DESIGNING SOCIAL INQUIRY
Democratic Peace as a ‘Theoretical’ and
‘Methodological’ Panacea……?
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HAN DAEHEE
2014-06-04
Democratic Peace as a ‘Theoretical’ and ‘Methodological’ Panacea……?
HAN Daehee
Two Origins of the Problem that DPT has
Why only the avoidance of the war between liberal democratic countries seems to hold? To answer for this
question, research programs of DPT (Democratic Peace Theory) can be thought to have lots of theoretical and
methodological chaos. Even though Kenneth A. Schultz the avoidance of war can be affected by informational
and institutional constraints and his empirical tests might have demonstrated that 1,654 militarized disputes in
the period from 1816 to 1980 were ‘strongly’ consistent with the informational perspective, paradoxically
enough even he wasn’t 100% sure that those empirical results presented in his article do not conclusively falsify
the ‘institutional constraints’ argument. In fact, one striking aspect of the empirical literature on the democratic
peace is that there seems to be little agreement on the dependent variable that is to be explained. What’s the
origin of this problem?
The origin of this problem basically results from contestable ‘theoretical’ and ‘methodological’ issues that
scholars try to look meticulous but arbitrary. Therefore, this paper tries to look into what extent the scope,
definition, and hypothetical assumption related to the methodologies that DPT has can be problematic and
logically inconsistent. Basically in this regard, although the third article, Correspondence [Please refer to
International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Spring 1995) pp. 164 ~ 184], gives a brief summary and bird’s eye views
of theoretically-contestable arguments in terms of realism and liberalism. Yet, this article needed to complement
with ‘detailed’ insights to be more analytical. Thus, Debating the Democratic Peace [Please refer to Sean M.
Lynn-Jones, “Preface:, in Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds.,) Debating the
Democratic Peace (Cambridge, MA: The Mit Press, 1996), pp. ix-xxxiii.] , a more extensive article to explain
more detailed ‘theoretical’ and ‘methodological’ debates was additionally used at the same time in order to
complement the understanding of this article. Second, like that Kenneth A. Schultz already explained in his
conclusion, even he was quite confused about what kind of methodologies between qualitative and quantitative
approaches students of DPT should use to prove or disprove the main hypothesis of DPT. Although two
methodologies are dependent of ‘selections’ by students of DPT, outcomes of the selections in terms of intertemporal dimension and cases can vary, even sometimes these selections can undermine the main hypothesis of
DPT and other times can make their research outcomes be logically inconsistent according to what scholars
want to derive from their hypothesis. That’s why the number of independent variables varies but whether those
IVs can contribute to the dependent variable to be explained is not clear. To exhaustively discuss this matter, I
only limited the scope of discussions into arguments and counter-arguments among the Michael W. Doyle,
Christopher Layne, David E. Spiro and Bruce Russet.
A Hypothetical Assumption and Two Channels to Think It Over
Let’s start with a hypothetical conjecture that Michael W. Doyle raised in Correspondence. He assumed that if
the United States and Britain suddenly attacked each other, and stopped before sustaining 1000, no advocate of
the liberal thesis should regard the theory as vindicated. It plausibly seems that this hypothetical conjecture
reflects on the realities that researchers of the Democratic Peace Theory are not logically, methodologically, and
theoretically consistent. A hypothetical statement started with “if the United States and Britain suddenly attacked
each other” does give two logical channels.
The first hypothetical channel can be that although the number of casualties is less than 1000, the United
States and Britain could have attacked each other even though they share the Republican democratic
representation, an ideological commitment to fundamental human rights, and trans-national interdependence.
The other one can be that the United States and Britain attacked each other because their calculus would predict
that either of the two must have quite convincing calculations on the ‘relative’ capabilities, distinctions of the
motives, information structure over ‘the adversary’, and offence-defense differentiation[a transformative context
between the offence advantage and defense advantage].
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The problem of the two expanded conjectures ramified under the “if” statement might be that the first channel
can be logically contrasted with the assumption of the DPT. What’s the assumption of the DPT? The ‘tendencies’
of liberal states are simultaneously likely to be peace-prone in their relations with each other and unusually warprone in their relations with non-liberal states. Since the United States and Britain are definitely ‘liberal’
democracies and they seek to be peace prone according to the DPT, they are not programmed to fight each other
under the Republican tradition based on the “Perpetual Peace” and the domestic institutions to check-andbalance the motives to go to ‘war’. In terms of liberal states that have tendencies not to go to war, Kenneth
Schultz already emphasized the role of ‘institutional constraints’ that political costs of waging war are high and
‘informational constraints’ that in asymmetrical structures of information, democratic states are not likely to
engage in incentives to misrepresent their motives.
