<P> In international crises that include the threat or use of military force, one study finds that if the parties are democracies, then relative military strength has no effect on who wins . This is different from when nondemocracies are involved . These results are the same also if the conflicting parties are formal allies (Gelpi & Griesdorf 2001). Similarly, a study of the behavior of states that joined ongoing militarized disputes reports that power is important only to autocracies: democracies do not seem to base their alignment on the power of the sides in the dispute (Werner & Lemke 1997). </P> <P> According to a 2017 review study, "there is enough evidence to conclude that democracy does cause peace at least between democracies, that the observed correlation between democracy and peace is not spurious ." </P> <P> Most studies have looked only at who is involved in the conflicts and ignored the question of who initiated the conflict . In many conflicts both sides argue that the other side was initiator . Several researchers, as described in (Gleditsch, Christiansen & Hegre 2004), have argued that studying conflict initiation is of limited value, because existing data about conflict initiation may be especially unreliable . Even so, several studies have examined this . Reiter and Stam (2003) argue that autocracies initiate conflicts against democracies more frequently than democracies do against autocracies . Quackenbush and Rudy (2006), while confirming Reiter and Stam's results, find that democracies initiate wars against nondemocracies more frequently than nondemocracies do to each other . Several following studies (Peceny & Beer 2003), (Peceny & Butler 2004), (Lai & Slater 2006) have studied how different types of autocracies with different institutions vary regarding conflict initiation . Personalistic and military dictatorships may be particularly prone to conflict initiation, as compared to other types of autocracy such as one party states, but also more likely to be targeted in a war having other initiators . </P> <P> One 2017 study found that democracies are no less likely to settle border disputes peacefully than non-democracies . </P>

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