Unarmed man in a battle of wits with Dr. Rummel over the success of the Democratic Peace.

I'll only quote a small sample of Dr. Rummel's reply to one Gartzke, who does not seem to be able to understand what he sees. I must admit my old brain glazes over when the discussion turns to the arcania of statistical analysis, but I will slog through the whole when I get the time.

Dr. Rummel's thesis is simple: Free people do not wage war upon each other.

It seems like common sense to me.

This is Part II of my response to Gartzke's defense against my critique, "The CATO Institute Gets It All Wrong," (here) of his chapter 2 published in the CATO Annual Ranking of Economic Freedom. In reading my response, keep in mind how this Gartzke chapter was trumped in the very first lines of CATO's news release:

Economic freedom is almost 50 times more effective than democracy in restraining nations from going to war.

I will present the rest of Gartzke's reply that I didn't cover yesterday, and will intersperse it with my comments in green.

Gartzke:
Dr. Rummel argues that I am doing democratization injustice by using the term "impose." He suggests no alternative term, but references another blog post titled "Unchaining Human Rights, Not Imposing Democracy." Certainly, "unchaining" sounds more affirmative, just as "freedom fighter" sounds more affirmative than "terrorist." By "imposed," I meant situations like Iraq, where democracy has not evolved endogenously. [RJR: What difference should this make in understanding that Iraqis were freed from a bloody tyranny?] In Iraq, for example, unless democratic peace exists and is general (monadic), there can be no robust effect of democratization because other states in the region (besides Israel and Turkey) are not democracies. Research by Hegre (2004) shows that increasing democracy when few states are democratic tends to increase, not decrease, conflict. Even many advocates of democratic peace doubt that democratization in the Middle East will lead to peace in anything but the very long run. [RJR: This misses what is perhaps most important about a democratic Iraq: people are free; their government will not murder, rape, and arbitrarily imprison them; it will not support terrorism, and aggrandize against its neighbors] This, of course, also requires that we assume that US efforts to democratize Iraq will succeed, a debatable claim in its own right.Dr. Rummel takes my study to task because I point out that the democratic peace observation has recently been limited to prosperous states [RJR: All my research and most I know of have been done on all democracies, regardless of development and prosperity]. Here again, I am simply reporting the evolving consensus of democratic peace researchers themselves. Mousseau (2000) and Hegre (2000) report that an interaction term between variables for democracy and economic development leads the democracy term to become no longer statistically significant. In a newer study, John Oneal himself collaborates with Mousseau and Hegre in further substantiating this conclusion. As the result makes clear, democratic peace, if it exists, is conditioned by economic development. My view is that it is development itself, along with economic liberalization, that explains the peace. [RJR: Leave all these studies aside and just look at he world today. Among the 117 democracies now existing, which range across all levels of development and prosperity, there is no war between any two of them, no expectation of war, and no arming against another. Moreover, there is no violence between any two. Also, I've tested this in a variety of ways, and found that even holding development constant, the relationship between democracy and war is robust. See again the chart on this I showed yesterday (here), where "wealth" in equivalent to economic development. See also my Appendix to Saving Lives (here)]Dr. Rummel claims that my assertions are falsified in my own data. As evidence, he argues that there are no "wars" between democracies. The specific claims that I make, and the data that I use involve militarized interstate disputes (MIDs), a broader category of conflict behavior. Wars are very rare. There are just 44 state participations in wars beginning in 1970, the earliest date for which the Index of Economic Freedom supplies data. Less than 1% of state years (think "man hours") involve a war. For this reason, democratic peace researchers and others studying conflict among nations have overwhelmingly preferred in recent years to examine MIDs [RJR: Yet, Gartzke has much to say about democracy or economic freedom and war based on this analysis of a data set in which there are no wars for democracies]Still, it is not difficult to have a look. I examined the Correlates of War project listing of wars (conflicts involving at least 1000 battle deaths per year per participant). I find no statistical relationship between either the index of economic freedom, or the democracy variable, either separately or together, using these data. [RJR: not clear -- is this a monadic or dyadic analysis? In any case, there were no wars between democracies in these data either.] The effect of capitalism is either more subtle, reducing conflicts only over a lower intensity, or the sample of wars is too small, or both. In any case, democracy does not have the effects Dr. Rummel claims in these data, even when it is left by itself in the regression. [RJR: I don't understand Gartzke's reasoning, when in the data set he originally used and in this one, there is NO WAR between democracies] As a further check on these findings, I also examined data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). These data report conflicts involving at least 25 fatalities. Thus, they are clearly conflicts involving "violence." Using SIPRI conflicts as the dependent variable [RJR: I also analyzed a larger data set involving these data for the years 1973-2003 and found NO VIOLENCE causing deaths between democracies (see table here).], I am again unable to find a statistically significant relationship linking democracy and peace [RJR: This is an incredible statement, considering the all the data sets he consults show NO WAR between democracies]. I can, on the other hand, find weak support for the suppression of major violence by the economic freedom variable. [RJR: The methodological error is in turning a point prediction into a linear correlation one. The best way of testing a point prediction is by a contingency count, and this is what in effect I did with the table I referenced above] This variable is just short of the 5% significance threshold in a quick statistical comparison of democracy and capitalism as determinants of peace. [RJR: Gartzke is again applying statistical significance inappropriately to a population, and not to a sample that is assumed in statistical inference-- there is, however, a way of applying the test, and that is if one is assessing the probability of getting a specific combination of data, but this is not what Gartzke is doing]So, to summarize, Dr. Rummel's critique that I should look at wars seems unfounded, though it did not hurt to check. The claim that democracy generally causes peace is again unsupported. [RJR: Again, in all the data he uses, there is either no wars, or no violence, although in a much longer set of data over almost two centuries, as I indicated in Part I, there are three minor cases of violence between democracies. In other words, the democratic peace holds, regardless of what Gartzke says]