ABSTRACT
The democratic peace—the empirical association between democracy and peace—is an extremely robust finding. More generally, many liberal factors are associated with peace and many explanations have been offered for these associations, including the effects of: liberal norms, democratic signaling, credible commitments, the free press, economic interdependence, declining benefits of conquest, signaling via capital markets, constraints on the state, constraints on leaders, and others. Scholars are still mapping the contours of the liberal peace, and we remain a long way from fully understanding the respective influence of these different candidate causal mechanisms.
