Oneal and Russett: The Classical Liberals were Right

Oneal, JR, and BM Russett. 1997. “The Classical Liberals Were Right: Democracy, Interdependence, and Conflict, 1950-1985.” International Studies Quarterly 41:267-294.
(23).

“The liberals believed that economic interdependence, as well as democracy, would reduce the incidence of interstate conflict. In this article, we test both their economic and their political prescriptions for peace, suing pooled-regression analysis of politically relevant dyads for the Cold War era. We find that the pacific benefits of trade, both total and dyadic, have not been sufficiently appreciated” (267).

This article represents an expansion on earlier work by Maoz, Russett and Oneal. This approach is more theoretically grounded in the relationship between regimes and trade affect conflict. It also uses expanded data sets. Finally, it explores the transition from one type of regime to another.

There is a review of the literature beginning with classical liberalism and building towards democratic peace theory. There is a nice overview of democratic peace theory and it would be useful to revisit this article to explore that. The literature review then builds to an account of trade interconnectedness as being a mitigating factor for conflict and how this is not entirely taken into consideration by democratic peace theories, though it should, because it stems naturally from the classic liberalism literature. There have been analyses of the effect of trade interdependence on peace, but the findings have been largely unclear, and there is still a substantial divide between liberal and realist thought on the matter. The direction of causality is also important to take into consideration: before the 19th century, it was not uncommon for nations at war to continue trading. That has since changed, and, if one is not careful to examine the data thoroughly, the decline of trade as a result of conflict could be misinterpreted as being causally connected in different ways.

They use dyads involving at least one great power from the Correlates of War database. They examine the years 1950-85. Use MID data from COW: “A militarized dispute is an international interaction involving threats, displays, or actual uses of military force; it must be explicit, overt, not accidental, and government sanctioned” (273). They have a relatively standard set of independent variables (economic interdependence, democracy, political change, alliances, economic growth, contiguity, etc.).