Between Dispute and War: The Effect of Joint Democracy on Interstate Conflict Escalation

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Abstract
The "democratic peace" postulate has received much theoretical and empirical attention recently, with the bulk of the evidence coming down in support of its expectations: that democratic pairs of states are unlikely to get involved in militarized disputes (compared with other regime pairs), and more likely to avoid escalation to war when they do occur. This paper does not challenge these findings but examines escalation behavior of democratic disputants at the stages between the two "fire break" points of dispute and war Interestingly, the results of ordinal level analyses are not in line with the expectations of the joint-democracy hypothesis: once a democratic pair has entered a militarized dispute, it is about as likely (possibly a little more so) to escalate that dispute through further stages of antagonism short of war, as is a non-jointly democratic dyad. Once they pass the initial threshold into conflict, disputes between democracies escalate to uses of force relatively frequently, showing a willingness by democratic leaders to fight.

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