Extant studies provide inconsistent evidence that democracies are generally more pacific than nondemocracies. Many scholars have concluded that this question has been answered and work should be concentrated on explaining why democracies rarely fight each other. Yet, previous state level research has been conducted with model specifications that fail to control for spurious relationships, and t...

Democratic peace theory is probably the most powerful liberal contribution to the debate on the causes of war and peace. In this paper I examine the causal logics that underpin the theory to determine whether they offer compelling explanations for the finding of mutual democratic pacifism. I find that they do not. Democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict resoluti...