democratic peace

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the empirical finding and theoretical claim that liberal democracies almost never go to war with each other, constituting one of the most robust and debated regularities in the study of international relations; the monadic version of the theory claims that democracies are more peaceful in general; the dyadic version — which has stronger empirical support — claims that the absence of war obtains specifically between pairs of democracies even when democracies fight non-democratic states at the same rates as other regime types; explanations invoke institutional constraints that make democratic leaders accountable to publics who bear the costs of war, normative dispositions of democratic citizens toward peaceful conflict resolution, and the trust and information-sharing facilitated by shared democratic institutions; the democratic peace theory provided a major justification for democracy promotion as US foreign policy after the Cold War and for the expansion of NATO to newly democratic Eastern European states; critics note selection effects — democracies tend to be wealthy and ally with each other — and the record of democracies fighting wars against weaker non-democracies

Examples

• The democratic peace finding that no two democracies have fought a full-scale war since 1945 remains contested but influential.
• Kant's Perpetual Peace anticipated the democratic peace by arguing that republican governments would be less prone to war.