Bear Any Burden? How Democracies Minimize the Costs of War

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that the greater accountability of democratic leaders to their citizens creates powerful pressures on leaders to reduce the human costs of war. In an analysis of a new dataset of fatalities in interstate wars (1900 to 2005) we find that highly democratic states suffer significantly fewer military and civilian fatalities. We argue that democracies limit their war losses primarily by adopting four specific foreign and military policies. First, democracies generate higher military capabilities than nondemocracies in times of war. Second, democracies are more likely to augment their national capabilities by joining more powerful coalitions of states during war. Third, democracies are more likely than other states to utilize battlefield military strategies that minimize their fatalities. Finally, democracies are more likely to fight wars on battlefields that are not contiguous to their home territories, thereby shielding their civilian populations from the fighting.A rough consensus has emerged in the literature on the ''democratic peace'' that, contrary to the expectations of early theorists like Immanuel Kant, democracies are not generally more pacific than nondemocracies. As modern scholars have recognized, the fact that elected leaders are more accountable to the citizens who must bear the costs of wars does not imply that these leaders will avoid wars in general-only that they will oppose highly unpopular wars that threaten their tenure in office.Recognizing this, recent studies of democratic war involvement have focused on war outcomes (defined in terms of victory and defeat) as a central concern of democratic leaders in times of war. We argue, however, that democracies should be highly attentive to the costs of war as well as its outcome; they do not seek victory at any price. Moreover, because victory is sometimes won only through a heavy price in blood and treasure, a war's outcome is not a reliable proxy for its costs. Thus, more than two centuries after it was articulated, one of the key implications of Kant's theory-that democracies should strive to minimize the costs borne by their citizens-has not been adequately tested.With this in mind, in this article we develop a refined theory of democratic war behavior and utilize a newly constructed dataset on war fatalities to conduct the most rigorous test of this theory to date. We find that highly democratic states suffer fewer military and civilian casualties in their wars than do other states. More importantly, however, we also shed new light on precisely how democracies reduce the costs of the wars they fight, a critical theoretical question largely ignored by the existing literature on the democratic peace. We argue that democracies limit their losses by adopting four key foreign and military policies that help them minimize both military and civilian fatalities-mobilizing superior military forces in times of war, utilizing casualty-reducing military strategies on the battlefield, fighting battles on distant territories and fightin...

Do Democracies Engage Less in Coup-Proofing? On the Relationship between Regime Type and Civil-Military Relations1

“…Empirically, they demonstrate that armies of democratic states displayed a higher quality of leadership on the battlefield in interstate wars between 1800 and 1982. Similarly, Valentino, Huth, and Croco (2010) examine interstate wars between 1900 and 2005 and demonstrate that democratic combatants could implement maneuver strategies to minimize the number of casualties occurred due to their higher confidence in the loyalty of their armed forces.…”

A porous humanitarian shield: The laws of war, the red cross, and the killing of civilians

“…Thus our sample is limited to one-sided violence in civil wars for the years from 1989 to 2004 for 72 countries. 8 We conduct the examination with the logarithm of civilians killed (see also Valentino et al 2010) and use, as indicated by the Hausman test, fixedeffects regression models with robust standard errors. 9 In robustness tests we also estimate negative binomial regression models.…”

Necessity and non-combatant immunity

“…But in drawn-out wars of attrition, belligerents are more likely to use up their stockpiles of materiel, so civilian productive capacity 'becomes directly relevant to success or failure on the battlefield'. 80 Finally, there is some evidence that anti-civilian attacks can in fact contribute to overall strategic success, not only to intermediate goals. Insurgent groups that deploy terrorist methods in asymmetric conflicts can achieve strategic objectives by coercing their more powerful adversaries.…”

“…121 Valentino et al concur on this: belligerents 'are most likely to resort to killing civilians in the most difficult and desperate conflicts -when conventional military means are ineffective or too costly' so we can predict that 'victory in these circumstances will be relatively unlikely no matter what tactics a combatant employs'. 122 If states that victimise civilians in interstate wars achieve the same rate of success as those that do not, that itself strongly implies -given the typically direr straits faced by those who do take these extreme measures -that attacking civilians is militarily effective.…”

“…But in certain circumstances combatants may come to believe that doing so is the best way to achieve victory at an acceptable cost.' 145 They defend this theory by showing that states engaged in wars of attrition or counterinsurgency 'killed nearly six times more civilians than did states utilising other strategies'. 146 When attrition and counterinsurgency combine, the predicted number of civilian casualties jumps exponentially; when these combined with a long war and maximalist war aims, the numbers multiply still more.…”