Grasping the scientific evidence: The contractualist peace supersedes the democratic peace

This article draws on new data and analyses to investigate whether the contractualist peace supersedes the democratic peace. A series of studies have shown that contractualist economy accounts for the democratic peace, but defenders of the democratic peace claim that these studies contain measurement errors, that democracy correlates with peace at least in interaction with contractualist economy, and that the causation is reversed from democracy to contractualist economy and peace. Results are consistent across all tests: there is no support for democracy as a cause of peace. The democratic peace is a statistical artifact explained by contractualist economy.