Replication Data for: Cultural Distance and Interstate Conflicts

The literature on the impact of culture on the conduct of international affairs, in particular on conflict proneness, is growing fast. Yet, the question of whether markers of identity influence disputes between states is still subject to disputes, and the empirical evidence on Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis is ambiguous. One issue is the dichotomous nature of the culture variables used, which reduces the dimensionality of the problem significantly. A second issue is considering countries’ individual identities as immutable objects, when the religious and ethnic makeup of modern societies have dramatically changed in the last few decades. We use an array of measures of cultural distance between states, including time-varying and continuous variables, and run a battery of alternative empirical models. Regardless of how we operationalize cultural distance and the empirical specification used, our models consistently show that conflict is more likely between culturally distant countries.