Political survival, policy distribution, and alliance formation

Anessa L. Kimball
Additional contact information
Anessa L. Kimball: Département de science politique, Université Laval, anessa.kimball@pol.ulaval.ca

Journal of Peace Research, 2010, vol. 47, issue 4, 407-419

Abstract: Existing work cannot explain why countries form alliances when direct security threats are not a key political issue, though we know countries routinely do engage in that behavior. Countries form alliances to manage the essential problem that they must use finite budget resources to provide social policy and national security; the ‘guns versus butter’ dilemma. States ally to ‘contract out’ national security via the formation of alliance contracts so they can allocate more resources to domestic concerns. Alliances increase the efficiency of security policy by providing the same level of security with fewer resources, thus freeing those resources for use in other domains. Not only should alliances form when security threats do not dominate the political agenda, but also domestic political and economic demands will influence alliance decisions. In positing a domestic politics-based explanation for alliance formation, this article argues that increased demands for social policy goods increase the chances of alliance formation as leaders seek greater policy allocation efficiency. The use of a production possibilities frontier illustrates the central argument. Those claims are examined on a sample of all country-years from 1816—2000 using a probit model. Empirical results suggest changes in the demand for social policy goods, operationalized as changes in the infant mortality rate, are an important cause of alliance behavior.

Keywords: alliances; guns vs butter; political survival (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/47/4/407.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:joupea:v:47:y:2010:i:4:p:407-419

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().