Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace in Territorial and Maritime Disputes

• In Event: Democracy and Foreign Policy

Abstract

Public opinion is one of the important channels that underpins the democratic peace. Recent studies have demonstrated experimentally that citizens in democracies are more averse to attacking other democracies than autocracies. None of these studies, however, investigate the public opinion mechanism of the democratic peace in the context of either territorial or maritime disputes. Such an oversight is surprising, given that the former have traditionally been considered more dangerous than those over other issues, while the latter have increasingly been salient as a source of international conflict. In this paper, we examine whether shared democracy prevents both territorial and maritime disputes from escalating to war. We argue that even in the face of such disputes, democratic publics’ perception of democracy can reduce support for military strike against democratic opponents. Using a series of survey experiments in three East Asian democracies (i.e., Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), we test whether, when confronted with territorial and maritime disputes, their publics are more reluctant to use force against democracies than against autocracies. Indeed, our findings provide further empirical support for the role of public opinion in the democratic peace, particularly because territorial and maritime disputes are pervasive in East Asia, making it a much more difficult test.

Authors

• Yu Bin Kim, University of Missouri

• Gidong Kim, Stanford University