Civil Society and the Democratic Peace

• DOI: 10.1177/0022002719850620
• Author: Michael Bernhard,Håvard Hegre,Jan Teorell
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Civil Society and the

Democratic Peace

Ha

˚vard Hegre

1,2

, Michael Bernhard

3

,

and Jan Teorell

4

Abstract

We theorize that three distinct structures of democratic constraint explain why

more democratic dyads do not engage in military conflict with each other. We build

on earlier theories that focused on electoral and horizontal accountability. We 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, we

stringently test these explanations. We 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. However, we do find that social and

electoral accountability work strongly together, to make for an even greater effect.

The finding is robust to a range of specifications and in the face of controls for

contending theories that challenge the democratic peace (e.g., the capitalist and

territorial peace theories).

Keywords

democratic peace, interstate conflict, democratic institutions, dyadic conflict

1

Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

2

Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Oslo, Norway

3

Department of Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

4

Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Corresponding Author:

Ha

˚vard Hegre, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala 75121, Sweden.

Email: havard.hegre@pcr.uu.se

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(1) 32-62

ªThe Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0022002719850620

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The democratic peace has proved to be one of the most influential an d durable

findings in the history of international relations, if not political science as a whole.

As with all influential findings, alternatives have been posed, for example, the

“capitalist peace” (Gartzke 2007; Mousseau 2000, 2009, 2013), the “territorial

peace” (Gibler 2012), or “political similarity” (Bennett 2006; Raknerud and Hegre

1997; Peceny, Beer, and Sanchez-Terry 2002; Werner 2000). Beyond such empirical

challenges, the finding has also been criticized for not providing a fully convincing

causal logic that explains the empirical finding (Rosato 2003). This puzzle of what

makes democracies less likely to engage in conflict with other democracies still

remains subject to a lively and inconclusive debate (Hegre 2014). Our purpose here

is to use the new Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, with its ability to more

precisely disaggregate the components of democracy, to reconsider its causal logic

in a more precise fashion and with a fresh perspective.

We advance the debate by arguing that different forms of constraint on power

holders help to explain why democratic dyads are less likely to engage in conflict.

To date, the greatest attention has been focused on wha t we term electoral and

horizontal accountability. Electoral accountability (sometimes referred to as vertical

accountability) functions because elected politicians try to avoid alienating voters in

anticipation of the next round of elections. Horizontal accountability operates

through the ability of other branches of government and state institutions to check

the power of the executive. We build on previous work that showed that greater

electoral participation (Reiter and Tillman 2002; Clark and Nordstrom 2005; Bueno

de Mesquita et al. 1999) and greater horizontal constraints on the executive (Reiter

and Tillman 2002; Clark and Nordstrom 2005; Choi 2010) work to reduce conflict.

An important part of our contribution is to add a new dimension—social account-

ability. It is provided by organized actors in civil society that have the ability to

inflict audience costs on the executive in-between elections and to mobilize in

support of opponents during elections.

We also highlight a new measurement tool for capturing democracy as an aggre-

gate and in its component parts in new and potentially fruitful ways. Whereas the

vast majority of studies have relied on Polity to capture the degree of democracy

among states, we use the V-Dem data, which have both better concept-measurement

consistency and also allow us, because of the ability to disaggregate components of

democracy, to directly test the different forms of constraint we discussed above. Our

sample includes observations from 173 countries across the globe from 1900 to

2010. We test whether these three different forms of accountability—(1) horizontal,

(2) electoral, and (3) social—restrain democracies from fighting with each other.

When pitting the three mechanisms of accountability directly against each other, we

find the weakest support for the form that has received the greatest attention in the

literature—electoral. However, its effect becomes salient when it is combined with

social accountability between elections. The democratic peace effect thus seems less

a product of simple electoral constraint than on the ability of civil society, as well as

other state actors, to constrain the incumbent. To our knowledge, this is the first time

Hegre et al. 33