Democracy and war: Reflections on the literature

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Abstract
This article reviews the research addressing the question of whether democracies are less war‐prone than are other types of nation‐states. I argue that we have witnessed a great deal of cumulation in this body of literature and that our understanding has grown substantially over the past decades. Furthermore, I suggest that this literature has advanced through the interplay of theoretical and empirical work in which empirical analyses have posed questions requiring the development of new theories, which in turn have produced new hypotheses requiring additional empirical work. I note that recent work provides two competing theoretical arguments accounting for the empirical evidence and suggest research strategies that may produce a reconciliation.

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