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Viewing report
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Democracy or Demography?. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, Oct 2008, Pages: 212
How much influence does the regime type of a country
have on its ability to win an international war? Upon
closer inspection, very little. A careful study of
the process by which peaceful citizens are converted
into instruments of state-sponsored destruction shows
that countries with democratic systems of government
perform no better in international wars than their
non-democratic counterparts. Instead, it is the size
of the population asset that the state’s leadership
can gather, leverage, and deploy in combat that has
historically mattered most for victory in war.
Population sizes of countries in the international
system are so varied that it is virtually impossible
for a small nation to withstand the military
onslaught of a more populous foe, a finding that
reintroduces some basic tenets of realism to modern
foreign policy discussions. The importance of the
size and quality of a country’s population is
demonstrated via statistical analysis on a novel
dataset of international wars since 1816, as well as
detailed case studies of the Arab-Israeli Wars and
German invasion of France in 1940.
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