Economic War and Democratic Peace

Now here's some additional insight on the oft quoted statement that democracies rarely go to war with each other. The author has picked up on another dimension on this by checking out whether the democracies go after others via economic sanctions and they have found it is indeed so. Curiously, sanctions have been provent hat they rarely work, see here for an argument that economic boycotts and sanctions rarely work!

The graph is quite interesting with the democracies living in the lower part of the saddle!

Economic War and Democratic Peace
Cullen F. Goenner, Department of Economics, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA
Conflict Management and Peace Science, Volume 24, Issue 3 September 2007 , pages 171 - 182

Abstract
Research has shown that democracies rarely, if ever, engage each other in war and are less likely to have militarized disputes than when interacting with authoritarian regimes. Economic sanctions are an alternative to militarized conflict viewed by the masses as more acceptable. The conflict-inhibiting effects of democratic norms and institutions are thus weakened with respect to the use of sanctions. This paper examines whether a country's decision to initiate sanctions is influenced by its regime type as well as that of the potential target. The results for the period 1950 to 1990 indicate that the more democratic a country is, the more likely it is to initiate sanctions. Democracies, however, are less likely to target other democratic regimes relative to nondemocratic regimes. With respect to sanctions use, pairs of democracies are not peaceful.