Monday 1 January 2018

The warmongering queens of Europe

I just finished reading an interesting NBER Working Paper by Oeindrila Dube (University of Chicago) and S.P. Harish (McGill University), simply entitled "Queens" (ungated version here). In the paper, the authors essentially investigate whether queens are more likely than kings to engage in war.

Why would that be? Dube and Harish suggest a couple of reasons:
We examine two potential accounts of why female ruler may have increased war participation. The first account suggests that queens may have been perceived as easy targets of attack. This perception—accurate or not—could have led queens to participate more in wars as a consequence of getting attacked by others.
The second account builds on the importance of state capacity. During this period, states fought wars were primarily with the aim of expanding territory and economic power... Wars of this nature demanded financing, spurring states to develop a broader fiscal reach... As a result, states undertaking wars required greater capacity. Queenly reigns may have had greater capacity than kingly reigns for two reasons, both of which themselves reflect prevailing gender norms from this period. First, queenly reigns may have been able to secure more military alliances. While marriage brought alliances for both male and female monarchs, male spouses were typically more involved with the military of their home countries (than female spouses)...
Second, queens often enlisted their spouses to help them rule, in ways that kings were less inclined to do with their spouses—an asymmetry again reflects gender identity norms. For example, queens put their spouses in charge of the military or economic reforms, which effectively meant there were two monarchs overseeing state affairs, as compared to one. This greater spousal division of labor may also have enhanced the capacity of queenly reigns, enabling queens to pursue more more aggressive war policies. 
Dube and Harish constructed a dataset of 193 reigns in 18 polities (essentially states) in Europe over the period 1480-1913, where at least one queen had reigned in each polity (19% of the decade-polity dataset had queens reigning). In their headline results, they find that:
...polities ruled by queens were 27% more likely to participate in inter-state conflicts, compared to polities ruled by kings. These estimates are economically important, representing a doubling over mean war participation over this period. In contrast, we find that queens were no more likely to experience civil wars or other types of internal instability.
In terms of which account of why queens are more likely to engage in wars, they find that:
...among married monarchs, queens were more likely than kings to fight as aggressors, and to fight alongside allies. Among unmarried monarchs, queens were more likely than kings to fight in wars in which their polity was attacked. These results provide some support for the idea that queens were targeted for attack: Unmarried queens, specifically, may have been perceived as weak and attacked by others. But this did not hold true for married queens who instead participated as aggressors. The results are consistent with the idea that the reigns of married queens had greater capacity to carry out war, and asymmetries generated by gender identity norms played a role in shaping this outcome...
In other words, unmarried queens were more likely to be perceived as weak and attacked, while married queens were more likely to be the aggressor. Good reason for newly crowned queens to quickly find a quality husband (preferably with military experience)?

When reading the paper, I was a little worried about the exclusion of polities that never had a queen reign (which could lead to biased results), but Dube and Harish show that including king-only polities doesn't affect the results drastically, alongside a battery of other robustness checks.

It's an interesting paper, and it makes me wonder for modern times what, if anything, it might tell us about female CEOs, particularly in family-owned businesses where succession is most similar to a monarchy?

[HT: Marginal Revolution, back in April last year]

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