Public Opinion, Rivalry, and the Democratic Peace: Experimental Evidence from South Korea.

This article examines how international rivalry influences public opinion related to the democratic peace—the observed tendency for democracies to avoid militarized conflict with each other. Using a nationally representative survey experiment in South Korea, a young and middle-power democracy in East Asia, the study finds that while South Koreans generally show less support for military strikes against democracies than autocracies, this reluctance diminishes significantly when the target democracy is a rival. The findings suggest that public opinion's pacifying effect in democratic peace is weakened by perceptions of rivalry, indicating that the democratic peace theory's public opinion mechanism may primarily apply to non-rivalrous democratic dyads. These results have broader implications for understanding democratic peace in regions with rivalrous democracies and call for further research on different types of rivalries, issue areas, and distinctions between young and established democracies.