PEACE AND DEMOCRACY - 3 LEVELS OF ANALYSIS

Peace and regime type can be examined at the dyadic, nation, and syste m levels. At the dyadic level, it is well established that democracies rarely if ever fight each other. At the national level, the broad con sensus is that there is no significant relationship between democracy and war participation, but this conclusion remains controversial. At t he system level, there has been little research; most scholars have ta ken for granted that the answer can be inferred from the findings at t he dyadic or national levels. The authors show that, if the convention al wisdom holds at the dyadic and national levels, the probability of war in a politically mixed dyad must be higher than the probability of war between two nondemocracies, and the relationship between democrac y and war at the system level must be parabolic. Thus increasing democ ratization initially produces more war, and the reduction of war start s only at a higher level of democratization.