The results of this study must be made very clear: There is no justification for inferring or implying any evi¬dence herein, direct or indirect, as corroborating the causation from democracy to peace. Democracy is not merely insignificant: Standard measures of democracy were shown to have positive impacts on the odds of fatal milita¬rized conflict in every model of fatal conflict that con¬trolled for contract flows. In conjunction with prior related studies (Mousseau 2009; Mousseau et al. 2013), it is now clear that there is little correlational evidence of democracy causing peace, whether we gauge peace with wars, fatal and nonfatal militarized interstate conflicts, or interstate crises. I do not expect this to be the last word in the demo¬cratic peace research program, but as this controversy unfolds, it would be useful for all of us to give careful consideration to Lakatosian insights on how research pro¬grams progress and degenerate (Lakatos [1970]1978). Dafoe has expressed the view that “as the number of studies supporting the descriptive inference of the demo¬cratic peace continues to grow, the probability of a future study overturning this finding becomes increasingly less likely”(2011:14; see also Dafoe and Russett 2013). This statement is not scientifically correct: As far as I know, Dafoe has no special powers in divining what future stud¬ies will show; and repeated studies with specification bias do not render a finding any more accurate than a single one. If it did, then the progress of knowledge would col¬lapse into a race of competing viewpoints over publica¬tion numbers; editors, rather than evidence, would emerge as the arbiters of truth, and popular and aca¬demic culture and intuition would trump the progress of knowledge.14 While numerous studies have corroborated the democratic peace, most of these employed “almost similar statistical models, indicators, and data”(Reuveny et al. 2011:764), and not a single one controlled for con¬tract-intensive economy, a proven powerful variable pre¬dicted by a new and highly corroborated theory. New ideas can always emerge, and there is no logic in resisting them simply because a prior view was widely accepted as fact: The world is not flat.
There is no justification for inferring or implying any evi¬dence as corroborating the causation from democracy to peace. Democracy is not merely insignificant: Standard measures of democracy were shown to have positive impacts on the odds of fatal milita¬rized conflict in every model of fatal conflict that con¬trolled for contract flows it is now clear that there is little correlational evidence of democracy causing peace, whether we gauge peace with wars, fatal and nonfatal militarized interstate conflicts, or interstate crises While numerous studies have corroborated the democratic peace, not a single one controlled for con¬tract-intensive economy