Demosthenes and democracies: Regime-types and arbitration outcomes

Recent empirical research has found that democracies almost never wage war against each other. One explanation for this finding is that when given the same opportunities, joint-democracy dyads are more willing than other types of dyads to entrust third parties with judicial competence to settle their disputes with binding arbitration. But while joint-democracy dyads show a greater propensity than other pairs of states to use international arbitration, little research has been done on the success of these efforts. In order to determine whether there are any differences in the outcomes of arbitrations among different types of dyads, 221 cases of international arbitration were analyzed. No support was found for the hypothesis that joint-democracy dyads experience significantly greater success using arbitration than other types of dyads. Joint democracy is an important predictor of whether states will choose a binding method of third-party conflict resolution, but it does not predict whether a salient outcome will emerge from the arbitration.