Democracy, Hegemony, and War: New Data from the Ancient World

Abstract

We examine the correlates of war by studying a large and newly compiled dataset on warfare in the ancient world (600 to 30 BCE). Our data allow us to test two main explanations for international peace: hegemony and democracy. First, we seek empirical support for the democratic peace outside of the modern period and find that the democratic peace is not an empirical regularity among Ancient Greek city-states. Second, we explore the relationship between relative state-sizes and war and find mixed results, both inside Greece and outside.