Are democracies generally peaceful? Studies have produced mixed evidence, both for and against this proposition. I review and update the literature on this topic and explore reasons why some scholars have come to emphasize those studies showing that democracies are no more or less conflict-prone than other states. This paper re-examines democracy and conflict at the state level of analysis from 1884 to 1999 using a broad sample of states and appropriate statistical estimators. The results show that democracies are less likely to initiate militarized conflicts. I also find that political competition has a stronger pacifying effect than executive constraints when disaggregating the Polity IV democracy index.
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