Neoidealism and the democratic peace

While analysts hail the democratic peace as an empirical vindication of neo idealist precepts of world politics, actually it is inconsistent with them. Neoidealism focuses on the role of international regimes - not shared poli tical regime type - in reducing the probability of interstate conflict. In this article, I suggest a more consistent neoidealist conceptualization of the stability among democratic dyads. Focusing on the postwar era, I mainta in that a combination of factors, including bipolarity, nuclear deterrence, alliance membership, and trade links, contributed to the formation of an i nternational security regime among the major power democracies and their mi nor power democratic allies. Further, I maintain that the presence of this international regime and not simply joint democracy allowed for the postwar stability among democratic dyads. While democracy may have been associated with the creation of a security regime at the behest of the Western democr acies led by the USA, the expansion and maintenance of this regime (and its conflict dampening attributes) are rooted, to a greater extent, in the int erplay of alliance-aggregation and security externalities of trade. This ar gument is consistent with neoidealist precepts and by focusing on the role of security regimes it contributes to the neoidealist research program.