This Article Full Text (PDF) Datasets References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Horowitz, S. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Debate: Democracy for Peace, or Peace for Democracy? The Post-Communist Experience

Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, shale{at}uwm.edu

In the post-communist world, war appears to set back democracy. But pre-transition, prewar levels of democracy may predict both war and post-communist levels of democracy. After controlling for initial levels of democracy, it might emerge that war has no significant impact on later levels of democracy. These conjectures are supported if the years of regime change are used to measure pre-transition, prewar democracy. However, this measure is inappropriate, because war and other independent variables already had significant impacts on democracy in those years. When earlier years are used - which more appropriately measure pre-transition, prewar democracy - share of time at war is estimated to have a significant adverse impact on post-transition democracy. Moreover, pre-transition, prewar democracy is not a significant predictor of post-transition democracy, either directly, or through war, indirectly. In the post-communist sample, it is not surprising that prewar democracy has little capacity to predict war. Pre-transition levels of democracy were highly constrained by the authoritarian systems run from Moscow and Belgrade. In addition, the post-communist conflicts were inter-ethnic. In such conflicts, one would expect the institutional and normative constraints proposed by the democratic peace literature to be weaker.

Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 43, No. 1, 91-97 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0022343306059794


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?