King Democracy: Do Democratic Nations Mitigate Conflict Over Transboundary Freshwater Resources Better Than Other Nations?

The prospect of water wars and conflict over water are ideas that are frequently dramatized in media and also studied by scholars. It is well-established that bona fide wars are not started over water resources, but conflict over water does exist and is not well understood. One would suppose, as scholars often do, that dyads composed of two democratic nations would be the best at mitigating conflict and promoting cooperation over freshwater resources. General conflict research supports that supposition, as does the argument that democracies must be best at avoiding conflicts over resources because they excel at distributing public goods. This study provides empirical evidence showing how interstate dyads composed of various governance types conflict and cooperate over general water and water quantity issues relative to each other. After evaluating the water conflict mitigating ability of democratic-democratic, democratic-autocratic, and autocratic-autocratic dyads, this study found that democracy-autocracy dyads are less likely to cooperate over general water issues and water quantity issues than the other two dyad types. Nothing certain can be said about how the three dyad types compare to each other in terms of likelihood to conflict over water quantity issues. However, two-autocracy dyads seem to be most likely to cooperate over water quantity issues. These findings support the established belief that democratic-autocratic pairs struggle to cooperate while also encouraging greater scrutiny of the belief that democracies must be best at cooperating over water resources.

DEMOCRACY ISN'T THAT SMART (BUT WE CAN MAKE IT SMARTER): ON LANDEMORE'S DEMOCRATIC REASON

Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016In her recent book, Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore argues that, when evaluated epistemically, “a democratic decision procedure is likely to be a better decision procedure than any non-democratic decision procedures, such as a council of experts or a benevolent dictator” (p. 3). Landemore's argument rests heavily on studies of collective intelligence done by Lu Hong and Scott Page. These studies purport to show that cognitive diversity – differences in how people solve problems – is actually more important to overall group performance than average individual ability – how smart the individual members are. Landemore's argument aims to extrapolate from these results to the conclusion that democracy is epistemically better than any non-democratic rival. I argue here that Hong and Page's results actually undermine, rather than support, this conclusion. More specifically, I argue that the results do not show that democracy is better than any non-democratic alternative, and that in fact, they suggest the opposite – that at least some non-democratic alternatives are likely to epistemically outperform democracy.