RULER AUTONOMY AND WAR IN EARLY-MODERN WESTERN-EUROPE

Following Kant, many scholars have argued that rulers often benefit mo re from war than do their subjects, and thus that rulers with more aut onomy from subjects will initiate more wars. They usually test this ar gument by focusing on whether democratic states are less prone to init iate wars than autocracies, and generally find little or no relationsh ip, These are not adequate tests of the general argument, since they t urn both ruler autonomy and the interests of actors into rough dichoto mies (democracy vs. autocracy, rulers' interests vs, interests of all subjects), and they ignore opportunity costs. This article uses a mode l of state policy formation based on agency theory to provide a better measure of ruler autonomy by differentiating between institutional au tonomy and resource autonomy, We also use a more nuanced specification of the interests of different groups of subjects, taking their opport unity costs into account. This model allows us to derive more precise propositions about the relationship between ruler autonomy and war ini tiation. An analysis of war in four Western European states (England, France, Sweden, and Spain) between 1400 and 1700, using legit regressi on and qualitative comparative analysis, provides some support for the central propositions of the theory.