WOMEN were less likely than men to support the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, or the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. They commit far fewer murders. They are less likely to favour drone strikes. For scholars such as Steven Pinker, a psychologist, and Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, these are grounds for thinking that a world run by women would be more peaceful.
But European history suggests otherwise, according to a working paper by political scientists Oeindrila Dube, of the University of Chicago, and S. P. Harish, of McGill University. They studied how often European rulers went to war between 1480 and 1913. Over 193 reigns, they found that states ruled by queens were 27% more likely to wage war than those ruled by kings.
This was not all the queens’ fault: men, seeing them as soft targets, tended to attack them. After Mary Tudor became queen of England in 1553, the Protestant reformer John Knox...Continue reading
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