Fun fact: democracies don’t fight other democracies.
Takeaway Points
- The democratic peace theory is a statistical trend that shows that democratic countries engage in war less frequently than non-democratic states.
- The effect is dyadic—it describes interactions between two specific states rather than how a single state interacts with all other states. Specifically, a dyad consisting of two democracies is less likely to fight than a dyad of two non-democracies. But a dyad of one democracy and one non-democracy is just as likely to fight a war as a dyad of two non-democracies.