I36005

Soohyung Ahn

Week 12 Designing Social Inquiry

Democratic Peace Schol-arshipProponents vs.

Critics

• Read Layne, Spiro, and Corres-pondence.

What are the major points of contentions (in terms of methodo-logy) between these scholars? Who do you think has won the debate?

Question

• Democratic peace theory + pro-ponents

• The element of democratic peace theory

• Critics on this theory• Who won the debates?

Contents

Democratic Peace Theory

•Democratic peace is the proposition that democra-cies do not fight each other.•Immanuel Kant’ essay “Perpetual Peace.”

• A republican constitution is the most desirable cir-cumstance for perpetual peace.•The checks and balances and international law.

Immanuel Kant

The elements of democratic peace theory

- Structural element : democratic struc-tures give citizens leverage over govern-ment decisions. Therefore, a democratic leader is less likely to initiate a war with another liberal democracy.

- Normative element : shared democratic and liberal values explain the peace that exists between democratic states.

Michael Doyle

• Statistic - A computerized database on interstate wars. - In statistical analysis, he found no liberal na-

tions fought wars with each other since 1816.

(“the complete absence of wars” or “zero wars”)

Bruce Russett

• The causes of peace : the two elements. - democratic peace theory relies on two

causal explanations. 1) institutional constraints 2) democratic norms and culture

Critics on the theory David Spiro

Immanuel Kant

1) DefinitionA statistical artifact in terms of its

definition. - They selectively choose definitions

of key variables so that data ana-lysis yields the results they seek.

- Democracy and War

2) The data• Zero is a insignificant result and is pre-

dicted by random chance.

- Why? Although he used a computerized database, he did not perform any probability analyses to disclose why zero is statistically significant.

- Example? Lotteries

- Actually, the absence of war between liberal democra-cies is not a significant pattern for the past two centur-ies.

- The number of wars between democracies is not statist-ically different from what random chance would predict.

- Furthermore, both wars and democracies are rare over

the past two centuries.

Critics on the theory Christopher Layne

• criticizes two elements of democratic people theory

(institutional constraints / democratic norms and culture)

• it is just a matter of de-gree

• It is difficult to prove the cases why a non-event did not happen

- The dog that did not bark agreement.

The main points of critics

• This theory use only the data which support their position and exclude evidence they cannot explain for their good.

• The theory is based on normative theory, which cannot be substanti-ated.

Who won the debates?

• On the surface, Layne and Spiro can be considered the winner in the ar-gument.

• “the dog that did not bark argument”

• Therefore, Neither position is perfect