Democracy and Militarization in Developing Countries: A Panel Vector Autoregressive Analysis

This study examines the dynamic relationship between democracy and the military in more than 40 developing countries from 1990 to 2017. We investigate the dynamic interaction between democracy and military institutions using a panel vector autoregressive model and impulse response functions as well as variance decomposition analyses. We show that democracy plays a significant role in the substitution of nonmilitary expenditures for defense expenditures. We also investigate the response of democracy to positive shocks in military and nonmilitary expenditures. We find that the responses of political systems and different indexes of democracy including electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian democracy to positive shocks in military expenditures are negative and significant, whereas their responses to the shocks in nonmilitary expenditures are not significant. This result suggests that the political behavior of governments in developing countries is influenced more heavily by their spending on the military sector than by their spending on the nonmilitary sector.