War and Democracy

By Gregory D. Hess, Athanasios Orphanides. Journal of Political Economy, 2001

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a general equilibrium model of conflict to investigate whether the prevalence of democracy is sufficient to foster the perpetual peace hypothesized by Immanuel Kant and whether the world would necessarily become more peaceful as more countries adopt democratic institutions. Our exploration suggests that neither hypothesis is true. The desire of incumbent leaders with unfavorable economic performance to hold on to power generates an incentive to initiate conflict and salvage their position—with some probability. An equilibrium with positive war frequency is sustained even if all nations were to adopt representative democratic institutions and even in the absence of an appropriative motive for war.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/65ef6e637a315b1d4c808ce5dabd7698e355bccf

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Citations in the corpus

Make Trade not War (2008, unknown): “Studies on the relationship between domestic politics and war include Garfinkel (1994) and Hess and Orphanides (1995, 2001).”
Restraining the Genuine Homo Economicus: Why the Economy Cannot be Divorced from its Governance (2003, unknown): “For a bene…cial e¤ect of democracy on con‡ict see Gar…nkel (1994) and for a more skeptical view see Hess and Orphanides (2001).”
Economics of Conflict: An Overview (2006, background): “Related analyses which have considered more specifically the interrelations between democratic political institutions and international conflict, include Garfinkel (1994) and Hess and Orphanides (1995, 2001).”
The Political Economy of Economic Sanctions (2007, background): “58 Hess and Orphanides (2001) for example argue that, because incumbent democratic leaders often have a need to hold on to power in the face of poor economic performance, they will sometimes have an incentive to initiate international conflict in order to salvage their domestic positions.”
War, Peace and the Size of Countries (2005, background): “6 Formal and empirical analyses of the relationship between wars and domestic institutions for given country borders are provided by Garfinkel (1994) and Hess and Orphanides (1995, 2001).”