Editing Democratic peace theory (section)

==Statistical difficulties due to newness of democracy==
[[Image:Number of nations 1800-2003 scoring 8 or higher on Polity IV scale.png|thumb|right|upright=1.35|Number of nations 1800–2003 scoring 8 or higher on [[Polity data series|Polity IV scale]]. There have been no wars and in Wayman's listing of interliberal MIDs no conflict causing any battle deaths between these nations.{{sfn|Wayman|2002}}]]

One problem with the research on wars is that, as the [[Realism in international relations|Realist]] [[John Mearsheimer]] put it, "democracies have been few in number over the past two centuries, and thus there have been few opportunities where democracies were in a position to fight one another".{{sfn|Mearsheimer|1990|p=50}} Democracies have been very rare until recently. Even looser definitions of democracy, such as Doyle's, find only a dozen democracies before the late nineteenth century, and many of them short-lived or with limited franchise.<ref name="Doyle 1983"/>{{sfn|Doyle|1997|p=261}} [[Freedom House]] finds no independent state with [[universal suffrage]] in 1900.{{sfn|''Democracy's Century''|1999}}

Wayman, a supporter of the theory, states that "If we rely solely on whether there has been an inter-democratic war, it is going to take many more decades of peace to build our confidence in the stability of the democratic peace".{{sfn|Wayman|2002}}

===Studying lesser conflicts===
Many researchers have reacted to this limitation by studying lesser conflicts instead, since they have been far more common. There have been many more MIDs than wars; the Correlates of War Project counts several thousand during the last two centuries. A review lists many studies that have reported that democratic pairs of states are less likely to be involved in MIDs than other pairs of states.{{sfn|Ray|2003}}

Another study finds that after both states have become democratic, there is a decreasing probability for MIDs within a year and this decreases almost to zero within five years.{{sfn|Hensel|Goertz|Diehl|2000}}

When examining the inter-liberal MIDs in more detail, one study finds that they are less likely to involve third parties, and that the target of the hostility is less likely to reciprocate, if the target reciprocates the response is usually proportional to the provocation, and the disputes are less likely to cause any loss of life. The most common action was "Seizure of Material or Personnel".{{sfn|Wayman|2002}}

Studies find that the probability that disputes between states will be resolved peacefully is positively affected by the degree of democracy exhibited by the lesser democratic state involved in that dispute. Disputes between democratic states are significantly shorter than disputes involving at least one undemocratic state. Democratic states are more likely to be amenable to third party mediation when they are involved in disputes with each other.{{sfn|Ray|2003}}

In international crises that include the threat or use of military force, one study finds that if the parties are democracies, then relative military strength has no effect on who wins. This is different from when non-democracies are involved. These results are the same also if the conflicting parties are formal allies.{{sfn|Gelpi|Griesdorf|2001}} Similarly, a study of the behavior of states that joined ongoing militarized disputes reports that power is important only to autocracies: democracies do not seem to base their alignment on the power of the sides in the dispute.{{sfn|Werner|Lemke|1997}}