The conclusion was interesting
6 Conclusion
A common perspective posits that women are less violent than men, and therefore, states led by women will be more peaceful than states led by men. We examine the effect of female rule on conflict historically, focusing on Europe over 1480-1913. Our analysis examines how states fared in terms of conflict under female rulers, which is conceptually distinct from the question of whether women, as individuals are less violent than men. We exploit gender of the first-born and presence of a sister in the previous reign as instruments for whether queens come to power. We find that queenly reigns participated more in inter-state wars relative to kingly reigns, and these effects arise from greater participation in Balance of Power wars, which took place among European actors. Queens were also more likely to gain territory over the course of their reigns, but were no more likely than kings to experience civil wars or other internal conflicts.
Notably, queens engaged more in wars in which their polity was the aggressor, though this effect varies based on marital status. Among unmarried monarchs, queens were attacked more than kings. Among married monarchs, queens participated as attackers more than kings, and were also more likely to fight alongside allies. These results are consistent with an account in which unmarried queens were attacked as they were perceived to be weak, while married queens had greater capacity to attack, based on both alliances and a willingness to use their spouses to help them rule.
These effects suggest that war policy differed under female leaders than male leaders, in part because women tended to organize their rule differently than their male counterparts. These different tendencies themselves reflected prevailing gender norms of the day. For example, queens were more inclined to put their husbands into positions of power to help them rule, even if they were not their official co-regent; but under prevailing gender norms, kings were less inclined to do the same with female spouses. In addition, queens were more likely to benefit from alliances based on marriage, since male spouses could hold positions in the militaries of their home countries, and were therefore better positioned to cement alliances. In contrast, direct military involvement remained taboo for women. In this regard, gender norms ultimately played a role in why female rule led to greater participation in war of aggression, and in shaping the conflict trajectories of states under male and female rule.
While we cannot extrapolate directly from these results to the current era, we can consider a few potential implications for today’s rulers. These conjectures seem relevant since existing work has already documented a positive correlation between female executives and a state’s conflict behavior in the modern period [Koch and Fulton, 2011]. Broadly speaking, we may expect to observe systematic differences in war policy based on a ruler’s gender if male and female leaders continue organizing their rules differently, including in who they recruit into their governments, and who they enlist to play supportive roles. The marital interactions we uncover for Europe historically also suggest that perhaps the largest genderbased effects today arise in weakly institutionalized settings, where families continue to play a role in solving the challenge of who to trust in leading. This should be the subject of future research, in further study of gender and conflict.
