ABSTRACT
This chapter focused on this relationship between democracy and foreign violence. But because of the lives lost, there is another, even more important fact about democracy and violence— it sharply reduces the severity of domestic collective violence, genocide, and mass murder by governments. Democracy is inversely related to the intensity of collective internal violence, such as revolutions, bloody coups d'etats, political assassinations, antigovernment terrorist bombings, guerrilla warfare, insurgencies, civil wars, mutinies, and rebellions. The Democracy/Internal Violence Proposition states a well-supported fact about nations. In this chapter, authors using the democracy scale which is the Freedom House ratings of nations in their civil liberties and political rights. They found thirty-one such studies, of which in methodology and measurement eighteen were directly relevant to the proposition. Of these the empirical results of five studies strongly supported it, twelve were positive, and only one was negative, but not strongly so.
