Press Freedom and the Democratic Peace

Abstract

A persistent question in the study of international conflict centers on the role of democratic political institutions and the initiation of war. Several dyadic examinations of data on regime type and conflict reveal that democracies do not appear to fight one another. This article describes a mechanism within the structure of modern democracies and their foreign policy decision-making process that might explain how the interdemocratic peace functions. When a democracy faces a non-democracy in international conflict, the democratic leader can expect to be the dominant source of `legitimate' information for the domestic news media. As the dominant source of information, the leader can use the resources of his or her office to influence the news content to his or her domestic political benefit. Information reported from the government controlled media of non-democratic regimes is reported as propaganda and dismissed as such. In contrast, when two democracies come into conflict, the domestic news media on both sides accept each other as legitimate sources of information and neither leader can expect to dominate the legitimate sources of news to nearly the same extent. As a result, neither leader can expect to have an overwhelming influence on the content of the news media, and the domestic political costs of war, upon which Kant based his model of a perpetual peace, will far outweigh any potential domestic political benefits received from engaging in conflict. This mechanism also offers an explanation for some of the seemingly inconsistent findings at the edges of the democratic peace, such as covert operations by one democracy against another.