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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2006
Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005, pp. x, 300.
Research by political scientists has established, fairly conclusively, that democratically governed states rarely go to war against each other. There is also evidence to suggest that democracies tend not to become embroiled in militarized disputes short of war. The policy implications of this body of scholarly research seem clear: one path to a more peaceful world is by encouraging, pressuring, even forcing autocratic governments to embrace democracy. Not so fast, say Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder in Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, for a glaring exception to the “democratic peace” is their finding that societies undergoing democratic transitions may in fact be rather warlike.