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.

近二十年来，日益增多的调查实验研究证实了公众舆论在解释民主国家间冲突稀缺性方面的作用，这一关联被学界广泛称为民主和平论（democratic peace）。本研究依托世界银行收入分类标准展开分析，结果显示：所有上述同行评议研究均基于高收入及更高收入民主国家开展，且其中绝大多数仅来自以色列、英国与美国三个国家。同时我们发现，全球多数民主国家并不属于高收入经济体范畴。随后，我们在加纳、印度这两个中低收入民主国家开展了五项调查实验，并严格复刻了此前研究的实验流程。所有调查均显示：对手的政权属性并未对受访者针对该对手动用武力的意愿产生显著影响。本研究的启示意义不容忽视：当前支撑“仅民主即可解释民主与和平间关联”的最有力证据——即微观基础层面的调查实验证据——均源自对全球民主国家的系统性偏误抽样。通过本研究，实验证据与现有观测研究结论达成一致：存在与经济相关的因素，能够解释或调节民主与和平间的关联。