ABSTRACT
Overview This chapter assesses progress in the democratic peace research enterprise. While not a new endeavor – many scholars have produced insightful reviews of the democratic peace – the modus operandi here differs.1 Specifically, we combine analytic eclecticism and systemism, two approaches toward research that previously had not been connected, to obtain a fuller sense of causation in the democratic peace research program. Thus, in addition to exploring the democratic peace agenda in a novel way, this chapter operates within the context of philosophy of inquiry to demonstrate the value arising from a union between systemism and analytic eclecticism. Over the last three decades, the democratic peace (DP) stands as the most sustained program of research in International Relations (IR). Research has “exploded” (Hayes, 2012: 2) and “cumulative knowledge is considerable” (Liebel, 2011: 384). “The democratic peace,” as described by Liebel (2011: 386) among many others (e.g., Chan, 2010: 5928), “is a dyadic theory, as opposed to a monadic theory, because it is concerned with a pair (dyad) of democratic states and how they act in accordance with one another.” Evidence for the dyadic version of the democratic peace is substantial (Ungerer, 2012: 16). In Chapter 5 of this volume, Chernoff establishes the near-universal acceptance of the dyadic proposition as the product of a debate that featured agreement on criteria for evaluation. Questions for the democratic peace have moved beyond establishing an association between regime-type and conflict to revolve around questions of theory and causal mechanisms as well as the scale of the democratic peace effect. These tendencies are a welcome development and, as will be argued emphatically by Harrison in Chapter 7, offer the optimal path to progress to the extent that levels of aggregation beyond the dyadic are brought into consideration.2 While presented in detail later in this chapter, we briefly introduce analytic eclecticism and systemism here. Previously, these frameworks have been implemented separately. Both hold promise for further application, the argument being that a synthesis of ideas from analytic eclecticism and systemism enhances the significance of both approaches.
