Structural Change and Democratization in the Major Power Subsystem: Some Systemic Puzzles of the Democratic Peace
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Structural Change and Democratization in the Major Power Subsystem: Some Systemic Puzzles of the Democratic Peace Karen Rasler and William R. Thompson Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
Two systemic puzzles of the democratic peace are examined within the context of the critical major power subsystem for the 1816–1992 period. One puzzle concerns whether the relationship between systemic democratization and conflict should be linear, curvilinear, or unpredictable. While the arguments for the latter two possibilities are persuasive, the empirical evidence suggests that the relationship is negative and linear in the major power subsystem. The second puzzle focuses on the relative strength of democratization, particularly, vis-a`-vis hegemony, in reducing conflict. In contrast to earlier findings, structural change, conceptualized and measured in terms of global and regional power concentration patterns, in conjunction with democratization, predicts significantly to systemic levels of militarized dispute behavior. The democratic peace phenomenon thus works similarly at multiple levels of analysis but its emergence has not eliminated the explanatory utility of older emphases on geopolitical configurations and structural change. At the same time, we do not need to choose between old and new explanations, as long as we can integrate them into coherent and more compelling explanations than their stand-alone equivalents. International Politics (2003) 40, 465–490. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800037 Keywords: democratic peace; structural change; major power; international conflict
Introduction In the past decade or so, the empirical study of world politics has gravitated overwhelmingly toward dyadic analyses. In what might be termed a macroNoah’s Ark perspective, international relations is viewed as consisting of the aggregation of thousands of pairs of interacting states. The main reason for this shift in focus is that it makes considerable sense for a number of questions. At the core of such traditional phenomena such as war, crisis, and arms races, there are often two states in confrontation. More recently emerged foci on militarized disputes, democratic peace, and enduring rivalry all seemingly lend themselves readily to a dyadic interpretation. While the adoption of a dyadic perspective makes great sense and has contributed to a number of advances in
Karen Rasler and William R. Thompson Structural Changes and Democratization in the Major Power Subsystem
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our understanding of IR processes, there is a cost to pay if the one level of analysis is permitted to crowd out other levels of analysis. This is all the more the case, if dyadic arguments and findings generate puzzles that can only be dealt with at some level of analysis other than the dyadic. A case in point is the democratic peace. If two democracies are unlikely to go to war with each other, what should we make of an international system that is increasingly populated
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