Cooperation and Conflict among Democracies: Why Do Democracies Cooperate More and Fight Less?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to corroborate that democracies rarely fight other democracies, and (2) to establish why. The paper shows that democracy-pairs cooperate more and fight less in order to protect the greater amounts of trade and wealth that democracies exhibit. Unlike current studies that employ war and militarized international dispute (MID) data, this analysis is performed using the Cooperation and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB), an events data set culled from 48 newspapers from 1958 to 1967. As such it utilizes information on both international cooperation and conflict, and thus is not restricted solely to conflict data as in most studies. The results are important because they provide an alternative, more economics-based, explanation of why democracies rarely fight each other, rather than the “cultural” and “structural” reasons now commonly used in the political science literature. As such, the results call to question current U.S. policies that promote democratization to establish peace. The paper shows free trade to be a more fundamental factor in the peace process than democracy per se, and as such the paper advocates policies encouraging international trade rather than policies purely advocating democratization.1