A Feminine Peace? Female Leadership and the Propensity to Go to War.

In the nineteenth century transnational women's political activists claimed that female executives were less likely to take a country to war than male executives. The idea was reiterated by feminist activists in the 1970s and 1980s and is found in some feminist international relations and evolutionary psychology scholarship today. Whether female or male, however, executives can seldom make war on their own; they need the support of legislatures and the state to sustain military activities. We test the proposition that female leaders are more pacifist using newly assembled time-series cross-section data covering all countries in the world from 1960 through 2012. It records not just the presence of female executives, but the proportion of women in parliament and in cabinet posts as well. By merging our data with the Uppsala Conflict Data Program dataset on militarized disputes, we are able to test whether women's representation in various kinds of national-level office influences a state's propensity to go to various kinds of war. Preliminary multivariate analyses reveal that female leadership has more complex effects on the likelihood that a country will be involved in war than previously believed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]