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Peace Between Participatory Polities: A Cross-Cultural Test of the “Democracies Rarely Fight Each Other” Hypothesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Carol R. Ember ,
Melvin Ember  and
Bruce Russett
Carol R. Ember
Affiliation:
University of New York
Melvin Ember
Affiliation:
Yale University
Bruce Russett
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Abstract

Evidence is accumulating that, in the modern international system, democracies rarely fight each other. But the reasons for the phenomenon are not well understood. This article explores a similar phenomenon in other societies, using cross-cultural ethnographic evidence. It finds that polities organized according to more participatory (“democratic”) principles fight each other less often than do polities organized according to hierarchical principles. Stable participatory institutions seem to promote peaceful relations, especially if people perceive that others also have some control over politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , July 1992 , pp. 573 - 599
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1992

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References

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17 When it comes to external war, however, we could not make that assumption. The units that fight each other in external warfare are by definition from different cultures, and we cannot assume that the “enemy” has the same degree of political participation.

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21 The scale ranged from 1 to 5, from less often than once in ten years to “constant,” or occurring at any time of year. We exclude here any cases where the coders' initial ratings for internal warfare frequency were not close. By close we mean that one of the following situations applied: (1) The initial ratings did not disagree by more than one point on the five-point ordinal scale. (2) The initial ratings disagreed by more than one point but did not straddle the boundary between low and high frequency of war, which was predictive of various things in past studies (Ember and Ember ffn. 19, 1971]; Ember, Carol R., “Residential Variation among Hunter-Gatherers,” Behavior Science Research 10 [1975]CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Men's Fear of Sex with Women: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Sex Roles 4 [1978])Google Scholar, i.e., warfare at least once every two years (high) versus less often (low). (3) One of the first two coders said “don't know” and the third coder's rating was “close” (as denned above) to the other initial coder's rating.

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27 Murdock (fn. 14). Coding was initially done independently by two trained assistants. Differences in coding exceeding one scale point were discussed by the two coders, typically in conjunction with the third author (on political participation) and the first author (on warfare). If it was apparent that one coder had missed relevant information or had misinterpreted the coding rules, that coder changed her/his rating; sometimes the coders reached a compromise. Where the original codings were more than one point apart and the coders could not reconcile the discrepancy, the case was omitted from the analysis; where the discrepancy was one point or less, the computations were performed using the midpoint between the two codings. The assistants did not know our hypotheses; the third author had no knowledge of the frequency of warfare in the societies.

28 Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon, “Yanomamo Warfare, Social Organization and Marriage Alliances” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1966); and idem, Yano-mamo: The Fierce People (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1968)Google Scholar.

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30 Images of a divinity are seen through a glass most darkly, if at all. Hence those images would seem to derive from immediate relationships. Where socialization in the first years of life is strict and punitive, such behavior is typically imputed to the supernatural. Similarly, images of political jurisdiction in the supernatural world tend to parallel those in political jurisdictions above the family. See Lambert, William, Triandis, Leigh, and Wolf, Margery, “Some Correlates of Beliefs in the Malevolence and Benevolence of Supernatural Beings: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58 (1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Swanson, Guy E., The Birth of the Gods (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969)Google Scholar. In international relations, Alexander Wendt argues that beliefs about whether other states will behave according to the principles of realist anarchy are socially constructed, but he attends to learning from behavior in the interstate system rather than from domestic politics. See Wendt, , “Anarchy Is What States Make of It,” International Organization 46 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For evidence that evaluations of domestic politics strongly influence orientations toward behavior internationally, see Lumsdaine, David, Ideals and Interests: The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949—1986 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

31 Tuden and Marshall (fn. 18).

32 See Carol Ember for earlier work linking type of war to population size; Ember, , “An Evaluation of Alternative Theories of Matrilocal versus Patrilocal Residence,” Behavior Science Research 9 (1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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34 The complete data set will be published separately by the authors in Behavior Science Research.

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38 Ross (fn. 22).

39 When either variable 6 or variable 11 was dropped, variable 8 retained its previous sign and approximate significance level; the same occurred for variable 11 when either 6 or 8 was dropped. Variable 6 was more unstable: weakly significant with a positive sign in the absence of 8; weakly significant with a negative sign in the absence of 11.

40 In the contemporary international system, see Maoz and Russett (fn. 3), who find that stable democratic systems are more likely to be peaceable toward other democracies than are unstable ones.

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46 Spoehr (fn. 45), 32.

47 Nordenskiold, Erland, An Historical and Ethnological Survey of the Cuna Indians, ed. Wassen, Henry (Goteborg: Goteborgs Museum, Etnografiska Avdelningen, 1938)Google Scholar; Fred Mc-Kim, San Bias: An Account of the Cuna Indians of Panama. The Forbidden Land: Reconnaissance of Upper Bayano River, Republic of Panama, in 1936, ed. Henry Wassen (Goteborg: Etnografiska Museet, 1947); Stout, David B., San Bias Cuna Acculturation: An Introduction (New York: Viking Fund, 1947)Google Scholar.

18 Ross (fn. 16), 176–81.

49 Ibid.

50 Tuden and Marshall (fn. 18), 120–21.