Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 85 Democratic vs. Capitalist Peace: A Test in the Developing World Faruk Ekmekci Abstract This paper aims to test the capitalist and democratic peace arguments within the developing world. Notwithstanding the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence which indicate two different dynamics of interstate conflict in the developing and the developed worlds, the proponents of both “democratic peace” and “capitalist peace” arguments did not take into account the distinction between developing and developed countries and tested their hypotheses within samples that included “all dyads” in different time periods. This study aims to fill this gap by testing capitalist and democratic peace arguments within the developing world. It tests the capitalist and democratic peace arguments through statistical analysis (logistic regression) of the militarized interstate disputes in the developing world between 1951 and 2000. The results support the “capitalist peace” argument and suggest that, within the developing world, economic development leads to interstate peace, whereas democracy does not. The findings are robust to different measures of conflict, democracy and economic development. Introduction “Democratic peace” has been one of the most extensively studied phenomena of international relations in the last three decades. The proponents of the democratic peace theory argued that democratic norms and institutions have rendered militarized conflicts among democratic countries unprecedentedly rare, if not obsolete. Yet the theory has been criticized on a variety of grounds as well. Two recent challenges to the democratic peace theory are the “capitalist peace” and “non-universality” arguments. The former argues that it is capitalism, rather than democracy, that accounts for the rarity of conflicts among contemporary democracies, while the latter contends that democracy’s peaceful effects on interstate relations are limited to Western Europe and North America. This article aims to make a simultaneous test of these two challenges to the democratic peace theory as well as the theory itself. It tests the capitalist and democratic Peace and Conflict Studies PCS (Spring 2014) 21(1), pp. 85-99 PCS Webpage: http://shss.nova.edu/pcs/