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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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are findings on democracy and conflict a product of unexamined conceptualassumptions about the nature of democracy inherent in the way we measureit? It is rare to find an empirical international conflict piece that doesnot mention that democracies do not fight each other. Very few studiescontradict this proposition. At the same time, there is reason forcaution due to how democracy is commonly operationalized and the conceptualassumptions inherent in the dataStudies that test for the effect of democracy most often rely on the Politydataset. Other authors have raised significant reservations about itsuncritical adoption (Gleditsch and Ward 1997). Our central concern is thatstudies which see democracy as affecting conflict may be picking uprelative differences between countries on the interval scale used by politythat do not capture qualitative differences between democracy anddictatorship. Would such findings hold if we considered democracy not inrelative but absolute terms? If we treated as democracies, only thosecountries that meet minimal standards (and operationalized it as a binaryvariable) like the literature on democratic survival (Gasiorowski,1995,Przeworski et al. 2000, Bernhard, Nordstrom, and Reenock2001), would we seedifferences?Two areas where past studies have strongly differed on this issue are theliteratures on the effects of democratization on conflict and theperformance of democracies in warfare. Mansfield and Snyder (1995)maintain that democratizing countries are more prone to interstateconflicts, while others have challenged their operationalization and do notfind a negative effect (see Thompson and Tucker 1997). Similarly withregard to the "democratic triumph" thesis (Lake 1992), there isdisagreement as to whether democracies are more successful inwarfare. Reiter and Stam (2002) find that democracies do win more butDesch (2002, 2003) challenges their findings and strongly criticizes theircases.In this study, we retest several important empirical works on democracy andinternational conflict using a measure of democracy, based on Dahl'sminimum criteria for polyarchy (1971). We use this measure to test therobustness of works such as "The Classical Liberals Were Right: Democracy,Interdependence, and Conflict: 1950-1985," (Oneal and Russett1997). "Democracies and War" (Reiter and Stam 2002), and "IncompleteDemocratization and the Outbreak of Military Disputes" (Mansfield andSnyder 2002). Our purpose is to see if their results are an artifact ofthe relative measure of democracy in the polity data, or whether they holdwhen we think of democracy as needing to meet certain minimum conditions. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]