| As a theory of international relations, Democratic Peace Theory posits that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other, thereby reducing the overall incidence of interstate conflict. Immanuel Kant suggested that this principle was true in part because citizens in democracies do not want to bear the costs, physical, emotional, or fiscal, of war and vote to remove bellicose leaders from power. I test the hypothesis that conscription methods may affect the incidence and length of interstate conflicts, specifically that citizens forced to fight in draft armies, as opposed to citizens who choose to fight in all-volunteer armies, will be less likely to vote for or in other ways approve of their leaders and will thus reduce the likelihood that a country will choose to go to war or choose to stay at war for an extended period of time. Using data from the Correlates of War Project, the Polity IV Project, the Military Recruitment Data Set, and the World Bank, I find that my hypothesis is not supported, and that in fact all-volunteer military recruitment methods lead to a statistically significant reduction in the incidence and length of interstate conflicts. I conclude that interstate conflict is an incredibly complex concept to explain using a single variable, regardless of statistical significance, and that further research needs to be done on the issue particularly with regards to modern shifts in the nature of war. |
