The democratic peace is a well established empirical law in the international relations literature.Two key findings mark the cornerstone of the democratic peace: first, democracies almost never fight other democracies, and second, democracies regularly fight non-democracies. Although most empirical analyses and theoretical explanations have focused on the dyadic nature of the democratic peace, some have argued that democratic norms make democracies more peaceful than other regime types in general, not just in their relations with other democracies. In this article, we evaluate the monadic democratic peace to examine support for the claim that democracies are more peaceful in general than non-democracies. Examining the frequency of conflict and the likelihood of dispute initiation using four different measures of democracy, our results indicate that, while the dyadic democratic peace is strongly supported, there is little, if any, empirical support for the monadic democratic peace.
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