Introduction

Abstract

Compared to the amount of research devoted to the interdemocratic peace proposition, the “flipside” of democratic participation in armed conflict has received considerably less attention. Moreover, due to a widespread focus on regime type differences, many studies in International Relations (IR) implicitly treat democratic regimes as a homogeneous group and thus fail to account for substantial variation within the group of democracies. While scholars have persuasively made the case that “democracy” needs to be unpacked to be meaningful (Elman, 2000), this remains rarely done in the field of international politics and conflict research. In Comparative Politics, on the other hand, research on democratic subtypes and their virtues and weaknesses abounds, but this knowledge is seldom applied to matters of security policy.