From causal effects to causal mechanisms: improving the democratic peace propositions : a comparative case study of british policymaking in the British-Icelandic cod wars and the Falklands war

Abstract

Democratic peace theory is one of the most influential contemporary international relations theories . Researchers have shown that democracies rarely fight each other, and this has led many high ranking policymakers to promote democratic governance as the key to world peace (Elman 1997). However, the causal explanations provided to explain this event are insufficient and possibly inaccurate. The democratic peace research program has for the most part relied on a positivist philosophy of science. I argue that a positivist philosophy of science provides scholars with an “overly restrictive epistemology that cannot ground a causal theory” (Dessler 1991:337). Positivism imposes on researchers a causal explanation that relies heavily on causal effects (correlation). To improve the causal explanations that can account for the democratic peace, we need to identify and understand how the causal mechanisms that connect the independent and dependent variable operate. This thesis is an attempt to do just that. The objective of this thesis is twofold. First, it seeks to test the causal mechanisms that are implicitly proposed by democratic peace researchers. Second, it seeks to improve the causal explanations that can account for the peaceful relations between democracies.