The demand for military expenditure in authoritarian regimes

Abstract

This paper examines whether there are systematic differences in military spending between different types of autocratic regimes. We view military expenditure as an instrument a dictator can exploit in order to stay in power. How he utilises this instrument depends on the institutional set up of his regime. We distinguish between military regimes, single party states and personalist regimes and predict that military regimes should have the highest, whereas personalist dictatorships should have the lowest level of military spending. Using panel data on 64 dictatorships from 1960 to 2000, we find empirical evidence that our hypotheses are not rejected.

Military expenditures and political regimes: Evidence from global data, 1963–2000

“…The authors also write that democracy also enhances the state's ability to raise public finance in the case of war. Bove and Brauner (2011) reference Nordlinger (1977) and other political scientists (such as Sprout and Sprout (1968)), who make the case that democratic rulers who wish to be re-elected have an incentive to increase social spending and reduce military budgets to please the populace.…”

“…Russett and Oneal (2001) find that the transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes in Latin America results in reduced military spending. Bove and Brauner (2011) examines differences in autocratic regimes, categorizing the regimes as Personalist, Single party, Monarchy and Military authoritarian regimes, and finds that military regimes have the highest levels of military spending. Albalate, Bel and Elias (2012) separate democracies themselves into two types, presidential and parliamentary democracies, and find that military spending in the former is higher than in the latter.…”

Military in politics and budgetary allocations

“…Bove & Brauner (2011) and Kim et al (2013) find that military regimes spend more on the military than other authoritarian…”

Institutional determinants of military spending

“…However, when they interact democracy and income, they find that democracy together with low income might actually increase violence. In an interesting and very recent work, Bove and Brauner (2011) The democracy and autocracy scores of Polity IV (Jaggers & Gurr, 1995) The model we estimate by a pooled OLS is based on the standard models of the determinants of military defense, which include threat, emulation and socioeconomic variables, as well as the variable "democracy" (as in Dunne & Perlo-Freeman (2003a, 2003b, 2008, and Collier & Hoeffler (2007 …”