The Party Politics of Defense Spending in Western Europe

Analyses of the politics of defense spending have often assumed a guns–butter tradeoff that maps onto the standard left–right political spectrum, with dovish leftists favoring less military spending and hawkish rightists supporting more. But in Europe, plotting parties’ positions on military spending against their left–right position reveals almost nothing. To address this puzzle, I advance three arguments—first, that nationalism should be understood as a separate axis influencing defense spending preferences; second, that party positioning is conditioned by GDP; and third, that the USSR’s role as an external ideological pole played a key role in structuring left party positions on military spending. I use Manifesto Project data to test these hypotheses and find support for the third. In doing so, I shed light on the sources of party positioning in an under-analyzed issue space, and I offer evidence for the international order’s role in constituting the domestic one.