Science is about falsifiable hypotheses
Dean
Science is about falsifiable hypotheses. Ultimately that's what science is all about.
Some claim that political science is not truly science because it produces no falsifiable theories. But political scientists do state a falsifiable hypothesis: no two democratic nations will ever go to war with each other.
How do you define "democratic?" "Democracy" in this discussion is defined by the Freedom House data set. Any country rated an overall "4" or better is defined as a democracy.
How do you define "war?" The loose definition is "an armed conflict in which at least 1,000 people die."
The prediction is that no two democratic nations will ever go to war with each other.
The weak version of the theory is that this will be rare. The strong version is that it will never happen.
So far, the strong version is vindicated.
You disagree? Find me the exception.
Go Wolverines!
Link
Another thing:
Contrary to what the "anti-war" crowd say war is not the only bad thing humans do to each other. Tyranny and famine have killed more people than war has. The number of people unlawfully killed by they're own governments in democracies, while not zero is minuscule to any dictatorship and no democracy have suffered a famine. Democracy's ability to reduce these two phenomenons is probably more important than it's ability to reduce war.
So to sum up:
War: Bad, but almost completely eliminated by democracy.
Government repression: Even worse, but even more reduced by democracy.
Famine: Worse than war, but so far completely eliminated by democracy.
I'm not sure about civil war. One thing democracies have been shown to be bad about, though, is when they maintain colonies in which those colonies do not have democratic representation, they sometimes do commit atrocities. See France's many atrocities in the Ivory Coast, and how the Russians treat the Chechens.
The American "Civil War" was actually a war between two democracies -- The United States of America and the Confederate States of America.
Your point that democracy reduces the threat of war is still a good one. But you should never say
"never". :)
At the time of the civil war, in much of the south, only white male property owners could vote. They would likely have been rated a 5 or even a 6.
Any time you go back past the 20th century you have real problems finding anything but proto-democracies.
Of course, that means before a war breaks out, and you send in the guys in power armor, you need to make sure one of the sides is non-democratic. Which is a good idea, I'd been wondering what would trigger my interventionist hero guy power armor force to meddle, and the lack of democracy would be a good candidate as a trigger.
Don't have to wait for genocides, etc..
Hmmh.
BTW is my memory failing or is Amartya Sen the one who first modeled the link between democracy and lack of famine? I believe I heard him on PBS a few years back. Very smart guy.
Nigeria had a scare where it looked like famine was imminent -- and asked for help and opened their doors to allow full access to international aid agencies so food could get to hungry people.
In other words, they did what democracies always do when they're worried about a famine: they find food for people.
There has not been a famine in the last hundred years that was not directly caused by non-democratic governments, either through sheer bungling or outright intentional mass murder.
Most of the big ones appear to have been intentional.
And the Niger situation illustrates how democracy (Partly free 461 (115 of 146)) eliminates (so far) famine not by never having a bad situation concerning food, but by being open enough that need for food is discovered early. Contrast that with Ethiopia in the mid eighties where the famine wasn't known until people started dying by the hundreds of thousand. (Stopping at about 1.5 million). Also aid organizations are allowed to operate freely unlike in say North Korea where several international aid organizations have pulled out because of government obstruction.
I still wouldn't say democracy is a 100% effective cure for all the worlds problems, but it is the best place to start by far.
So, I think it more like a lottery thing: the chances go waaaaaay, waaaaay down, but when you do hit is a doosy.
I mean, saying the sun will rise tomorrow is certainly falsifiable, but the interesting question is not what will or won't happen, but why.
With Reagan, there was a move away from the M.A.D. strategy toward a "counteforce" strategy of targeting the enemy's nuclear and other military forces and their political leadership. In this War in Iraq, we were able to target Saddam and his forces without waging war on the Iraqi people as such. Quite the opposite, in fact. Good. Perhaps with more accurate weapons, we can return to a sense of chivalry in warfare.
Moreover, despite myths to the contrary, warmaking is generally very expensive unless you're in the business of extensive pillage.
Democratic nations have shown repeatedly that they'd rather negotiate than shoot at each other--it's cheaper, less disruptive, and less unpleasant.
The CSA was as "democratic" as the Northern states. In neither territory were women or blacks allowed to vote. The CSA of course argued that they were the more democratic state, the more constitutional. Debatable, obviously.
If the standard we apply is the 20th/21st century standard of democracy then we have too small a sample set to prove much of anything. By that standard there simply hasn't been much opportunity for democracies to fight each other. Not saying your premise is wrong, I just think it's premature to draw conclusions. Most of Germany has been a democracy for just about 60 years, part of it for far less. (They had a brief earlier democracy during which time they elected Hitler.)
Japan about 60 years as well. France has been a democracy off and on for parts of the last two centuries out of a history stretching back to Roman times. Russia is barely a democracy today and has been so for a handful of years. Let's see how everything looks in 50 years or so. We may have more compelling data then.
Civil war is rare in democracies, and democracies have shown that they rarely sponsor or conduct terrorist operations. Exceptions are quite rare.
In the particular case of Iraq: civil war is less and less likely all the time, as much as some people are still hoping for it.
Democracy has been spreading throughout most of the world. Although Russia no longer qualifies as a democracy, sadly, many of the former Soviet states now do. A majority of the world's population now lives under democratic governments, with more all the time.
Five years ago there was not a single democracy in the middle east except Israel. Now there are three: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel. Kuwait and Lebanon are becoming more democratic--Kuwait especially has come a long way. All of this is to the good and should be celebrated. Now if only we would exert more pressure on states like Egypt and Jordan to change their ways.
If you phrase the famine/democracy model not as binary (i.e. if you're below X on the freedom score, where low score = more free, you get zero famine) but rather as a slope (i.e. the lower number you have on the freedom, the less likely you are to have a famine) then you would expect that the details of what constitutes a famine and what constitutes a democracy matter.
In the case of Niger:
1. there is a distinction between a hunger crisis or shock if you will, and an ongoing state of malnutrition. Niger is a poor country and therefore it doesn't normally have much cushion. There it is extremely sensitive to variations in agricultural output. Hence one slips into famine more easily than if people were normally very well fed.
2. apparently there is some issue with what the actually state of the country is. The president asserts there is no famine but instead localized food shortages, the opposition leaders say there is. Presumably an infrastructure which could provide more objective and detailed reporting of this would be available in a richer and more mature democracy.
3. Niger lacks a lot of the infrastructure of richer countries, so a lot of aid is raised and distributed by NGO's. Apparently the NGO's tend to overhype food shortages, leading eventually to massive influxes of aid which can arrive too late, and not be distributed appropriately.
The danger in this kind of reasoning of course, is that it requires a lot more data to say for sure which aspects of infrastructure are relevant for preventing famine. Arguing on a case by case basis is fraught with implicit bias.