Abstract: Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women.
At each stage of the escalatory ladder, women prefer more peaceful options. They are less
apt to approve of the use of force and the striking of hard bargains internationally, and
more apt to approve of substantial concessions to preserve peace. They impose higher
audience costs because they are more approving of leaders who simply remain out of
conflicts, but they are also more willing to see their leaders back down than engage in
wars. Unlike men, most women impose audience costs primarily because a leader behaved
aggressively in making a threat, not because the leader endangered the states bargaining
reputation through behaving inconsistently. Many of these differences, and possibly all,
span time periods and national boundaries. Women have been increasingly incorporated
into political decision-making over the last century through suffragist movements, raising
the question of whether these changes have had effects on the conflict behavior of nations
consistent with their large effects in other areas, such as the size and competencies of
governments. We find that the evidence is consistent with the view that the increasing
enfranchisement of women, not merely the rise of democracy itself, is the cause of the
democratic peace.
Conclusion
The results above provide evidence that the divergent preferences of the sexes translate into a
pacifying effect when women’s influence on national politics grows. The magnitude of this correlation
is substantial, on par with the largest effects uncovered in the empirical literature on international
relations. There remains much to understand about these political processes, however. The results
presented above are consistent with greater female influence directly through voting, but perhaps
also consistent with influence exercised through other societal channels whose existence correlates
with female franchise. Another alternative explanation for our findings may be that suffrage is
confounded with liberal institutions and attitudes. While this possibility cannot be fully ruled out,
we have illustrated the shortcomings of the liberal institutions argument in a variety of ways. The
concerns of some scholars about the democratic peace may nevertheless apply to the argument we
make here. To address these, we have shown that our findings are robust to a variety of specifications.
We look forward to further investigation in these areas.
At the individual level, the evidence of a gender gap in so many existing survey experiments
suggests that scholars should explore how men and women respond to different frames or primes.
Such evidence would help illuminate how politicians might frame arguments for war or even choose
to use force in different contexts depending on the constraint of women’s more pacific preferences,
or the necessity of expending political capital to overcome those constraints. The exploration of
heterogeneous treatment effects is beyond the scope of this paper but a logical avenue for future
research.
The links in the aggregation chain from the individual level to national policy and international
interactions are also ripe for further exploration. There are potentially many paths from female
suffrage to women’s preferences influencing national policy and international outcomes. Some might
be direct, for example if interest groups are able to exert direct pressure on politicians; some might
be more indirect, for instance if institutional and electoral incentives in some countries make women
a particularly important voting bloc. In the latter case, politicians may anticipate the reactions
of female voters, either by consciously considering women’s lower baseline preference for war or by
treating it as one of part of a package of preferences. At the level of strategic interaction between
states, process tracing might illuminate whether leaders in one state actively consider the extension
of suffrage in adversary states when engaged in a crisis. More fine-grained analysis of how leaders
seek to accommodate women’s preferences in the wars they do fight could also follow, including an
examination of other dependent variables such as war duration, casualties, or military strategy.
Yet another avenue for future research concerns the potentially differing effects of female enfranchisement and female political leadership. While this study focuses on the former, others have
examined the latter, and some evidence exists that female leaders are more willing to participate
in international conflicts (Dube and Harish 2017). Given the on average individual level differences
between the sexes, this may be considered surprising. Future research should probe the extent to
which this tension is explained by one of two factors. The first is whether female political leaders
are systematically different from female population averages in ways that relate to political decisions
to engage in conflict (Fukuyama 1998, 32). The second is the extent to which female leaders, who
have often been a gender minority among their peers, have been influenced by incentives to mimic or
even exceed the aggressive norms of male peers (Goldstein 2003, 124-5. Doing otherwise might have
been interpreted as a form of “weakness” in the conduct of foreign affairs.33 In effect, as Ehrenreich
(1999) point out, the “tough” international actions of Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher may
have been a form of “male posturing.”34
As the field of international relations has returned to studying individuals and their preferences
over foreign policy and international issues, the long-understood gender gap has been glossed over,
if acknowledged at all. Yet this persistent feature of individual preferences over war and peace
changes the composition of the electorate in states that give women the vote. This article represents
an important step in establishing the link, across space and time, between the gender gap at the
individual level and peace at the international level. Democracy gives the public a voice, but the
public is not homogeneous. This article suggests that women’s preferences exert a significant and
independent effect on state behavior in war, conditional on the existence of political institutions
that allow women’s voices to be heard. Early suffragist movements, including those that successfully
expanded suffrage following the First World War, were closely linked to peace movements (Goldstein
2003, 322-31). They hoped to make world politics more pacific by giving women greater say in
political affairs via the vote; their hopes were fulfilled.
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