Democracy or demography: Regime type and determinants of war outcomes

To what extent does the regime type of a country impact its ability to win an international war? To answer this question one must first understand how nations wage wars. I conceptualize state leaders as asset managers who gather, leverage, and deploy a state's main asset--its population--to achieve war victory, effectively turning men into instruments of state-sponsored destruction. Next, I utilize an original dataset of 138 international conflicts since 1816 to determine whether there are important regime-type differences in each of these three phases of asset utilization. Although democratic regimes display limited advantages in some aspects of asset leverage the presence of any particular form of governance is not a significant predictor of victory. Instead, by far the most powerful determinant of international war outcomes is the discrepancy between the initiator and target country's population sizes. Also, due to the large variance between countries in the sizes of their underlying population assets how efficiently a certain nation can leverage and deploy its armed forces matters little in which side is ultimately victorious. In addition to statistical analyses I conduct case studies of Arab-Israeli wars, Franco-German war (1940), and Vichy France-Thai war (1941) to demonstrate the lack of correlation between democracy and determinants of war victory. These findings have important policy implications for U.S. grand strategy and future scholarship on the topic.