2024/05/27 by Brian C. Rathbun, Christopher S. Parker, Caleb Pomeroy · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Political Conflict and Governance #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Social and Intergroup Psychology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0003055424000509
openalex publication_date 2024/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Why are democratic publics reluctant to use force against fellow democracies? We hypothesize that the democratic peace in public opinion owes, in large part, to racialized assumptions about democracy. Rather than regime type per se doing the causal work, the term “democracy” inadvertently primes the presumption that target countries are predominantly white. This implicit racialization, in turn, explains the reluctance of the American public to support aggression against fellow democracies, most notably among respondents higher in ethnocentrism who disproportionately drive the democratic peace treatment effect. Two original survey experiments, a large-scale word embedding analysis of English texts, and reanalyses of published studies support this expectation. Our results suggest that the democratic peace in public opinion is, largely, an ethnocentric and racialized peace. The findings hold implications for the role of racism and racialization in foreign policy opinion research generally.