Comment: Why "an identified systemic model of the democracy-peace nexus" does not persuade

In their article in this journal, James, Solberg and Wolfson (1999) challen ge our findings that two states are more likely to have peaceful relations if they are both democratic. They claim to develop a simultaneous system of two equations showing that peace and democracy foster each other, and that the effect of peace in encouraging democracy is stronger than that of demo cracy on peace. Their analysis, however, is flawed. Their research design e mploys measures of dispute and joint democracy that are inferior to those n ow common in the literature, and their equation for predicting peace is not properly specified. These problems distort their results. Even so, their r esults provide evidence of the pacific benefits of democracy. Analyses we c onduct with a more completely specified model reveal stronger support for t he democratic peace. Furthermore, a test of the effect of interstate confli ct on democracy should be done at the national (or monadic) level of analys is; but James et al. perform a dyadic analysis. In a monadic test using vec tor autoregression, we find that disputes make no contribution to explainin g the character of regimes. Even with their dyadic method, their finding th at peace promotes democracy is not robust. Including a crucial control vari able, the ratio of militarily relevant national capabilities, that James ef al. omitted, dramatically alters their findings.