This paper shows that elections are good for peace and that politicians ’ fear of losing office is the reason why disputes between democracies are extremely rare. To examine the impact of electoral accountability on military conflicts, we...
moreThis paper shows that elections are good for peace and that politicians ’ fear of losing office is the reason why disputes between democracies are extremely rare. To examine the impact of electoral accountability on military conflicts, we construct a new dataset of executive term limits for a sample of 177 countries over the 1816-2001 period, and combine this information with a large dataset of interstate militarized disputes. In line with previous studies, we find that democracies are much less likely to fight one another than autocracies or mixed pairs of states. However, this “democratic peace ” result does not hold for democracies in which the leaders face binding term limits, which are as conflict prone as autocracies. We also find that disputes involving democracies with term limits are more likely to occur during the executive’s last mandate. To explain these findings, we provide a simple theoretical model
