In the forthcoming January 2007 issue of the American Journal of Political Science, Columbia University political scientist Erik Gartzke has a gem of an article. Its title is “The Capitalist Peace.” (It isn’t yet available on-line.) In this paper, Gartzke refines the argument that he presented in the Economic Freedom of the World: 2005 Annual Report, co-authored with James Gwartney and Robert Lawson.
Here’s the abstract from Gartzke’s forthcoming paper:
It is widely accepted that democracies are less conflict prone, if only with other democracies. Debate persists, however, about the causes underlying liberal peace. This paper offers a contrarian account based on liberal political economy. Economic development, free markets, and similar interstate interests all anticipate a lessening of militarized disputes or wars. This paper shows that this “capitalist peace” subsumes the effect of regime type in standard statistical tests of the democratic peace.
