In theory, states can gain security by acquiring internal arms or external allies. Yet the empirical literature offers mixed findings: some studies find arms and allies to be substitutes, while others find them to be complements. This article contends that these conflicting findings are due to scholars failing to consider how regime type influences the choice between arms and allies. Since democracies are highly credible allies, states that form alliances with democracies can confidently reduce their internal arms. This is not the case when states form alliances with non-democracies. This study evaluates the argument using data on military expenditures and defense pacts from 1950 to 2001. Taking steps to account for the potentially endogenous relationship between arms and allies, it finds that democratic alliances are associated with lower levels of military spending.

In this article, we contend that the "democratic advantage" literature (i) exaggerates the potential political backlash from credit downgrades in democracies; and (ii) overlooks the importance of sovereign credit to nondemocratic leaders. We argue that nondemocratic regimes receive a higher marginal political benefit from credit compared to democratic regimes. Consequently, changes in credit prices or credit access affect nondemocratic leaders' tenure more than democratic leaders' tenure. To test this argument, we provide the first statistical examination of the electoral punishment mechanism of the "democratic advantage." Our duration analysis shows that credit downgrades increase nondemocratic leaders' vulnerability more than that of their democratic peers. Our research reinforces the growing concerns about the conventional views about regime type, domestic constraints, and leaders' preferences toward sovereign credit and other political processes.

International relations scholars have previously argued that states facing budget constraints will join alliances to free resources for domestic spending. In this paper, we focus on the primary mechanism by which leaders have relaxed this constraint: sovereign borrowing. Sovereign debt enables states to maintain stable tax rates while increasing expenditures to confront budgetary emergencies. Affordable access to credit, then, serves as both a source of power and an important buffer between security and the political consequences of fiscal policy. States that lack the confidence of investors must make tough choices between continued security and their electoral fortunes. We suggest that as governments lack access to affordable credit, they will substitute military capacity with alliance formation. Alliances provide a means for leaders to offset the loss of flexibility from diminished access to credit without disturbing the domestic political economy. Using previous models of alliance formation as a guide, our empirical evidence indicates that states that have a hard time borrowing are more likely to form an alliance than those states with affordable access to credit markets.

Empirical research on the determinants of individual-level support for trade liberalization has focused almost entirely on the economic effects of trade. Yet, international relations scholarship has long recognized that commerce also has a variety of security implications. This paper explores if and when security considerations influence individual attitudes toward trade. In this study, we ask two questions: First, to what extent do expectations about the security implications of trade affect individual-level attitudes toward trade agreements? Second, does the introduction of security concerns into the discussion of trade agreements influence how heavily individuals weigh their economic costs and benefits? We employ an original experiment embedded in a conjoint survey to investigate the relative impact of a variety of economic and security considerations on respondents' support for trade. Our findings suggest that security information matters and undermines the appeal of some, though not all, economic arguments for trade liberalization among our respondents.

This study explores the conditional influence of sovereign credit on leader survival. We specifically focus on credit's heterogeneous effect on leadership survival across regimes. We argue that non‐democratic leaders are more sensitive to credit access and cost than democratic leadership. We use event history analysis to test the conditional relationship between sovereign credit and leader tenure from 1981 to 2004. Examining both domestic and global determinants of credit access and costs, our findings are consistent with the assertion that non‐democratic leadership survival is linked to credit even when addressing issues of endogeneity.