Domestic Political Structure and War Behavior

Abstract

A natural approach to understanding the tendencies of nations to enter or avoid wars is through the study of national decision making in international crises. Recent game-theoretic models of national crisis behavior can be used to generate research hypotheses about how specific features of national political structures and political culture are related to war-proneness. To illustrate, propositions about the relationships of several national characteristics to crisis involvement and war initiation are derived from two such models. Empirical testing of these hypotheses can help shed new light on Kant's thesis that democracies are less war-prone than other states.