ABSTRACT
Amartya Sen’s democracy theory is far and away the most dominant famine theory at the political level, but it is not the only one that attempts a causal explanation of famine at the political level. I will discuss three other theories of famine causation in the following chapter, all of which use Sen’s democracy theory as their point of departure, but which subsequently divert to what they perceive to be more important factors in explaining famine. De Waal finds the relationship between anti-famine contracts and famine to be the determining relationship; Banik argues that freedom ought to replace democracy as the explanatory variable; and Neumayer and Plümper hypothesize that the size of the electorate is what matters. I will address each of these theories in turn. However, they all generally suffer from the same shortcoming: they are causal theories hypothesizing that one factor is responsible for a certain famine outcome.
