10 - What have we learned about the democratic peace?

Summary

In the opening chapter to this book we argued that while scholarship over the past decade has made substantial contributions to our understanding of how domestic political institutions influence patterns of international conflict, opportunities remain for continuing research to make important new advances in our understanding of the democratic peace. In particular, we claimed that the deductive logic of different models of the democratic peace could be developed more fully, thus producing a broader range of hypotheses to explain the diplomatic and military policies that state leaders adopt in international disputes. We also argued in favor of new statistical tests of theoretical models of the democratic peace, and claimed that such tests should focus on the evolution of territorial disputes into different stages and the choices made by state leaders at these various stages.

It is now time to step back from the extended and detailed discussion of theoretical models, hypotheses, and statistical results. In this concluding chapter we pull together our research findings and summarize the contributions we have made on both the theoretical and empirical fronts and also discuss some of the policy implications of our research. We begin by reviewing the empirical results for each of the models tested and drawing conclusions about the performance of each model. We follow our summary of results by considering how our findings address central debates and research puzzles in the democratic peace literature and the study of international conflict more broadly.