I received my B.A. in political economy at Williams College in 1956, my Diploma in Economics at King's College, Cambridge University, in 1957, and my Ph.D. in Political Science at Yale in 1961.

As you can see, much of my education crossed into economics, and that experience has given me an analytical edge for much of my research, which has also crossed those boundaries. I've taught courses with several economists, published several articles with economists, I have my bio in Who's Who in Economics, and even now am in a big research project with my frequent collaborator John Oneal and Yale economist William Nordhaus on explaining comparative military spending across countries.

My first book (Community and Contention: Britain & America in the Twentieth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1963) was on how and why the US and UK moved from an adversarial relationship in the 19th Century to cooperation and alliance in the mid-20th. It began my interest in domestic politics and international commercial exchange as possible means of reducing violence between countries—a theme that one way or another informs many/most of the articles in your list.

Witnessing, as a child from a very safe distance, WWII and then the Cold War; getting a special scholarship from Williams that allowed me to spend 56-57 in the UK; and the interest of my dissertation adviser—Karl Deutsch, arguably the intellectual giant in the scientific study of international relations (IR).

The ultimate goal of the project is to find out what makes international relations happen, how the world works, and what circumstances result in violence. To do this, we had to develop a theory and gather a great deal of empirical information.

“Social science may start from policy interests and opinions (as ours did) but it deserves to succeed only if it can stand up to intense scrutiny.”

In the 1970s, I developed a perception with regard to Europe’s peace: there was wealth, geographic proximity, and alliance with America and American troop presence, all of which kept the Soviets at bay, allowing European nations to interact peacefully. But there had to be more to the European peace. Was it a coincidence that these countries were all democratic, and what is it about democracy that induces peace among neighboring nations? Was it that there was peace because there was democracy, or democracy because there was peace? It was an interesting puzzle, and we performed a multivariate analysis to try to get a handle on it. Elections and leaders’ accountability for waging war were at the core of our theory, but there was no strong evidence that we were correct in measuring democratic norms. Other analyses turned up alternate possible explanations, including trade and international organizations.

In 1993 I published a book, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton University Press), that tried to establish and explain the fact that democracies almost never go to war with each other, and rarely even get into lesser violent disputes with each other. (This does not necessarily imply they remain at peace with countries who do not share this characteristic.) But when it was published, John Oneal (subsequently my co-author on this article, and nearly 20 others as well as the book, Triangulating Peace [WW Norton & Company, 2001]) told me that while he agreed with much of the book he thought trade was probably as important as democracy in reducing conflict—i.e., if nations traded together, did that make them less likely to fight or vice-versa?—and proposed we begin a research project. Fortunately I had the good sense to take him up on it.

Our primary mode of analysis was like that of epidemiologists who look at big information bases to identify the causes of disease, only we did it for war. We did an analysis similar to some of those in Grasping, but adding trade to an analysis of most of the Cold War era, and found that democracy and trade deserved almost equal credit in accounting for the low level of violent conflict between countries that shared democracy and high levels of trade/GDP.

From that we ultimately went on to include the effect of joint membership in international organizations (IOs), in a somewhat free but I think consistent use of Immanuel Kant's view (Essay on Perpetual Peace) of how countries that shared those three ties might manage to be at peace with each other without having peace imposed by a world government (which Kant feared could become a "soulless despotism"). Our conclusion was that Kant was essentially correct in light of modern social science. This conclusion grew out of continued refinement of our theory and methods, and the expansion of our research back to 1885 and forward to 2001 as we were able to create or obtain the necessary information.

We looked at democracy, trade, and IOs as a three-pronged feedback system. Analyses showed that trade producing peace was the stronger element, but there was also peace producing trade that could not be discounted. In a feedback system, all three elements reinforce each other, and the hopeful answer is that these good things can spread and support each other over time.

The whole thing became a very prominent and contested research program, challenged on theoretical grounds (the previously predominant school of IR, realism, held essentially that trade and domestic politics had little effect) and methodological grounds (many critiques to our statistical methods, to which we responded). The methods were, and still are, rapidly evolving, but I think there is now near-consensus that we are fundamentally right about democracy, probably right about trade, and maybe right about IOs. (On the last I have a new article, with Jon Pevehouse, that says we may not have been right in general about IOs, but at least those IOs whose member countries are democracies do, directly and indirectly, promote peace among their members.) All these are of course strong generalizations, but we don't pretend there can be no exceptions.

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It has been a great—exciting, sometimes exhausting—ride. Also an exemplar, I believe, of how science ought to be done: theoretical and empirical challenge to the accepted wisdom, tough but responsible criticism from skeptics who share a commitment to scientific method, and equally tough and responsible rejoinder as everybody tries to sort wheat from chaff. On this project alone I have had about 20 co-authors (colleagues around the country and even the world, former students, and even a former M.D.), and hundreds of other scholars involved or critiquing the endeavor one way or another—that's what generates all the citations! We've made all our data freely available to anyone on the web. Social science may start from policy interests and opinions (as ours did) but it deserves to succeed only if it can stand up to intense scrutiny.

I'd like to add that an article with Zeev Maoz in the American Political Science Review in 1993, producing some of the theory and results from Grasping, has been identified by the APSA as 19th on its all-time (well, since 1950) all subfields of PS list of most-cited APSR articles.

It’s definitely harder to do than other forms of scientific research, because you cannot measure and observe things in a closed laboratory setting, as you would be able to do with, say, a biochemistry experiment.

