POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, Democratic Peace Theory, International Relations Theory
Document Summary
Theory = ability to predict how states will behave, how individual voters will behave. A theory based on historical patterns that democracies do not fight/go to war with other democracies. In most cases democracies are allied with one another. Democracies are also slow in making policy, therefore except under extreme circumstances they take a long time to declare war. An in this time democracies figure out alternative ways to solve their differences. Conflicts may exist but history as shown they do not go to war with each other. However political science is not very good at predicting or creating good theories. For example we did not predict the end of the cold war. We try to predict how states will be have but generally not successful. The reason is because politics is uncertain, the way states behave is very uncertain. But we continue to try and understand how states behave and why.
