Democracy and armed conflict
By Håvard Hegre. 2014
212 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The article reviews the literature on the relationship between democracy and armed conflict, internal as well as interstate. The review points to several similarities between how democratic institutions affect both conflict types. It summarizes the main empirical findings and discusses the most prominent explanations as well as the most important objections raised to the finding, empirically and theoretically. To a large degree, the empirical finding that pairs of democratic states have a lower risk of interstate conflict than other pairs holds up, as does the conclusion that consolidated democracies have less conflict than semi-democracies. The most critical challenge to both conclusions is the position that both democracy and peace are due to pre-existing socio-economic conditions. I conclude that this objection has considerable leverage, but it also seems clear that economic development is unlikely to bring about lasting peace alone, without the formalization embedded in democratic institutions.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49fcf36164aa93398169ca6d5f192958968536c0
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In Political Science and International Relations
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Governance and Conflict Relapse (2015, background): “Are well-governed countries better able to avoid armed conflict? Studies such as Hegre et al. (2001), Fearon and Laitin (2003), and Cederman, Hug, and Krebs (2010) answer this question focusing on the extent to which the governing institutions are formally democratic since democratically elected lea”