The conflicts of interest that prevailed between the great powers in the wake of the First World War eviscerated their ability to respond collectively to the advent of the Great Depression. Instead, each turned to discriminatory trade barriers and trade blocs to try to revive domestic output....

The central claim of a rapidly growing literature in international relations is that members of pairs of democratic states are much less likely to engage each other in war or in serious disputes short of war than are members of other pairs of states. Our analysis does not support this claim....

A growing literature in international relations concludes that democratic states pursue distinctive foreign policies. Specifically, democracies do not engage each other in war and only rarely engage each other in serious disputes short of war. Scholars have offered three basic explanations to...