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The idea that democratic states have not fought and are not likely to fight interstate wars against each other runs counter to the realist and neorealist theoretical traditions that have dominated the field of international politics. Since the mid-1970s, the generation of new data and the development of superior analytical techniques have enabled evaluators of the idea to generate impressive empirical evidence in favor of the democratic peace proposition, which is reinforced by substantial theoretical elaboration. Some critics argue that common interests during the Cold War have been primarily responsible for peace among democracies, but both statistical evidence and intuitive arguments cast doubt on that contention. It has also been argued that transitions to democracy can make states war-prone, but that criticism too has been responded to persuasively. The diverse empirical evidence and developing theoretical bases that support the democratic peace proposition warrant confidence in its validity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some earlier efforts to measure the inequality of distribution within several different substantive contexts and to see how appropriate these different measures might be if they were applied to the distribution of "power potential" in the international system or any of its subsystems. We discuss several measures which we find would not be appropriate. We then present a measure which we find better suited for the purpose and go on to compare it to earlier measures of

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1993) reported that democratic states after World War II were unlikely to engage in militarized disputes with one another, but their continuous measure of joint democracy is problematic. It can decrease if one of a pair of states becomes more democratic, even if the political regime of the other does not change. Thus, results using this index are difficult to interpret. In this study we estimate the likelihood of dyadic conflict using more straightforward indices of joint democracy As in Oneal, Oneal, Maoz, and Russett (1996), we control for economic interdependence and several other theoretically interesting, potentially confounding influences. Our analyses indicate that the more democratic a pair of states, the less likely they are to become involved in a militarized dispute; but a high level of democracy in one state can not compensate for less democracy in a strategic partner. The political distance separating states along the democracy-autocracy continuum is an important indicator of the likelihood of dyadic conflict: democracies are unlikely to fight other democracies, but democracies and autocracies are conflict-prone. These results indicate that, ceteris paribus, democratic states are more peaceful than autocracies at the national level of analysis.The debate between realists and liberals (or neo-realists and neo-liberals)is not fully resolved, as several recent articles attest (Cohen 1994;Layne 1994; NOTE: The authors would like to thank Bruce Russett for organizing the Yale Workshop on Interdependence, Democracy, and Conflict, April 1995, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for its financial support of this meeting. We are indebted to the other participants for stimulating our thinking on these topics. This research was completed while John Oneal was the recipient of a grant from the National Science Foundation (SBER-9507975).