Democracy and War Involvement

Abstract

Most quantitative researchers had agreed that regime type and war involvement are not significantly related to each other until Rummel recently challenged this consensus. According to Rummel, libertarian or democratic states are less intensively involved in foreign conflict and tend to participate in wars less often than do other states. Rummel's assertion is disputed in this article. Relying on various definitions of war and compilations of data for the 1960s and 1970s, it is demonstrated that democracy and war involvement are not consistently and significantly correlated with each other. Only in the late seventies did democracies succeed in avoiding involvement in wars. Unfortunately, this period seems rather exceptional.

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