Demography, Democracy and Disputes: The Search for the Elusive Relationship Between Population Growth and International Conflict

We examine the propensity of states to initiate international conflict conditioned on four primary explanatory variables: (1) changes in population over varying lags, (2) democratic status of the state, (3) the power status of the state, and (4) changes in the state's level of energy consumption. We hypothesize that the responsiveness of a government to the needs of its citizens is sufficiently important that the effect of population growth cannot be properly examined independently of democracy and that major powers tend to become involved in disputes for a much wider set of reasons than minor powers. Thus, we expect to find the strongest effect of population change on conflict initiation in democratic minor powers. We also expect that decreases in energy consumption concurrent with increases in population will lead to conflict initiation. A series of negative binomial regressions over 20 yearly time lags lends robust support to our expectations.