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.
The usefulness of the general class of spatial econometric models, which relaxes the assumption that the observations are independent, has only recently been realised. One particularly fruitful application includes models of parties' ideological change as well as the electoral consequences of party competition. In these studies, scholars can explicitly model the spatial interconnectedness of political parties in theoretically pleasing ways, producing inferences that are consistent with formal models of party competition, but are beyond the grasp of traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models. To illustrate these benefits, this article replicates Adams and Somer‐Topcu's 2009 study of parties' responses to ideological shifts by rival parties to show that appropriately modeling patterns of interconnectivity between parties via weights matrices provides more realistic inferences that are more consistent with formal models of party competition.
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