Kantian Liberalism, Regime Type, and Military Resource Allocation: Do Democracies Spend Less?

In this paper, we evaluate the liberal claim that democratic states devote fewer resources to their militaries. Low military spending is thought to avert conflict spirals and release more resources to fund domestic programs. While prominent in many liberal international relations theories, most notably in Immanuel Kant’s, this proposition has received little empirical scrutiny. Using several indicators of military resource allocation and data on a wide range of states since 1816, we find empirical support for the liberal argument, although regime type is not necessarily the strongest influence on military resource allocation.