Measuring Democracy

I’m a bit delirious after doing this reading: a lot of information and numbers that I don’t quite know what to do with. I am going to do my best to unpack what the guy is trying to say and attempt to find some areas of contention.

The standard interpretation of democratic peace theory holds that countries that are democratic are less likely to go to war against one another. The emphasis in this view is that the political regime type is the cause behind the peace between these countries. Gartzke takes a contradicting view: he thinks that economics and free market capitalism has as much if not more to do with peace among liberal states than the regime type.

I got pretty lost when the author started going through the different “traditions” of liberal peace. In truth, I skimmed the section: I’m not convinced it was even necessary.

The heart of the article is Gartzke’s data and regression tables. His dependent variable is a militarized interstate dispute variable, which essentially measures whether or not two states were in conflict in a given year (1 is coded as conflict, 0 otherwise). He uses Polity IV scores (my Balkan-approved measure) to measure “democracy” among countries. He uses 4 other independent variables: markets, development, and interest similarity.

The results are expected: two states that are democratic are less likely to fight each other. From here, more liberal economic variables are added to the regression. The effect of development on disputes is not statistically significant, which means it is not a huge determinant of whether or not a country in going to go to war with another. States with similar interests (based on UN voting) are less likely to go to war with one another.

So… how is Gartzke really going against democratic peace theory if every successive regression he ran was one which included democracy as an independent variable? I need to go over this in class before I really make a claim against what he is trying to do.