Power Transitions as a Cause of War

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.