The second channel is also problematic because although they have finished calculating the calculus of ‘war’
politics over the various independent variables of going to war which I mentioned earlier in the first paragraph
in this section and they judge that going to ‘war’ is rational, ‘war’ might not happen because those independent
variables including ‘relative’ capabilities, distinctions of the motives, and information structure over ‘the enemy’,
and offence-defense differentiation are quite ‘volatile’ even now and ‘dyads’ to fight each other might have the
incentives to misrepresent their own ‘capabilities’, ‘distinctions’, information’, and even ‘the incentives’. In
actuality, if one country can strictly assume that it has the offensive advantage and offensive motives against the
adversary, one country might not easily wage the war in terms of the ‘rationalist’ or ‘realist’ assumption. In this
regard, James Fearon emphasized the role of ‘audiences cost’. Depending upon the magnitude of ‘audiences cost’
that political leaders fear for concealment, deception, and bluff from threats and for losing their political
leadership as well as legitimacies, ‘how credible a threat to use force’ can be sometimes penalized by voters.
Therefore, since higher audience costs derived from the possibilities of bluffing behavior constrain political
leaders to search for ‘credible’ signals to resolve.
Internal Constraints of the ‘Definition’ and Its Scope
Therefore, reflecting these two channels, it might be wrong that simply sharing the democratic tradition
between the two countries might not lead to the war between the two. At the same time, it might be logically
wrong that depending upon the ‘realist’ and ‘rationalist’ explanation might not also ‘inevitably’ lead to the war
and violence between the two. The problem lies in the basic ‘starting-edge’ of the research design: definition. A
rule of thumb of the research should be started with the clear ‘definition’ and ‘scope’ of the theory.
The ‘ambiguity’ problem that the ‘definition’ of the DPT seems to be the fundamental cause that
paradoxically enough, the article ‘Correspondence’ filled with well-orderly chaotic contentions was written. To
illustrate, going back to the assumption of this theory is quite useful because it seems easy to have weakness in
finding the ‘ambiguity’ of the assumption. Michael W. Doyle described the assumption that liberal states
simultaneously to be peace-prone and to be war-prone in non-liberal states are a sort of ‘tendencies’. It’s quite
dubious. Why? Liberal states simultaneously to be peace-prone and to be war-prone in non-liberal states are
‘tendencies’ to be explained in probability dimensions. In this situation, it is also plausible that analysis of
‘tendencies’ for liberal states to be ‘peace-prone’ with liberal states must not be biased as if liberal states are not
programmed into fighting each other. At least in this respect, that’s why it is quite worthwhile to take a look at
why Christopher Layne at least tried to undermine the main assumption of the DPT. In addition, ‘tendencies’ are
mathematically applied into a situation to describe ‘stochastic’ outcomes of ‘average’ behaviors which are likely
to happen repetitively. Therefore, if this usage has to be applied in the study of the DPT, it is quite controversial
because whether researchers should exclude ‘extraordinary’ and ‘hard’ cases from the selected cases for which
researchers searched for. In this situation, by utilizing ‘hard’ cases, a meaningful trial and error to undermine the
value of the DPT can be started like Christopher Layne did somehow.
At the same time, what does the terminology ‘liberal’ means? If a liberal state wages a war with a shifted state
from a non-liberal state to liberal state or from a liberal state to a non-liberal state, then can we say that the DPT
can hold? What’s the exact criterion to distinguish the liberal states from non-liberal states? To elaborate this
issue, bisecting the regime type might not be efficient approach to the research of DPT like David Spiro replied
to a methodological critique of Bruce Russet.
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Because of the internal ambiguity problems, two channels of researches can be ignited: a research of why
liberal stares might be suspected as ‘programmed into fighting each other’ and related to the former issue, the
other research of why ‘hard’ cases can occur like Finland that David E. Spiro and Bruce Russett democratically
fought each other. With these two conjectures, ‘theoretical’ questions can be validated because those questions
are directly caused by the endogenous suspicion of ‘ambiguity’ and ‘uncertainty’ that definitions of DPT have.
Empirically…… Yes?
Since DPT has fragile theoretical backbone of its ‘scope’ and ‘definition’ in that DPT can hold in terms of
‘probablistic’ manner, the problem is not only theoretical but also empirical. Yet, like Kenneth Schultz were
cautious of his empirical tests because of ‘selection effects’, empirical tests are not easy because so many
arbitrary ‘methodological’ issues such as the number to be recognized as ‘war’ are ready to be democratically
fought each other in order to gain ‘methodological’ advantage. To speculate those issues, let’s go back again to a
hypothetical assumption raised by Michael W. Doyle.
Mr. Doyle’s Hypothetical Assumption: If the United States and Britain suddenly attacked each other, and
stopped before sustaining 1000, no advocate of the liberal thesis should regard the theory as vindicated.
