Is Democracy a Cause of Peace?

Author(s):  
Dan Reiter

Essentially all scholars agree that the levels of violent conflict, especially wars, within democratic pairs of states are significantly lower than levels of violent conflict within other pairs of states. However, debate rages as to whether this observed correlation is causal or spurious. Does democracy actually cause peace? Answering this question is critical for both scholarly and policy debates. Critics have lodged two sets of arguments proposing that the observed correlation between democracy and peace does not mean that democracy causes peace. First, some claim that the peace observed among democracies is not caused by regime type, but rather by other factors such as national interest, economic factors, and gender norms. These critics often present statistical analyses in which inclusion of these or other factors render the democracy independent variable to be statistically insignificant, leading them to draw the conclusion that democracy does not cause peace. The second critique claims that there is a causal relationship between democracy and peace, but peace causes democracy and not the reverse. Peaceful international environments permit democracy to emerge, and conflictual international environments impede democracy. Though peace causes democracy, democracy does not cause peace. Careful examination of the theoretical claims of these critiques and especially the pertinent empirical scholarship produces two general conclusions. First, there is enough evidence to conclude that democracy does cause peace at least between democracies, that the observed correlation between democracy and peace is not spurious. Second, this conclusion notwithstanding, the critiques do make important contributions, in the sense that they demonstrate that several factors (including democracy) cause peace, that there may be some qualifications or limitations to the scope of the democratic peace, and that causality among factors like democracy and peace is likely bidirectional, part of a larger dynamic system.

2020 ◽  
pp. 089590482098303
Author(s):  
Cris Mayo

In recent years, conservative advocates have obscured their transphobia by framing their concerns as religiously-based parental rights claims. They have advocated for limitations on youth rights to gender identity self-determination. This article examines policy debates over transgender-inclusive practices in schools, including conservative demands for parental notification and limitations on healthcare access for transgender youth. I suggest that schools ought to be more concerned with children’s or students’ rights to help enable diverse students to flourish and become who they are in supportive schools. This shift would move schools away from the distractions of conservative parental rights claims and re-focus them instead on the needs of students.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147-218
Author(s):  
Travis D. Stimeling

Many of the most iconic recordings of the Nashville Sound era gained popularity not simply because of the recording artist whose name appeared on the labels of the singles and albums that contained them, but because of the contributions of Nashville’s session musicians who crafted arrangements and “hook” motifs. Yet, for the most part, these session musicians were never credited and received only a seemingly small one-time fee for their efforts. This chapter considers the creative impact of Nashville’s session musicians through a careful examination of several chart-topping Nashville Sound–era recordings, exploring the ways that the arrangements and “hook” motifs that they created shaped the works. Moreover, this chapter suggests that, although session musicians were seldom credited for their work, many of them presented clear artistic identities that are anonymously visible across a wide spectrum of recordings.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Marcelo J. Borges ◽  
Sonia Cancian ◽  
Linda Reeder

While migrant stories have long been weighted with love, loss, anger, and bitterness, scholars have rarely considered how these emotional landscapes shaped personal and political understandings of mobility. Building on the work of scholars who have insisted that emotional expressions, like political or economic factors, are analytical categories, critical to understanding social, cultural, and political change, this anthology focuses attention on the ways in which emotions gendered migrations, constructing “emotional landscapes” that reconfigured spatial, cultural, and temporal networks linking individual migrants to a multiplicity of new communities. The essays in the anthology highlight the complicated ties linking emotion and gender in a mobile world, exploring the ways technology, capital, war, and state-building altered affective performances and ties. Combined, the contributions argue that the circulation of public and private languages of love became a constitutive element in the ways people understood and navigated migration.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Phillip Y. Lipscy

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to refocus scholarly attention on the politics of crisis. Crises that abruptly upend political and economic relations are important and increasing in frequency. However, the division of international relations into international political economy (IPE) and international security has contributed to the relative neglect of non-militarized crises like pandemics. Crises are defined by threat, uncertainty, and time pressure: understanding them requires a careful examination of how these variables affect political and economic outcomes. Drawing on often disparate literatures on finance, energy and climate change, natural disasters, pandemics, and violent conflict, I propose a broad research program around the politics of crisis, focusing on puzzles related to causes, responses, and transformations.


