Democratic Peace and Electoral Accountability

Paola Conconi, Nicolas Sahuguet and Maurizio Zanardi

ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: Democracies rarely engage in conflicts with one another, though they are not averse to fighting autocracies. We exploit the existence in many countries of executive term limits to show that electoral accountability is the key reason behind this "democratic peace" phenomenon. We construct a new dataset of term limits for a sample of 177 countries over the 1816-2001 period, and combine this information with a large dataset of interstate conflicts. Our empirical analysis shows that, although democracies are significantly less likely to fight each other, democracies with leaders who face binding term limits are as conflict prone as autocracies. The study of electoral calendars confirms the importance of re-election incentives: in democracies with two-term limits, conflicts are less likely to occur during the executive's first mandate than in the last one. Our findings support the Kantian idea that elections act as a discipline device, deterring leaders from engaging in costly conflicts. © 2014 by the European Economic Association.

Keywords: Interstate Conflicts; Elections; Term Limits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
Note: SCOPUS: ar.j
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Published in: Journal of the European Economic Association (2014) v.12,p.997-1028

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/145492/3/DP.pdf DP (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: DEMOCRATIC PEACE AND ELECTORAL ACCOUNTABILITY (2014)
Working Paper: Democratic Peace and Electoral Accountability (2009)
Working Paper: Democratic Peace and Electoral Accountability (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/145492

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/145492

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().