The problem is why a waged war even between liberal states which didn’t exceed the number of casualties by
1000 is not vindicated as a war between liberal states. Depending on this criterion, there might be one researcher
who contends that DPT empirically holds because empirical tests show that liberal states are not likely to lead to
a war after selecting cases of ‘war’ that didn’t exceed 1000 casualties between liberal states. At the same time,
there might be the other researcher who contends that DPT doesn’t hold because dogs that didn’t bark [a
phenomenal ‘hard’ cases that can be suspected as war between liberal states that didn’t exceed the casualties by
1000 or other ‘hard’ cases that can be suspected as a ‘near misses’ to the war] should also be considered as facts
to disprove DPT. That was a Christopher Layne. Therefore, depending upon the ‘methodological’ criterion that
researchers have no choice to be biased in terms of ‘selection’, ‘disproval’ or ‘approval’ of DPT can be decided.
In this respect, recognizing what kind of contestable arguments Christopher Layne, David E. Spiro, and Bruce
Russet they have can give a clear-cut impression on how ‘chaotic’ methodologies of DPT issues are. The
following methodological dimensions can be divided into two parts: Qualitative Vs Quantitative and
Quantitative Vs Quantitative.
Empirically…… Yes? : Qualitative Vs Quantitative
Basically, Christopher Layne demonstrates that institutional constraints including institutional constraints and
democratic norms and culture do not hold up when examined in four key ‘hard’ cases where it should apply. He
tries not to approve that democratic peace theory offers no convincing explanation of why democracies
purportedly do not fight each other. Rather he wants to contend that much evidence cannot materialize because
in terms of one of four hard cases, London and Berlin could not reconcile their conflicting strategic interests, not
because of the domestic political factors. More specifically, Britain did focus on the German threat, rather than
on the far-away American one for geopolitical reasons. At that time, Germany had been rising as the dominant
land power on the continent and Britain had had ‘fears’ of it. When he analyzed ‘near misses’ of why the US and
the Britain did not lead to a war, he exhaustively sought to look carefully at the historical evidences such as
archives, diaries, memoirs, and policy statements. Yet, the problem that Bruce Russet raised was an issue of
‘reliability’ that ‘interpretation’ spawns. Like he said, serious problems of interpretation are unavoidable, and
difficulties regarding which statements are reported and which are not reported and of obtaining agreement
among observers, must not be evaded. In this circumstance, the following statements quite suspicious of a robust
‘reliability’ to increase the quality of the interpretation can be produced.
Bruce Russet also pointed out that Christopher Layne committed the “logical fallacy of inducing a principle
of universal non existence merely by finding a few cases of non-existence”. Bruce Russet wanted to emphasize
the ‘outcome’ of near misses that anyhow nothing happened in terms of the crises that never erupted or never
brought the participants to the brink of war. He also wanted to emphasize that only four cases can ‘undermine’
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the main hypothesis of DPT but cannot ‘bring it down’.
Then, are four cases that Christopher Layne meaningless? Maybe not because at least ‘liberal states’ might
have had suspicions to have robust ‘motives’ and ‘incentives’ to wage a war, although negligible. Like James
Fearon said, at least they had nearly convincing suspicions of their incentives to go to war even though it is not
quite clear whether Britain and the United States perceived them as ‘democracies’ or not, according to Ido
Oren’s argument. Even though ‘institutional’ or ‘informational’ constraints prevented ‘near-misses’ from going
further to the war, is it quite clear to contend that DPT holds even though the existence of ‘near-misses’
sometimes happen? Then, does Bruce Russet have problem? Yes. Although he raised a question of a ‘reliability’
issue regarding the qualitative methodology, he also has some methodological problems regarding the
‘quantitative research’ programs like Michael W. Doyle pointed out. Those problems will be discussed in the
next section
Empirically…… Yes? : Quantitative Vs Quantitative
In terms of Quantitative Research, what’s the most problematic is to set the accurate standard to select
‘reliable’ data sets based on the ‘temporal’ constraint to prove the main hypothesis of DPT. In actuality, the
debate between Bruce Russet and David E. Spiro focused on which methodologies to select them based on the
‘temporal’ limitation seem more convincing and persuasive. The problem is that issues include the following
two dimensions such as ‘probabilistic’ tests over the inter-temporal horizons and reliability of the statistical data
sets to decide anomalies.
