Modeling the democratic peace as a Kantian selection process

Computational modeling is used to improve our understanding of how the demo cratic peace unfolds as a historical process in time and space. Whereas mos t of the conventional literature interprets the phenomenon as a constant an d universal law operating at the state level, the author follows Immanuel K ant and treats democratic cooperation as an emergent macroprocess. The curr ent study explores three causal mechanisms. First, strategic tagging introd uces a way for democracies to select out like-minded cooperators. Second, r egime-sensitive alliances enable democratic states to defend the gains of c ooperation. Third, liberal collective security complements the liberal alig nments. Based on these processes, it is possible to "grow" cooperative outc omes in an inhospitable geopolitical environment. Because tagging alone is insufficient, alliances, and sometimes even collective security, are necess ary to produce perpetual peace. Such outcomes are characterized by high lev els of spatial clustering.