NORMATIVE AND STRUCTURAL CAUSES OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE, 1946-1986

Democratic states are in general about as conflict- and war-prone as n ondemocracies, but democracies have rarely clashed with one another in violent conflict. We first show that democracy, as well as other fact ors, accounts for the relative lack of conflict. Then we examine two e xplanatory models. The normative model suggests that democracies do no t fight each other because norms of compromise and cooperation prevent their conflicts of interest from escalating into violent clashes. The structural model asserts that complex political mobilization processe s impose institutional constraints on the leaders of two democracies c onfronting each other to make violent conflict unfeasible. Using diffe rent data sets of international conflict and a multiplicity of indicat ors, we_find that (1) democracy, in and of itself, has a consistent an d robust negative effect on the likelihood of conflict or escalation i n a dyad; (2) both the normative and structural models are supported b y the data; and (3) support for the normative model is more robust and consistent.