Last week, we looked at new research on the aspects of democratic institutions that contribute to preventing the outbreak of civil war. This week, we’ll return to the core of democratic peace theory: The idea that democratic states don’t fight wars with one another.

In an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Peace Research, political scientists David Altman, Federico Rojas-de-Galarreta, and Francisco Urdinez take on one of the core definitional questions that complicates democratic peace theory. If the idea is that democracies won’t go to war against one another, one of the first things that needs defining is what counts as a democracy. Different researchers have used different definitions, often leading to varying conclusions about the main contention of democratic peace theory.

Altman et al., putting on their quantitative research hats, decided that instead of testing one definition of democracy they should test every definition of democracy. They used data that rated the strength of each state’s democratic institutions on a continuous scale over time to develop a set of over 33,000 dyad years — years in which contiguous states boasted varying levels of democracy and either did or didn’t fight each other.

The point of all that data was to bring it to bear on the two main hypotheses for the mechanism behind democratic peace theory. The first hypothesis, beloved of Immanuel Kant and other democratic optimists, holds that democracy imposes institutional constraints on states that make it difficult for them to go to war, especially with other democracies. Systems of checks and balances are difficult to navigate on the way to declaring war, the democratic optimists contend, and doubly so when potential adversaries face the same constraints.

The second hypothesis is rather more pessimistic about democracy. To the pessimists, the specifics of democratic institutions don’t matter much at all. Instead, they argue, the observed tendency for democracies not to fight each other is just a subset of a more general rule of international relations: That similar regimes of any type don’t fight each other. These naysayers point out that democracies fight non-democracies all the time, and that autocracies tend not to fight each other.

To Altman et al., these two hypotheses are not completely mutually exclusive. Checks and balances exist in autocracies, they just function differently than in democracies. It may be that the observed peaceful effect of regime similarity is the result of compatible institutions. It may also be the case that the effects of regime similarity are stronger among democracies than among autocracies — that is, that democratic institutions are superior, if not unique, in their capacity to limit conflict.

By plotting all the dyads based on both the mean level of democracy and the democratic spread — that is, how far apart the two countries were on a scale of democracy in that year — the researchers were able to measure the importance of both democratic institutions and similarity in regime type. What they found was good news for the democratic optimists. The higher the mean level of democracy in a dyad, the less chance there was of that dyad going to war. There was also, however, some good news for the democratic pessimists. As other researchers have observed, clear autocracies are also unlikely to go to war with one another.

Yet for dyads in the middle of the democracy scale, where both countries had some democratic and some autocratic characteristics, regime similarity didn’t seem to do much to prevent conflict. Simply having similar democracy scores doesn’t on its own prevent conflict between two states.

By measuring democracy on a continuous scale rather than as a binary designation, Altman et al.’s work lends credence to the idea that regime structures matter in determining the outcomes of international disputes. Strongly democratic dyads do seem to have an advantage over strongly autocratic dyads in preventing conflict, but perhaps the key is that each regime’s decision making apparatus must be legible to the other to gain the benefits of the so-called democratic peace.

Theo Merz chronicled a recent exhibition by Russian artist Katya Muromtseva that highlights the work of Russian political dissidents. The multimedia exhibition, which is showing at a gallery in central Moscow, draws on interviews Muromtseva conducted with her peers about their political experiences coming of age in Russia. Muromtseva’s works — large-scale drawings and paintings evoking the protests and repression that have defined life in Russia’s political opposition under Vladimir Putin’s rule — are presented alongside the text of the interviews.

Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo tracked the evolution of the security threat posed by drone swarms. Numerous countries are developing autonomous swarm capabilities, but those efforts are still in their early stages. Many swarm technologies that seem fearsome in testing environments would struggle in an actual combat environment, and anti-swarm weapons are being developed almost as quickly as the swarms. Yet, in the long run, there is a danger in swarm technology outpacing counter-swarm technology — particularly, Gosselin-Malo argues, if that technology proliferates to non-state armed actors.

Sarah Birnbaum spoke to human rights advocates about their use of the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s longtime, ongoing policy of affording Palestinians under Israeli occupation far fewer rights than are afforded to Israeli citizens who are doing the occupying. Some Israelis Birnbaum spoke with, including one who emigrated to South Africa in 1965, object to the term, saying they “can’t even begin to see the comparison” between modern Israel and the South African system of racial inequity. Yet among South Africans who stayed in the country, lived under apartheid, and fought against it, the comparison is particularly apt. South African president and anti-apartheid veteran Cyril Ramaphosa said last month that the plight of Palestinians “brings back very terrible memories of our own history under apartheid.”

As the US military eases into the eighth decade of its collective freakout about uniforms and grooming standards for women, the theatrically-inclined artillerymen of the British army would like a word.

The worst part about Australia is that every living thing there can prank you.

Academia.edu keeps our leading political scientists up to date on when their names are used in occult rituals, which is helpful.

When a layout editor’s day goes very wrong.