed conflict. The present research note combines two streams of evidence that speak to this question. Looking cross-nationally at the incidence of overt military intervention between 1974 and 1991, an inventory of 225 discr ete cases is produced with the distributions disaggregated by regime t ype. Comparing initiators and targets dyadically, the, study uncovers 51 instances in which democracies have used this form of coercive dipl omacy to influence the policies and practices within other democratic states. Presenting the trends exhibited in these indicators and juxtap osing them with an alternative measure of intervention, this research communication advances some observations about the obstacles to conver gence among research findings in the study of the democratic peace, an d some hypotheses about the kinds of research questions that warrant i nvestigation with the inventory of cases generated.