Ibland hajar man till när man ser en titel på en artikel – som när jag häromdagen såg titeln ”Queens”! Det visade sig att studien handlar om huruvida länder med kvinnliga politiska ledare under hundratals år av europeisk historia hamnar mer eller mindre i konflikt med andra länder, jämfört med länder ledda av män. Forskarna skriver om sin studie:

To conduct our analysis, we construct a new panel dataset which tracks the genealogy and conflict participation of European polities during every year between 1480 to 1913. Our primary sample covers 193 reigns in 18 polities, with queens ruling in 18% of these reigns. We include polity fixed effects, holding constant time invariant features of a polity that affect conflict, and exploit variation over time in the gender of the ruler. Using the first born male and sister instruments, we find that polities ruled by queens were 39 percentage points more likely to engage in a war in a given year, compared to polities ruled by kings. These estimates are economically important, when compared to mean war participation of 30 percentage points over this period.

Det tycks alltså som att drottningar har haft en betydligt starkare tendens att hamna i krig än kungar! Detta resultat förvånade mig.