Global Democracy and Global Peace: Vector Autoregression Granger Causality Analysis

This study tests the system-level implications of the dyadic democratic peace finding. Numerous statistical analyses in political science have found that, other things being equal, interstate relations between two democracies are more peaceful than those between two autocracies and those between a democracy and an autocracy. This empirical regularity suggests a system-level peace with the expansion of world democracy. That is, as the number of democracies in the world increases, the international system will be more peaceful. This system-level proposition is, in fact, more consistent with the original theorist of the democratic peace, Immanuel Kant’s, idea of perpetual peace. Using Granger causality tests based on vector autoregression models, it is found that global democratization does not cause world peace. Rather, peace and conflict affect global democratization. Regarding the sign of the effect, conflict is found to promote democracy at the global level, creating a new puzzle for future research.