Collaborative Research: The Democratic Peace - An Experimental Approach

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Countless studies have found that democracies never fight againts other democracies, but scholars continue to debate why this pattern exists. Some argue that the democratic peace is a spurious result of omitted variables such as shared interests. Others believe that democracy causes peace but disagree about the mechanisms generating this relationship. Previous attempts have faced three serious obstacles: endogeneity, collinearity, and over-aggregation. As a consequence, it has been difficult to isolate the conditions under which democracy contributes to peace and to understand the mechanisms behind its causal power. For decades, U.S. and foreign leaders have cited the democratic peace when analysing foreign affairs and justifying democratic enlargement. This topic is even more critical today, given the tremendous pressure for democracy in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. By clarifying the circumstances under which democracy fosters peace, and by identifying the mechansism through which it operates, this project could help leaders forecast the effects of democratization and the likelihood of war. Moreover, by indicating which institutional features of democracy contribute to peace, the research could inform the design of new democracies. Finally, studying how democracy affects not only war but also economic and diplomatic relations will result in new and general knowledge about the sources of international cooperation. The researchers propose to overcome these three obstacles, mentioned above, by conducting micro-level experiments. Existing theories of the democratic peace have testable but unexplored implications about the preferences and beliefs of individual citizens and elites. The researchers will conduct a series of survey experiments in which U.S. citizens, including a subset of citizens who most resemble political elites, read about foriegn policy scenarios. The aspects of the situation, including whether the potential adversary is a democracy, will be varied. The experiments will provide micro-level evidence about how democracy affects preferences about war, while avoiding problems of endogeneity and collinnearity that have hampered previous research. The researcers will also study why individuals react differently when the target is a democracy rather than an autocracy. Democracy could promote peace by changing perceptions about the threat the opponent poses, the expected cost of war, the likelihood of success, and the morality of using violence. These and other perceptions will be examined in order to shed light on the causal mechanisms.