IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jocore/v32y1988i1p87-102.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Power Transitions as a Cause of War

Author

Listed:
  • Henk Houweling

    (University of Amsterdam)

  • Jan G. Siccama

    (Netherlands Institute of International Relations, The Hague)

Abstract

In contradiction to balance-of-power thinking, in their book The War Ledger, Organski and Kugler claim to have proven that major war is caused by the overtaking of the dominant nation through the challenging major power(s). This regularity would still be valid in the nuclear era: According to Organski, nuclear weapons have no effect on deterring war. However, very serious objections may be raised against Organski and Kugler's test procedure. For this reason, we have replicated Organski and Kugler's analysis with a different data-set (collected by Doran and Parsons) and a more appropriate test procedure. The results show that the power transition hypothesis cannot be rejected (significance level, 5%). This result is obtained not only for the “top dogs†(the three or four strongest nations), but also for the complete subset of major powers. This latter result is different from Organski and Kugler's finding that power overtaking is significantly related to war outbreaks between contenders, but not in dyads encompassing the complete class of major powers.

Suggested Citation

  • Henk Houweling & Jan G. Siccama, 1988. "Power Transitions as a Cause of War," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 32(1), pages 87-102, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:jocore:v:32:y:1988:i:1:p:87-102
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/32/1/87.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Herbst, Luisa & Konrad, Kai A. & Morath, Florian, 2017. "Balance of power and the propensity of conflict," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 168-184.
    2. Michelle Benson, 2007. "Extending the Bounds of Power Transition Theory," International Interactions, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(3), pages 211-215, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jocore:v:32:y:1988:i:1:p:87-102. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://pss.la.psu.edu/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.