Wars between democracies: Rare, or nonexistent?

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Abstract
It is often asserted that democratic states never fight wars against each other, but there is a rather lengthy list of exceptions to that rule that are consistently or prominently mentioned in the literature on the democratic peace phenomenon. The controversy regarding whether democratic states never, or only rarely fight wears against each other is unlikely to move in the direction of satisfactory resolution unless an attempt is made to evaluate controversial cases based on a threshold of democracy that is simple, operational, theoretically informed, and intuitively appealing. If a political regime is categorized as democratic only if the identities of the leaders of its executive branch and the members of its national legislature are determined in elections in which at least two independent political parties participate, in which at least half the adult population are eligible to vote, and if the fairness of elections has been established by at least one peaceful transfer of power between opposing political parties, then an examination of controversial cases reveals that the proposition that democratic states never fight wars against each other is defensible.