Working Paper 105
We address how regime supporters affect war making by re opening a classic debate on business elites and their influence on states' conflict behavior. Imperialist theories contend that business elites encourage executives to undertake military expeditions to "open up" foreign markets, while "capitalist peace" arguments emphasize that business elites have economic incentives to work for peace. We synthesize these arguments and propose that countries become more belligerent, in general, when business elites enter regime support coalitions, but not towards other business supported regimes. We use recently compiled data on social groups in regime support coalitions, covering 200 polities across 1789 2018, to test implications of our argument. We find that businesssupported regimes are more likely to initiate armed conflict, but not against other countries with business elite supported regimes. We also find support for additional implications, for instance pertaining to how the belligerence of business supported regimes depends on existing trade relationships. We have received invaluable comments and suggestions from Tobias Rommel, Rick Wilson, Kelly McMann, Scott Gates, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Tatjana Stankovic, Havard Mokleiv Nygard, Johannes Lindvall, Johannes Gerschewski, Christian Houle, Michael Wahman, Jeff Conroy Krutz, and Masaaki Higashijima as well as participants at the 2018 Historical V Dem Workshop in Oslo, the International Security Program Seminar at the Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School, the NEPS Conference 2018 in Verona, the APSA Annual Meeting 2018 in Boston, V Dem Conference 2019 in Gothenburg, 2019 Workshop on Comparative Authoritarianism at the TUM School of Governance, Munich, and the Michigan State University Comparative Politics Workshop.