Predicting state bellicosity: The role of democracy, equality, and economics

Date of Completion

January 1999

Keywords

Women's Studies|Political Science, General|Political Science, International Law and Relations

Degree

Ph.D.

Abstract

This cross-national survey expands upon the causes of war literature, including the democratic peace thesis, and offers both theoretical and policy implications. I offer a critical analysis of the causes of war by incorporating the democratic peace theory, international political economy, and feminist theory. After exploring democratic theory and political culture, two alternative hypotheses are proposed. One hypothesis employs feminist theory within traditional international relations theory to investigate the impact of domestic gender equality on state bellicosity. A second hypothesis introduces the capitalist piece theory, which identifies economic ideology as the defining characteristic necessary to predict state bellicosity. Multivariate regression is performed on a subset of the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set (MID) to test the two hypotheses. ^

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