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Journal Article - International Studies Quarterly

Ballots and Blackmail: Coercive Diplomacy and the Democratic Peace

| December 2016

Does the restraint that prevents pairs of democracies from fighting large-scale wars also prevent them from coercing one another? While scholars have long drawn a bright line between using force and threatening it, the literature on democratic-peace theory overwhelmingly emphasizes the former. Using a dataset uniquely suited for the study of militarized compellent threats, the authors find that pairs of democracies are significantly less likely to engage in coercive diplomacy than are other types of regimes.