Both Guns and Butter, or Neither: Class Interests in the Political Economy of Rearmament

Narizny, Kevin

doi:10.1017/s0003055403000625

Cited by 51 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 101 publications

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“…Kirshner's () case study evidence demonstrates that financial communities often oppose the use of force abroad in light of expected market instability during conflict . In many cases, Narizny () finds that political parties and politicians representing wealthy and financial interests sought to avoid costly military rearmament in favor of the more cost‐effective strategies of alliance formation and appeasement. Similarly, Fordham's () evidence demonstrates that Republican United States presidents representing wealthy interests were more likely to invest in strategic weapons rather than the costly alternative of manpower favored by their Democratic counterparts because Republican constituents would likely shoulder the burden of increased spending.…”

Section: The Costs Of Conflictmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Fiscal Autonomy of Deciders: Creditworthiness and Conflict Initiation

DiGiuseppe

2014

Foreign Policy Anal

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Liberal theory claims that the constraint taxpayers impose on military expenditure is an important mechanism through which democracy and international commerce help prevent conflict. However, leaders with affordable access to sovereign credit have often overcome this constraint by raising revenue on credit markets. By minimizing or deferring the economic burden imposed on taxpayers and the macroeconomic stress associated with alternative financing strategies, I argue that these leaders have greater autonomy to pursue an aggressive foreign policy if they so desire. Leaders that lack creditor confidence risk increased political opposition and removal from office if hostilities generate macroeconomic stress or disturb the domestic fiscal balance. They also face a higher likelihood of defeat or retreat, and the subsequent political consequences, if they pursue conflict without sufficient resources. Estimates of a heteroskedastic probit model support this hypothesis and indicate that creditworthy states initiate conflict with a greater mean probability and greater variance than their noncreditworthy counterparts.

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Section: The Costs Of Conflictmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Narizny () and Kirshner () also employ cases where states had little option to borrow due to international or domestic circumstances to demonstrate the salience of the economic costs of security.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Fiscal Autonomy of Deciders: Creditworthiness and Conflict Initiation

DiGiuseppe

2014

Foreign Policy Anal

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“…Palmer (1990) argued that the existence of a negative trade‐off was contingent on alliance politics, and he found that a statistically significant negative relationship existed between military expenditures and social spending only in those nations that were relatively small military contributors to large military alliances. In a historical case study of nine major arms buildups by democratic nations, Narizny (2003) found that in only one of his nine cases (the United States during the buildup from 1979 to 1986) was a massive arms buildup accompanied by cuts in social expenditures. Other studies find no short‐term trade‐off between defense and welfare spending, and instead stress the constraining effects of fiscal policy on defense spending (Domke, Eichenberg, and Kelleher 1983; Su, Kamlet, and Mowery 1993).…”

Section: The Welfare Consequences Of Military Spendingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Buttery Guns and Welfare Hawks: The Politics of Defense Spending in Advanced Industrial Democracies

Whitten

Williams

2010

American Journal of Political Science

114

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In this article, we present a new theory that, given the economic consequences of military spending, some governments may use military spending as a means of advancing their domestic non-military objectives. Based on evidence that governments can use military spending as welfare policy in disguise, we argue that the role of ideology in shaping military spending is more complicated than simple left-right politics. We also present a theory that strategic elites take advantage of opportunities presented by international events, leading us to expect governments that favor more hawkish foreign policy policies to use low-level international conflicts as opportunities for increasing military spending. Using pooled time-series data from 19 advanced democracies in the post-World War II period, we find that government ideology, measured as welfare and international positions, interacts with the international security environment to affect defense spending.

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“…In many democracies, leaders need legislative authorization for war, but legislative approval is less likely to materialize in the face of public opposition (Hildebrandt et al 2013;Lindsay 1994). Moreover, leaders must raise revenues to pay for military operations, but legislative bodies are unlikely to levy new taxes, incur new debt, or cut government programs to finance wars that their constituents oppose (Hartley and Russett 1992;Narizny 2003).…”

Section: Public Opinion and The Democratic Peacementioning

confidence: 99%

Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace

2013

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ew findings in political science have received as much attention as the "democratic peace," the discovery that democracies almost never fight other democracies (Doyle 1986;Russett 1993). To some, the absence of military conflict among democracies is so consistent that it approaches the status of an "empirical law" (Levy 1988).Some authors have attempted to explain the democratic peace by highlighting the role of public opinion. They observe that democratic leaders are beholden to voters and claim that voters oppose war because of its human and financial costs. This argument, which dates to Immanuel Kant, predicts that democracies will behave peacefully in general-avoiding war not only against democracies but also against autocracies. History shows, however, that democracies frequently fight autocracies.A different possibility is that democratic publics are primarily averse to war against other democracies. If leaders are responsive to voters and voters are more reluctant to fight democracies than otherwise equivalent autocracies, then public opinion could play an important role in the dyadic democratic peace. To date, however, surprisingly few studies have investi- gated whether democratic publics are more reluctant to attack democracies than autocracies.1 Moreover, the small body of existing work has not accounted for variables that could confound the relationship between shared democracy and public support for war, nor has it investigated the mechanisms by which the regime type of the adversary affects the public mood. Despite decades of research on the democratic peace, we still lack convincing evidence about whether and how public opinion contributes to the absence of war among democracies.We used experiments to shed new light on these important questions.2 Our experiments, embedded in public opinion polls that were administered to nationally representative samples of British and American citizens, involved a situation in which a country was developing nuclear weapons. When describing the situation, we randomly and independently varied four potential sources of peace: the political regime, alliance status, economic ties, and military power of the adversary. We then asked individuals whether they would support or oppose a preventive military strike against the country's nuclear facilities.Participants in our experiments were substantially less supportive of military strikes against democracies than against otherwise identical autocracies. Moreover, because we randomly and independently manipulated the regime type of the adversary, the observed preference for peace with other democracies was almost certainly causal, rather than spurious. Our findings therefore provide empirical microfoundations for the 1 For exceptions, see Geva, DeRouen, and Mintz (1993); Johns and Davies (2012);Rousseau (2005). See also Lacina and Lee (2012), who examine how regime type affects perceptions of threat, and Geva and Hanson (1999), who focus on sociocultural similarity. 2 For other recent examples of experiments about internatio...

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Both Guns and Butter, or Neither: Class Interests in the Political Economy of Rearmament

Cited by 51 publications

References 101 publications

The Fiscal Autonomy of Deciders: Creditworthiness and Conflict Initiation

The Fiscal Autonomy of Deciders: Creditworthiness and Conflict Initiation

Buttery Guns and Welfare Hawks: The Politics of Defense Spending in Advanced Industrial Democracies

Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace

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