Democratic Peace Analysis

Democratic peace analysis is the empirical study of the proposition that democracies rarely or never fight one another. Building on the dyadic research design crystallized by Maoz and Russett (1993), it codes the regime type of each state, constructs dyad-years, and models the probability of militarized conflict as a function of joint democracy alongside controls for power, contiguity, alliances, and trade. The approach has produced one of the most robust empirical regularities in international relations and a long debate over whether shared norms or institutional structures account for it.