Political survival, policy distribution, and alliance formation

Abstract

Existing work cannot explain why countries form alliances when direct security threats are not a key political issue, though we know countries routinely do engage in that behavior. Countries form alliances to manage the essential problem that they must use finite budget resources to provide social policy and national security; the 'guns versus butter' dilemma. States ally to 'contract out' national security via the formation of alliance contracts so they can allocate more resources to domestic concerns. Alliances increase the efficiency of security policy by providing the same level of security with fewer resources, thus freeing those resources for use in other domains. Not only should alliances form when security threats do not dominate the political agenda, but also domestic political and economic demands will influence alliance decisions. In positing a domestic politics-based explanation for alliance formation, this article argues that increased demands for social policy goods increase the chances of alliance formation as leaders seek greater policy allocation efficiency. The use of a production possibilities frontier illustrates the central argument. Those claims are examined on a sample of all country-years from 1816-2000 using a probit model. Empirical results suggest changes in the demand for social policy goods, operationalized as changes in the infant mortality rate, are an important cause of alliance behavior.

Tightening the Belt: Sovereign Debt and Alliance Formation*

“…Kimball (2010) goes further with Powell's (1999) and Morgan and Palmer's (2003) theories of alliance formation by incorporating the social spending aspects of previous models with the political survival literature (Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow 2003). Kimball moves beyond ‘‘resource allocations valued because they satisfy internal wants’’ (Powell 1993: 116) and a state's decision to balance maintenance and change‐based foreign policy goals (Morgan and Palmer 2003, 2006) to balancing a leader's prospects for survival based on those domestic wants.…”

“…Kimball's (2010) article on alliance formation argues that an increase in the demand for social goods can push a state's expected expenditures beyond what it can normally provide with its limited budget—presumably, the state has already found some optimal allocation between the types of spending it can pursue. As such, the state needs to either make trade‐offs with military spending to maintain political office (decreasing its external security and future welfare consumption), raise revenue (taxation, borrowing, etc.…”

Regions of Hierarchy and Security: US Troop Deployments, Spatial Relations, and Defense Burdens

“…To account for the trade-off between defense spending and domestic demands for spending on other social issues, we include the Infant Mortality Rate in a country. Previous studies suggest that the infant mortality rate acts as an exogenous pressure for social spending and allows us to control for a negative pressure on defense burdens (Abouharb and Kimball 2007;Allen and Digiuseppe 2013;Kimball 2010).…”

Do Democracies Engage Less in Coup-Proofing? On the Relationship between Regime Type and Civil-Military Relations1

“…Accordingly, we first conceptualize a state's international security environment and distinguish between direct and indirect security threats. Direct security threats are measured by a state's number of strategic rivals (Thompson 2001) while we capture the degree of indirect threats by the number of ongoing militarized interstate disputes in a state's politically relevant international environment without involving the specific state itself (Kimball 2010). 17 Second, we operationalize internal threats by covariates, which influence the probability that domestic insurgents will challenge the current regime in power.…”