Following an analysis of more than five decades worth on international conflict, researchers from Ohio State University have come to a rather sobering conclusion: the theory that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other than other types of government may be false.
In the study, OSU political science professor Skyler Cranmer and his colleagues investigated the theory first put forth by philosopher Immanuel Kant back in 1795 that the world would be able to enjoy a “perpetual peace” if nations became increasingly interconnected in three ways.
The modern interpretation of those three ways, the researchers explained, are through the spread of democratic states, more joint membership in international governmental organizations (IGOs), and increased economic interdependence through trade. They used a new statistical technique to analyze all three components collectively, as well as how they connected to each other.
They found that while economic trade and participation in IGOs helped keep the peace between countries, democracy did not. Cranmer called the findings “startling… because the value of joint democracy in preventing war is what we thought was the closest thing to a law in international politics. There’s been empirical research supporting this theory for the past 50 years.”
Using Kant’s theory to better predict future international conflict
The study, which appeared in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also developed a new method that the authors claim is 47 percent more accurate than current models at predicting global conflict as much as five or 10 years into the future.
Using their statistical measure, which is known as “multislice community detection”, they looked at all three components of the Kant theory “holistically,” Cranmer said. By doing so, they found “communities of countries that are similar not only in terms of their IGO memberships, or trade agreements, or in their democratic governments, but in terms of all… three elements together.”
The separation between each of these communities, which the authors referred to as “Kantian Fractionalization,” helped predict how many violent conflicts would take place one-to-ten years down the road. The deeper the separation between these communities at any one time, the more dangerous the world becomes and the greater the odds of war.
“You might think of it as the number of cliques the world is split up into and how easy it is to isolate those cliques from one another,” Cranmer said, noting that the association between the higher levels of Kantian fractionalization and more future conflict was so strong that he “threw up my hands in frustration when I first saw the results.”
“I thought we surely must have made a mistake because you almost never see the kind of clean, linear relationship that we found outside of textbooks. But we confirmed that there is this strong relationship,” the OSU professor continued, adding that “being able to have a sense of the global climate in five or 10 years would be extremely helpful from a policy and planning perspective.”
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