In this article, the authors theorize that three distinct structures of democratic constraint may explain the so-called “democratic peace” – why more democratic dyads do not engage in military conflict with each other.
They build on earlier theories that focused on electoral and horizontal accountability, and add a new dimension—the social accountability provided by an active civil society.
Using several new measures from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data set, they find social accountability to be the strongest and most consistent predictor of nonbelligerence in dyads; that horizontal accountability is still important; but that the independent role of electoral accountability has been somewhat overstated.
Read the article on journals.sagepub.com