Democracy and Conflict: Evidence from the New York Times

Democracy and conflict are among the most compelling topics in political science and economics. Drawing on conflict reports from The New York Times, this study presents novel empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and conflict. Our identification strategy combines a fixed-effects Poisson model with a cross-lagged panel model that incorporates fixed effects. The empirical findings indicate that democracy significantly suppresses conflict in general. Baseline regression results show that transitions to democracy reduce national conflict by an average of 12.8% in the short run and 37.2% in the long run. A series of robustness checks, including causal analysis using instrumental variables based on regional waves of democratization, confirm the reliability of our findings. Further analysis reveals that democracy mitigates conflict primarily by reducing both the opportunity factors and grievance factors that precipitate conflict. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth examination of the heterogeneous effects of democracy across various conflict typologies, and we investigate the consequences of democratic backsliding on conflict resurgence.