Democracy Promotion/Soft Power—Affirmative Tentative 1AC
Democracy Promotion Good—Democratic Peace
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- Exts. Democratic Peace
- Democracies don’t go to war
ImpactDemocracy Promotion Good—Democratic PeaceGlobal democratic consolidation checks inevitable extinctionDiamond ‘95 (Larry, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, December, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/fr.htm) This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built. Exts. Democratic PeaceRegardless of the reason, democratic peace theory is empirical lawTomz and Weeks 13 - Michaeal Tomz is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Stanford Center for International Development, and affiliated with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, and the Woods Institute for the Environment. Jessica Weeks is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin Madison, whose research and teaching interests focus on the domestic politics of foreign policy, the domestic and international politics of authoritarian regimes, and public opinion about foreign policy. Her research has appeared in or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and International Organization (“Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace,” The American Political Science Review, ProQuest, November, 2013) STRYKER Few findings in political science have received as much attention as the "democratic peace," the discovery that democracies almost never fight other democracies (Doyle 1986; Russett 1993). To some, the absence of military conflict among democracies is so consistent that it approaches the status of an "empirical law" (Levy 1988). Some authors have attempted to explain the democratic peace by highlighting the role of public opinion. They observe that democratic leaders are beholden to voters and claim that voters oppose war because of its human and financial costs. This argument, which dates to Immanuel Kant, predicts that democracies will behave peacefully in general--avoiding war not only against democracies but also against autocracies. History shows, however, that democracies frequently fight autocracies. A different possibility is that democratic publics are primarily averse to war against other democracies. If leaders are responsive to voters and voters are more reluctant to fight democracies than otherwise equivalent autocracies, then public opinion could play an important role in the dyadic democratic peace. To date, however, surprisingly few studies have investigated whether democratic publics are more reluctant to attack democracies than autocracies. 1Moreover, the small body of existing work has not accounted for variables that could confound the relationship between shared democracy and public support for war, nor has it investigated the mechanisms by which the regime type of the adversary affects the public mood. Despite decades of research on the democratic peace, we still lack convincing evidence about whether and how public opinion contributes to the absence of war among democracies. We used experiments to shed new light on these important questions.2Our experiments, embedded in public opinion polls that were administered to nationally representative samples of British and American citizens, involved a situation in which a country was developing nuclear weapons. When describing the situation, we randomly and independently varied four potential sources of peace: the political regime, alliance status, economic ties, and military power of the adversary. We then asked individuals whether they would support or oppose a preventive military strike against the country's nuclear facilities. Participants in our experiments were substantially less supportive of military strikes against democracies than against otherwise identical autocracies. Moreover, because we randomly and independently manipulated the regime type of the adversary, the observed preference for peace with other democracies was almost certainly causal, rather than spurious. Our findings therefore provide empirical microfoundations for the hypothesis that the preferences of ordinary voters contribute to peace among democracies. In addition to estimating the overall effect of democracy, we investigated the mechanisms through which shared democracy reduces public enthusiasm for war. Democratic publics may feel reluctant to attack other democracies for a variety of reasons: They may view democracies as less threatening (Risse-Kappen 1995; Russett 1993), regard democracies as more formidable opponents (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999; Lake 1992; Reiter and Stam 2002), or have moral qualms about using force to overturn policies that were freely chosen by citizens in another democracy. Despite volumes of research about the democratic peace, however, little is known about whether these factors influence the willingness of voters to attack other democracies. Using a unique experimental design and new techniques for causal mediation analysis (Imai et al. 2011; Imai, Keele, and Yamamoto 2010), we find that shared democracy pacifies the public primarily by changing perceptions of threat and morality, not by raising expectations of costs or failure. Individuals who faced democratic rather than autocratic countries were less fearful of the country's nuclear program and harbored greater moral reservations about attacking. Those perceptions, in turn, made citizens more peaceful toward democracies. By comparison, respondents did not think that attacking a democracy would result in substantially higher costs or a lower likelihood of success than attacking an autocracy. Thus, our data help arbitrate between competing mechanisms, while also identifying morality as an important but understudied source of peace among democracies. Democracies don’t go to warGautreaux, ’12, (Sergio, M.A. in International Relations from Webster University in Leiden, the Netherlands, and a B.A. in History, international consultant based in East Asia, “Examining the Democratic Peace Hypothesis: A Neorealist Critique,” International Policy Digest, 04.26.12, http://www.internationalpolicydigest.org/2012/04/26/examining-the-democratic-peace-hypothesis-a-neorealist-critique/)//erg Referred to as the “closest thing we have to law in international relations,” the democratic peace theory – the idea that democratic states do not go to war against each other – has been used as a champion ideology during the latter half of the post-World War II era and into the new millennium. For the theory’s mostly Western advocates, it is believed that as democracy is spread to all corners of the globe, so shall peace. The seemingly unanimous explanation among liberal international relations theorists for such a Kantian principle has been that democratic states avoid conflict with each other because of the similar natures of the democratic processes and the shared values within liberal societies that constrain the states’ leaders from conflict escalation. Since the time of Cleisthenes and the ancient Athenians, the very method of democratization has been dynamic. That is to say, the process is always one of transformation – moving from a so-called undemocratic society to a free one; from an irresponsible government to one in which the leaders are responsible for the well-being of the citizenry; from weak and absent civil societies to active and vibrant civic organizations. Proponents of the theory posit that it is this transformation in which cultural values are established over time and, ultimately, institutions are created, that prevents dyadic conflict between democratic states. In his seminal work on the democratic peace, Bruce Russett develops two models of explanation. First, the “cultural/normative model” asserts that the norms of peaceful conflict resolution – such as rule of law – inherent in democratic states lead these societies to avoid dyadic conflict with their counterparts. It is through this concept of shared culture, norms, and ideals that war is made unthinkable. Second, the “structural/institutional model” suggests that checks and balances, a dispersion of power, and a need for public debate and majority support makes it more difficult for democratic states to escalate disagreements to a point in which peaceful resolution is impossible. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s seemed to indicate to liberal intellectuals, such as Russett and others within American academia, that the superiority of the Western system had prevented the Cold War from escalating to the point of no return. In a twist of Karl Marx’s historical determinism, Francis Fukuyama pre-emptively dubbed this era “the end of history,” arguing that the world had moved to a stage in which liberal democracy was seen as the only legitimate form of government. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This Wilsonian pronouncement has been used as a foreign policy doctrine for successive post-Cold War American leaders, such as Bill Clinton, who stated in his 1994 State of the Union address that, “Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don’t attack each other.” Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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