Are Democracies Really More Peaceful?

Are Democracies Really More Peaceful?: “Like many skeptics of democratization, Mansfield and Snyder may overestimate the stability of the authoritarians. Young democracies can be bellicose, but it’s hard to imagine many regimes more threatening to their neighbors than Saddam Hussein’s. The authors also appear to strain their argument when they suggest that Milosevic’s decision to crack down on the Kosovars was driven by his anxieties over winning a future election, or that Iraq’s faltering experiments in parliamentary democracy helped drive its 1948 attack on Israel.”