Right. Sorting out the effects of the variables is what Michigan-trained quantitative political scientists do. I used to be one. Russett is one too, though I think Yale-trained. jks
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 1 May 2004, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > Against your two examples over 150 years, one
> which
> > was a civil war and the other a war involving a
> civil
> > war in an at-best half-democratic country, we have
> > hundreds of wars, big and small, over that period,
> > involving nondemocracies that -- this point should
> be
> > neglected -- are not enmeshed in the web of
> > international agreements, or wars of imperialist
> > aggression (many carried out by democracies), or
> of
> > national liberation, some against democracies.
> Btw,
> > the point is not that democracies are pacific in
> > general, just towards each other, and the web of
> > agreements part is important too.
>
> People talk about how fuzzy psychology is, but this
> kind of poly sci stuff is even more speculative
> than Freud. "Capitalist democracies" have thousands
> of sociopolitical charactertics in addition to
> making international agreements with other
> capitalist
> democracies, and any one or more of these could be
> the true reasons why they rarely engage in war
> with one another.
>
> It's an interesting hypothesis, but the data are
> ambiguous here.
>
> Miles
>
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