Basically, we depend on other people’s information. For example, in our studies of democracy, rather than decide for ourselves what constitutes democracy and therefore introduce a bias into our data, we rely on standard unbiased data sets, such as those from the University of Maryland and the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. These data sets identify democracy using several dimensions based on historical data—for instance, how competitive elections are, or how much the executive office is held responsible for events in that nation. Another data set we use is the Correlates of War Project, which essentially records who’s fought or threatened to fight whom throughout two centuries.

We have compiled information on our own a few times, based largely on other standard data sets. For instance, we’ve looked at the degree of economic interdependence: starting with the International Monetary Fund trade data from 1950 on up, we developed a method for making estimates of trade and GDP where good data were lacking, for example, in earlier time periods. We also compiled a big data set on shared membership in international organizations over a long time span. This type of work makes for very good undergrad research projects!

The role of public opinion in democracies—where people not only can have opinions but can vote freely—is essentially a restraint on their leaders from starting wars—because leaders know they or their parties can be kicked out if they start costly and especially losing wars. When two democracies confront each other, both sets of leaders know this about both of their countries, so they almost never fight each other. (It helps that democracies win about 80% of their wars, so democracies also recognize each other as formidable fighters likely to make any war long and costly.) This does not mean that democratic publics are necessarily especially peaceful—but at least they don't like to pay the costs of losing. Dictators, on the other hand, can usually repress their people and retain power through heavy coercion—they don't have to satisfy the wide population, and so are much less afraid of popular dissent. So dictators often fight each other, and democracies and dictatorships often fight each other.

I've done a lot of work, over decades, on public opinion on military spending and use of force abroad that feeds into the above project one way or another, though only one paper on your list happens to address it directly. With regard to public opinion influencing military spending, our studies on the Cold War and post-Cold War eras indicate that military spending does somewhat respond to public opinion over time.

Much of my research has not actually dealt with the current situation in Iraq, but I am seeing plenty of papers on the topic by virtue of my role as editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution—there are three articles on this topic alone being published in the December 2006 issue of the journal.

The big issue in this type of research is whether public opinion responds negatively to war based on the duration of time without a victory. Another big question is how much do casualties matter? In terms of fatalities, the Iraq war’s numbers are not nearly as high as Vietnam, Korea, or World War II. However, a side issue that tends to get overlooked is the fact that while the fatalities aren’t as high, the wounded level is much higher: from a three to one ratio in prior wars to an eight or nine to one ratio in Iraq. This is partly due to advances in medicine—essentially, soldiers are surviving minus key body parts or with awful mental issues.

Now, in terms of a president’s popularity, the biggest factor usually would be the economy. In this administration, if you look at the average income per capita, the economy is doing well. But the administration is not getting much benefit out of this, and it’s a reasonable inference that the war is influencing public opinion. In this case as in others, the "rally ‘round the flag" effect has a half-life of about two months, after which the conflict in question either goes away or worsens.

I think we have the best and fullest explanation for the success of the European Union in particular, and for the peace among those who share the three Kantian elements in general. I also believe there is a dynamic that shows up in the continuing spread in the number of countries who share the three elements and peace with one another. Each of these influences has grown in strength over the past few decades. And each works in a feedback system reinforcing the others. It's not deterministic, but enabling. So we should work to spread democracy, prosperity, and international institutions—peacefully. I have never held, and in fact have explicitly rejected, the view that it was a good idea to spread democracy by force. Some leaders have believed otherwise—or at least tried to justify their actions on that basis—and are discovering how hard it is to do that successfully. So I regard such policies as a distortion of our theory and empirical evidence. Perhaps American (and also British) democracy will prove strong enough to extricate us from the current failure and restrain subsequent such efforts.

It’s easier said than done to spread democracy, but it can be done through diplomacy or through trade agreements. The most important influences are what’s going on in the country in question—its culture, its economy, and its history of democracy (It’s easier to bring democracy back than to be starting from scratch). With regard to the impact of culture, there are some who say that Islamic culture hinders the development of democracy, but actually, Islamic culture by itself is not such a hindrance—there are several Islamic countries in Asia who have successful democracies, such as Turkey. So it’s an overreach to say that there cannot be democracy in Islamic nations. Much the same was said about Catholicism; however, religious culture did not prevent democratization in places like Poland, Hungary, Latin America, etc.

The international community can influence a nation towards democratization. A prime example of this would be the European Union. The EU is a very attractive place to be—the countries are peaceful with each other, democratic, and very rich, or on the path to wealth. There are standards and conditions in order to be a member state: a country must be democratic and have a free-market economy. Other organizations that utilize similar methods include NATO and the OAS. As a matter of fact, Spain’s bid to join NATO in the post-Franco era was governed by such incentives: Spain could join as long as it implemented freer trade and free elections. When the possibility of a neofascist coup arose in February 1981, the economic incentives were powerful enough to encourage the business factions in Spain to protect democracy.

These organizations can also step in and offer aid to formerly non-democratic countries holding popular elections. Sending monitors to oversee these elections has become almost routine, such as in Africa, Latin America, and the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. These monitors even have the power to recommend future sanctions on these countries if the elections are not observed to be above-board.

The Kantian Peace project has been the central core of my research for the past 15 years, and has yet to reach a point of very diminishing returns! There are our own theories, opposing theories, the need to reproduce results, the introduction of new variables, etc., coupled with the fact that all the data is in the public domain; it’s rather like riding a tiger. Personally, although I am trying to keep my hand in, I am also looking into new projects.

I would like to emphasize that this is not the work of one person. I have had many collaborators, former and current students, and other people’s work that feeds into this project, all of whom deserve every bit as much credit. I am particularly immensely grateful for my long-term collaboration with John Oneal on this project.

Bruce M. Russett, Ph.D.
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA