Reassessing the Democratic Advantage in War

Alexander Downes and Jason Lyall
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Jason Lyall: Dartmouth College

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Abstract: Democratic initiators are widely held to win interstate wars far more often than autocracies. Yet this ``democratic advantage'' rests on one war dataset, the Correlates of War (COW), and a few democracy measures. We reassess it using 11 operationalizations of democracy and Project Mars, a far larger dataset of wars. Across 490 estimates, we find no robust advantage for democratic initiators. With standard controls, Project Mars contrasts between democratic and non-democratic initiators range from -12 to +8 percentage points; none is significant. A 1,408-specification multiverse shows the advantage fades as controls are added: only 5.8\% of Project Mars specifications are significant, and the Bayesian model average (11 points) is indistinguishable from zero. Project Mars rules out advantages of 15 points or more; COW, by contrast, has too few democratic initiators to settle the question. Research that treats democracies as the benchmark of wartime success may rest on a baseline that does not exist.

Date: 2026-10-16
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:jvryq_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/jvryq_v1

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