Cross-Country Differences in Citizens‘ Reactions to Arms Transfers. How united is NATO?

Weapons transfers to foreign countries became politicized in Western democracies in recent years, whereby security-related, economic, and normative aspects are discussed. We propose that how these different (perhaps conflicting) aspects are weighted is indicative of a more general strategic culture of countries. We investigate how the public views these dimensions and how homogeneous the underlying preference structure in NATO’s top arms-exporting democracies (the US, UK, France, Germany, and Italy) is. Using a multidimensional measurement strategy via a conjoint experiment (N ∼ 10, 000), we show that normative aspects predominate for all populations when forming preferences on export policies. However, we observe that Germany and Italy are essentially divided from the other three countries, regarding whether security aspects are considered in preference formation. Building on recent (machine learning) methods, we propose that this difference is primarily attributed to the country of the respondents, indicating different strategic subcultures with implications for countries’ foreign policy behavior.