It has often been said that the closest thing we have to an empirical law in international relations is that democracies do not fight against each other. This study adds to the literature on democratic peace by focusing on the crisis behaviour of democracies and nondemocracies. International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project data are used to conduct a quantitative analysis of states' crisis activity from 1918 to 1988. Strong support emerges for the three hypotheses of the study. First, it is clear that democracies initiate fewer crises than nondemocracies. However, democracies tend to escalate crises to higher levels of severity. Finally, democracies eventually win the crises in which they become involved. The conclusion is that democratic leaders face strong incentives to “select” winnable crises against nondemocratic states because of the audience costs they face, but when the opponent is another democracy, the domestic audience expects leaders to compromise.