Building upon the work of Maoz and Russett, Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, and Morgan and Campbell, the authors evaluate the “democratic peace” phenomenon in an experimental setting. They first introduce the “political incentive” explanation of why democracies don't fight each other in the context of the diversionary theory of war, and then report results based on experiments with three groups of subjects: American students, nonstudent adults, and Israeli students. The results of all three experiments confirm the democratic peace findings and suggest that democracies do not fight each other because their leaders have very few political incentives to do so.
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