ABSTRACT
The Democratic/Dyadic Violence Proposition implies that we can place pairs of nations along a continuum according to their types of political regimes. For example, assume that there are basically three types of regimes: democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian. The argument of the Democratic/Dyadic Violence Proposition is that as two regimes are more democratic, the cost of violence, especially the expected human toll, increasingly inhibits their mutual violence. Most of the studies of the Interdemocratic Peace Proposition have relied directly or indirectly on the Melvin Small and J. David Singer data on wars between 1816 and 1980, or the Charles Gochman and zeev maoz militarized international dispute data set. The hypothesis is that the higher the actual or potential severity, and the more democratic the two regimes, the less likely they have or will fight each other. When both are democratic, then the Interdemocratic Peace Proposition kicks in and there is no war.