In terms of ‘probabilistic’ tests over the inter-temporal horizons, what Bruce Russets argued was to regard
‘temporal dimension’ as ‘continuity’ when calculating the probability of consistently finding ‘zero’ democracies
at war, while Spiro does not regard ‘temporal dimension’ as ‘continuity’ because each year constitutes a test
fully independent of every other year. In that sense, depending upon the assumption whether ‘continuity’ can be
validated or not, the answer to approve the main assumption can be quite different. Bruce Russet argues that if
‘continuity’ assumption holds, the joint probability over 165 years is 0.000000000000000000002 based on the
data sets that David E. Spiro found out. Based on the data sets in order to demonstrate the plausible
insignificance of the liberal peace can somehow contribute to the democratic peace. In addition, ‘anomalies’
should be carefully reviewed. Was Finland regarded as an ‘enemy’ by the Allies and, if so’ in a way similar to
how the other enemy states were regarded? Depending upon the ‘motives’ and ‘hidden causes’ and the criterion
to select ‘cases’ and ‘data sets’, the answers to either to approve or to disapprove DPT can be different.
Although Spiro’s article tried to show that in statistical tests, random chance accounts for the Liberal Peace
better than ‘rigid’ analysis specified by the regime type, what Spiro and Bruce Russet co-shared was that the
absence of wars between democracies might not be ‘empirical’ conformation for liberal theory. At the same time,
technically, because of the ‘selection bias’ toward the definition and methodologies, Bruce Russet also
mentioned in his conclusion of methodological critique that neither should deny the limitations of inability to
explain many of the instances when liberal states have chosen not to fight or threaten one another. At the same
time, David E. Spiro contended that in statistical measure of Bruce Russet, there are no citations on where the
new data come from or how he manipulated it. He also added that there are no descriptions of the statistical tests
or methods used, and no detailed results.
Conclusion: Empirical Implications Related to ‘Theoretical’ Ambiguity of DPT!
In actuality, an assumption that domestic structure [the Second image assumption of IR] such as democracy
can contribute to the avoidance of a war can be right but, the domestic structure is not a panacea. Fundamentally,
DPT cannot be parsimonious in terms of liberalist assumptions. There exist so many different explanations such
as ‘institutions’, ‘perceptions’, ‘information’, even ‘statistical significance’ to support for ‘liberal democratic
peace’. At the same time, realists cannot be parsimonious either by considering so many factors including
offence-defense differentiation, distinction of motives, information variables, and relative capabilities. Based on
the combinations of those independent variables that liberalists and realists show, ‘approval’ for liberal
democratic peace can be ‘empirical’ questions.
The problem is that in DPT research programs, which methodologies are more plausible in explaining the
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behavior of ‘liberal’ states in terms of ‘democratic peace’ in terms of ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ dimension.
Yet, the backbone of this theory is logically inconsistent and not sound in that ‘definitions’ and ‘scope’ of this
theory can be arbitrary from scholars and students of this theory as I tried to discuss in the previous sections,
either. In short, methodological debates fundamentally seem to be directly caused by the ‘ambiguity’ on the
main assumptions of the DPT.
Therefore, the problem of the quantitativism is dependent on the clear definition of the theory, reliability of
‘data sets’, and avoidance of ‘selection bias’. In this avoidance process of ‘selection bias’, how to treat
‘anomalies’ among the chosen data sets can be burdensome issue such as Finland case. At the same time, the
problem of the qualitativism might be the reliability and quality of ‘interpretation’ and much historical evidence
that researchers investigate. They share some merits to be bisected clearly.
Even though Bruce Russet criticized that Christopher Layne was trapped in ‘logical fallacy’ unsuitable hard
cases, at least it is quite convincing that Christopher Layne at least tried to undermine the void ‘theoretical space
that ‘ambiguous’ DPT had with four hard cases. Although still dubious of quality of the case analysis, he tried to
set the alternative ‘explanations’ of state behavior related to ‘power’ and ‘motives’. Like it is impossible to have
robust trust in the quality of the interpretation, it is also impossible to have robust trust in the fluctuations of the
answers derived by the ‘methodological scopes’ of the quantitativism. Whether ‘anomalies’ should be included
in the data sets to implement certain types of statistical measures or not can be time-consuming debates that will
continue in the future. Although difficult and inefficiently-looking path, ‘qualitativism’ can also contribute to the
theoretical construction to build more strongly-robust DPT. To ignite on-going and energetic theoretical debates,
qualitative analysis to produce ‘alternative explanations’ well can be a more meaningful cornerstone to the
theoretical building. In this respect, that’s why Kenneth Schultz mentioned that while quantitative tests are
mainly useful for determining whether democracy matters, qualitative case studies are more appropriate for
determining why. Also at the same time, among so many scholars who tried to prove, disprove, or undermine
DPT, Christopher Layne’s qualitative approach to undermine the main hypothesis of DPT can be quite
convincing in a sense that paradoxically, this kind of ‘undermining’ can contribute to having a strongly-robust
confidence of DPT in the future, although lots of constraints exist for Christopher Layne, too.
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