Title: Moral Development, Norm Systems and Social Modernization: A Normative Democratic Peace Model
Abstract: This article offers a framework for understanding the democratic peace phenomenon across three levels of analysis. Specifically, Kohlberg’s structural-development model of moral reasoning offers an understanding of how individuals (e.g., national leaders, public officials) may approach ethically difficult decisions, such as whether or not to engage in war. In turn, this supports the normative strain of the democratic peace argument. Further, by applying a social constructivist approach to our understanding of the interaction between individual actors and social mores, the normative power and social foundation of the democratic peace argument is clarified. Finally, I argue that modernization & cultural change data from the World Values Survey supports the normative democratic peace proposition. Thus, I examine three different bodies of literature - individual moral development, normative democratic peace, and neo-modernization – and argue that the three are interrelated and aspects of the same meta-process. Therefore, I suggest a more complex, social understanding of non-conflict, predicated on normative and cultural-value ‘proximity’, which has been neglected in the literature, since most democratic peace scholars focus on structural explanatory variables.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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