The Post-Coup Military Spending Question: A Pooled Cross-Sectional Time Series Analysis

Despite or because of a decade of research that yielded conflicting results, the question of whether or not military coups or regimes brought into power through coups have an impact on subsequent military spending remains open. A review of the relevant literature suggests that part of the analytical problem may result from assumptions about military political behavior as well as various limitations associated with cross-national analyses of change, and the use of exclusively cross-sectional or longitudinal research designs. In addition, some of the disparity in research findings may result from the reliance on different indicators—both dependent and independent—by a number of different analysts. In response to these potential technical problems, this analysis of military spending patterns in 66 less-developed states applies a GLS routine, pooling cross-sectional and time-series data, to the 1967–1976 relationships between two measures of military spending and several predictor variables, including regime type, coup occurrences, level of conflict, economic development, arms imports, and previous military spending. Although the empirical outcome varies according to which dependent variable is examined, we find, in general, that information on the distribution and timing of regime types—military, civilian, and mixed—and successful military coups is not very helpful in predicting post-coup military spending policies. This finding suggests, in turn, that the crucial presumption that military personnel participate in politics primarily to defend or advance their corporate interests is not a very useful predictive foundation for the examination of post-coup military spending.