Replication Data for: The False Promise of Survey Experimental Support for Democracy as a Cause of the Democratic Peace: It’s the Economy

Over the past two decades, an increasing number of survey-experimental studies have corroborated the role of public opinion in explaining the dearth of conflict between democratic states, a correlation widely called ‘democratic peace.’ Using World Bank classifications, we show that every one of these peer-reviewed studies has been conducted in an upper- or higher-income democracy, mostly only three of them: Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also show that most democratic states do not have high-income economies. We then conducted five survey experiments in two lower-income democracies, Ghana and India. We replicated the exact procedures of the prior studies. In no survey did the regime status of the adversary significantly affect respondents’ willingness to use force against it. The implications are not trivial: the most robust evidence that democracy alone can explain the correlation between democracy and peace—the micro-foundational survey-experimental evidence—has cumulated from systematically biased samples of the world's democracies. With this study, the experimental evidence harmonizes with the extant observational evidence that there is something related to the economy that explains or conditions the correlation between democracy and peace.