Democratic Peace Theory - History

History

Although the philosophical idea has circulated since Immanuel Kant and Thomas Paine, it was not scientifically evaluated until the 1960s. Kant foreshadowed the theory in his essay Perpetual Peace written in 1795, although he thought that a world with only constitutional republics was only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace. Kant's theory was that a majority of the people would never vote to go to war, unless in self-defense. Therefore, if all nations were republics, it would end war, because there would be no aggressors. In earlier but less cited works, Thomas Paine made similar or stronger claims about the peaceful nature of republics. Paine wrote in "Common Sense" in 1776: "The Republics of Europe are all (and we may say always) in peace." Paine argued that kings would go to war out of pride in situations where republics would not.

Dean Babst, a criminologist, was the first to do statistical research on this topic. He wrote an academic paper supporting the theory in 1964 in Wisconsin Sociologist; he published a slightly more popularized version, in 1972, in the trade journal Industrial Research. Both versions initially received little attention.

Melvin Small and J. David Singer (1976: 50—69) responded; they found an absence of wars between democratic states with two "marginal exceptions", but denied that this pattern had statistical significance. This paper was published in the Jerusalem Journal of International Relations which finally brought more widespread attention to the theory, and started the academic debate. A 1983 paper by Michael Doyle contributed further to popularizing the theory. Rudolph J. Rummel was another early researcher and drew considerable lay attention to the subject in his later works.

Maoz & Abdolali (1989) extended the research to lesser conflicts than wars. Bremer (1992) and Maoz & Russett (1993) found the correlation between democracy and peacefulness remained significant after controlling for many possible confounding variables. This moved the theory into the mainstream of social science. Supporters of realism in international relations and others responded by raising many new objections. Other researchers attempted more systematic explanations of how democracy might cause peace (Köchler 1995), and of how democracy might also affect other aspects of foreign relations such as alliances and collaboration (Ray 2003).

There have been numerous further studies in the field since these pioneering works. Most studies have found some form of democratic peace exists, although neither methodological disputes nor doubtful cases are entirely resolved (Kinsella 2005).