An Empirical Law?

Democratic peace refers to a series of researches concerned with the relationship between democracy and violence.These research are different in the specific topics and methods of research,but they all consciously participate in the discussion under the same topic,and become builders and expander of each other's discursive field.For this series of studies,the main concerns are:historical evidence,statistical evidence and causal mechanism of democratic peace.These three research subjects often follow different research methods,focus on different research objectives,and have different utterances.Although each research method has made a contribution in the field of problems,quantitative approach is most important for the progress of its research project.When quantitative research methods are sweeping social science,democratic peace research is often regarded as an important evidence of the possibility of the scientific research of international relations.The quantitative study of democratic peace can be divided into two stages:data collection and model construction.We clarifies the development path of the quantitative research on democratic peace by investigating the competition and change of the operational plan formed by the different choices of the democratic peace researchers at each stage.In the investigation of the development of the quantitative research on democracy and peace,it is found that although as a relatively mature research project,the development of quantitative research on democracy and peace has accumulated some statistical evidence for its classical proposition,but far from as some scholars thought that it can be considered as an empirical law.On the one hand,under the traditional quantitative research pattern,based on more detailed consideration of the operation plan,we can not get enough statistical evidence to support the democratic peace phenomenon.Variables of international political structure,the population-averaged effect and the subject-specific effect are problems that democratic peace researchers can not avoid.On the other hand,the traditional quantitative research model,which is dependent on the quantitative research on democracy and peace,has also been questioned by its limitations,which directly point at the scientificalness of the empirical evidence of the phenomenon of democratic peace.It is too early to announce the discovery of the empirical law.