Author(s):  
Barbara L. Glover ◽  
Michael S. Wogalter

Warning signs are intended to alert persons to potential dangers in the environment. Despite its importance, empirical studies measuring behavioral compliance with warnings are limited due to methodological difficulties and ethical considerations in conducting the research. The present study used a computer simulated world as a new method for studying behavioral compliance. Such simulations can be constructed to appear realistic, thus maintaining ecological validity, while allowing control over experimental conditions. Three factors (time stress, salience, and sign type) were manipulated to determine their effects on a simulated egress task from an underground mine. Gender was also introduced as an additional independent variable. Results indicated signs with salient features increased compliance compared to signs without those features. Time stress and sign type failed to show significant effects. In general, women complied more frequently than men. Use of computer simulated worlds in warning compliance research is discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 572-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley English

AbstractThough the concept of intersectionality has been in circulation for nearly 30 years and women's organizations have long been criticized for failing to prioritize the concerns of women of color, poor women, and LGBTQ women, more research is needed to determine precisely why women's organizations do and do not discuss those intersectional identities during policy debates. This study analyzes 1,021 comments that women's organizations submitted to rulemakers to test a series of hypotheses about how women's organizations’ references to women's intersectional identities increase or decrease depending on the organization's primary constituency and ideology, the proposed rule's target population, and other features of the policy-making context. Using automated text analysis and a series of models, it shows that women's organizations do discuss intersectionally marginalized women in their comments. However, not all subgroups of women are equally represented during the process. Women's organizations focus on women's sexual orientations and gender identities more than their races, ethnicities, nationalities, or socioeconomic statuses. Intersectionally marginalized women also tend to receive the most attention when commenters are from organizations that are explicitly focused on representing intersectionally marginalized women and when bureaucrats include references to intersectionally marginalized women in their proposed rules.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 691
Author(s):  
Lizhen Zhao ◽  
Zhenjiang Shen ◽  
Yanji Zhang ◽  
Yan Ma

By means of on-site and network investigation, we collected data relevant to residents of communities, point of interest (POI) data, and land-use data of Fuzhou. We set traffic walking time and leisure walking time as an independent variable, built environment as dependent variable, and gender, age, education level and income level as control variables. Six linear regression models were established using Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS). The results showed that in the 5D (i.e., Density, Diversity, Design, Destination and Distance) elements of the built environment, the density was negatively correlated with the traffic walking time, whereas other elements were positively correlated with the walking time, but the degree of influence was different.


2010 ◽  
Vol 104 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRE DEBS ◽  
H.E. GOEMANS

We propose and test a formal model of war and domestic politics, building on recent evidence on the relationship between regime type, the effect of war on the probability of losing office, and the consequences of losing office. The less the outcome of international interaction affects a leader's tenure and the less punitive are the consequences of losing office, the more a leader is willing to make concessions to strike a peaceful bargain. We demonstrate that our theory successfully predicts war involvement among nondemocratic regime types. Moreover, our theory offers an intuitive explanation for the democratic peace. Compared to nondemocratic leaders, the tenure of democratic leaders depends relatively little on the war outcome, and democratic leaders fare relatively well after losing office. Thus, democratic leaders should be more willing and able to avoid war, especially with other democrats.


2008 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Jablonska ◽  
L. Lindberg ◽  
F. Lindblad ◽  
A. Hjern

BackgroundPrevious studies have shown an elevated risk for self-harm in adolescents from ethnic minorities. However, potential contributions to this risk from socio-economic factors have rarely been addressed. The main aim of this article was to investigate any such effects.MethodA national cohort of 1009 157 children born during 1973–1982 was followed prospectively from 1991 to 2002 in Swedish national registers. Multivariate Cox analyses of proportional hazards were used to estimate the relative risk of hospital admission for self-harm. Parental country/region of birth was used as proxy for ethnicity.ResultsYouth with two parents born outside Sweden (except those from Southern Europe) had higher age- and gender-adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) of self-harm than the majority population (HR 1.6–2.3). The HRs decreased for all immigrant groups when socio-economic factors were accounted for but remained significantly higher for immigrants from Finland and Western countries and for youth with one Swedish-born and one foreign-born parent.ConclusionsSocio-economic factors explain much of the variation by parental country of birth of hospital admissions for self-harm in youth in Sweden.


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