Testing the Democratic Peace: What Country Feeling Thermometer Data can Teach us about the Underlying Psychological Drivers of American and Western European Foreign Policy

In Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant (1795) argued that democracies do not view each other as threatening, so rarely go to war. The flip-side of democratic amity, David Hume (1742) pointed out, was an “imprudent vehemence” towards dictatorships, promoting conflict across regime types. Today, “democratic peace theory” (e.g. Doyle 1983; Maoz and Russett 1993; Moravcsik 1997) has become one of the most widely accepted theories of international relations. It has not gone without challenge, however. A “commercial/capitalist peace” (e.g. Polachek 1980; Gartzke 2007) counterargument maintains that the relationship between democratic politics and peace is spurious: the actual driver is greater trade among democracies, which contributes to greater interdependence. Realists (e.g. Farber & Gowa 1995; Rosato 2003) have also countered that it is alliances among democratic states, not their democratic nature, that causes peace among them. This Paper utilizes country feeling thermometer data from the Chicago Council, YouGov, and other nationally representative surveys as dependent measures to explore the underlying drivers of amity and enmity among democratic citizens. Why do the American, British, French, and German publics consistently like some countries, and dislike others? Utilizing Freedom House and other quantitative measures of freedom, trade, military strength, and racial and cultural difference, it utilizes multivariate regression analysis to pit the democratic peace against rival explanations like the commercial/capitalist peace and realism. Policy implications are discussed.