Democratic peace theory, especially in its normative version, is based on the assumption of the peace-promoting role of the democratic citizen. Still, the attitudes and preferences of individuals toward the use of armed force are rarely investigated explicitly. Neither has existing research satisfactorily accounted for why the democratic peace only exists at the dyadic level. Our study seeks to answer both these challenges. Firstly, we survey the democratic peace literature, emphasizing in particular normative theory and the discrepancy between dyadic and monadic democratic peace. Secondly, using data from the World Values Survey, we show that democratic citizens really are more pacifistic than citizens of other regime types. Thirdly, we argue that this << democratic pacifism >> is a conditional pacifism limited to certain types of war and certain types of opponent. Normative democratic peace is a real phenomenon, even if its existence is not absolute.
