Abstract
The allocation of resources and the sharing of defense burdens among members of the transatlantic security community is central to the defense of the liberal international order. It is also a fundamental component of that order in itself. While economists have shed light on variation in burden-sharing behavior among states and measured as top-line defense spending, only qualitative work in the security studies field has addressed the nature of contributions to shared priorities. Neither field has explicitly addressed spending on modernizing defense capabilities, which is of primary interest to policy-makers aiming to mitigate burden-shifting tendencies in alliances. I find the larger the weight of arms production is in its national economy, the more a state spends on shared transatlantic priorities. This finding suggests that the strategic effects of defense industrial policy, and particularly the distribution of defense industries across Europe, extend beyond the production of defense articles and into the politics of burden sharing. The finding is robust to multiple statistical modeling choices. It also finds support from primary source archival evidence and participant interviews.
Panel: Arms Procurement and Transfers
Cite this presentation
@inproceedings{eiss-2021-arms-without-influence-defense-industrial-policy-and-burden-sharing-in-the-trans,
author = {Jordan Becker},
title = {Arms Without Influence? Defense Industrial Policy and Burden-Sharing in the Transatlantic Community},
booktitle = {European Security Studies Conference 2021},
year = {2021},
url = {https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2021-arms-without-influence-defense-industrial-policy-and-burden-sharing-in-the-trans.html}
}