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Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace. By Joanne Gowa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 136p. $27.50.
Over the past several years Joanne Gowa has published a string of noteworthy attacks on the widely held proposition that liberal democracies seldom if ever fight wars against one another-the so-called democratic (or liberal) peace. Now Gowa combines, refines, and expands her attacks into a general offensive to which defenders of the democratic peace will have to respond. Its theoretical and empirical claims, if true, are devastating to the research program. Gowa argues that the analytical foundations of the democratic peace are wobbly at best; that the statistical evidence for it is inconclusive and even contrary; and that the structure of the international system better accounts for what appears to be democratic peace. She concludes that the United States should not promote democracy in other countries, at least insofar as America's goals include peace.
Gowa opens by arguing that there are no compelling a priori reasons to think that democracies would not fight one another. Democratic leaders are just as self-interested as others; democratic institutions should in principle constrain leaders no more than autocratic ones; and high trade levels should not prevent war inasmuch as states have incentives to continue trading during hostilities. Although Gowa's arguments make sense under certain rationalchoice assumptions, scholars working under different assumptions will be unmoved. For example, much of Gowa's skepticism about democratic institutions rides on her assumption that leaders are not myopic (pp. 21-3). Many scholars would be delighted to find one such leader in the real world.
More compelling are empirical findings that suggest the democratic peace is an artifact of the Cold War. Based on an examination of pairs of states between 1815...