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Democratizing countries have been shown to engage more often in interstate conflict. While these findings (particularly those of Mansfield and Snyder) have faced criticism, continuing references to these findings in both academia and policy circles suggest that the argument is still found to have merit and that the criticisms have not served to discredit the argument. One reason might be that the criticisms have been mainly limited to statistical model specification and sample issues. We argue instead there are other issues with the argument, data selection, and more centrally with concept misformation in a classic Sartorian sense that need attention. Fundamentally, we believe that Mansfield and Snyder (and others), by relying on a Politybased operationalization of regime change, fail to capture processes of democratization and instead agglomerate several processes of regime change into their measure of "democratization" and that they are engaging in concept stretching. Moreover, we highlight the importance of considering regime volatility. We test the democratization-conflict relationship statistically with several data sets that capture both regimes and interstate conflict. Our tests demonstrate that Mansfield and Snyder's findings in their work on interstate conflict are a product of concept misformation rather than just model specification. In addition, we inspect the conditioning role of institutional strength on democratization and conflict nexus. Simulation-based analyses show that the neither incomplete democratization nor other types of regime transitions exert a statistically significant effect on war onset at monadic level. On dyadic level, the most optimistic estimates that account for the zeroinflation in the dataset show that incomplete democratization is statistically significant at some levels of institutional strength, yet this time substantively insignificant. In the process, we raise new questions about the overreliance on a single dataset and exclusive use of quantities of interest such as relative risk that hides baseline point estimates in trivial magnitude, hence, misguides the discipline about the true location of causal effect attributed to a covariate in the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that democracies are less apt to engage in conflict with each other is the central finding of contemporary international relations. Yet at the same time, the operationalization of the concept of democracy in this literature has been relatively unreflective, with little critical consideration about how to measure what we mean by democracy. Since the mid-1990s the vast majority of studies that test for the effect of democracy on conflict have relied upon Polity to measure democracy. Given that important concerns have been raised about Polity previously (Gleditsch and Ward 1997), reliance solely upon one instrument may put such findings on too thin an evidentiary basis. In this paper we raise additional concerns about Polity, most notably that there is a mismatch between conceptualization of democracy as a regime type and using an interval scalar measure like Polity. We argue that complex types are better captured by "object concepts" that are best measured as dichotomous variables. If our contention is correct, we would expect to find that models that use a dichotomous coding provide a better fit for the data than models using Polity, or, even different findings, if a binary measure is better suited to capturing the concept of democracy. In this paper we look at what happens when we substitute a binary coding of democracy (Bernhard, Nordstrom and Reenock 2001) for Polity. We find that the democratic peace is robust using BNR, and that it even improves the fit of the data to the models. Other important findings on democracy and conflict, notably Mansfield and Snyder's (1995a) contention that democratizing countries are more prone to engage in interstate conflicts, are not strongly supported by the substitution of BNR for Polity. Both of these findings give credence to our contention that a binary coding has advantages in capturing the concept of democracy. At minimum, it suggests that findings based only on interval scalar measures like Polity, should be checked for robustness with binary measures that capture democracy as a type. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]