“Guns vs Butter” or “Guns Yield Butter”: Government Ideology and Military Spending

Military spending is a very significant and highly scrutinized aspect of government policy, because it epitomizes the complex interaction of issues regarding national defense, economic interests, and political ideology. Decisions to allocate resources in favor of defense over competing needs in other sectors such as social welfare, education, or infrastructure are not made based on perceived threats but are so significantly conditioned by the ideology of the ruling party. This article provides a summarized analysis of the impact of government ideology on military spending by referring to various academic research with a great variety of empirical data.

Ideological Influence on Military Spending

A government’s ideology does certainly matter to what extent resource allocation is affected by military spending, but the size or shape of this influence does largely depend on the general and wider economic and geopolitical environment.

Left-Wing Governments: Social Welfare Over Defense

Governmental policies of left leaning persuasion necessarily emphasize social security, job security and even economic equality, rather than military expenditure. Such disposition is most always indicative of, or inclined towards, “butter” as opposed to “guns,” a perspective taken up by Whitten and Williams (2010) in their study. The researchers pointed to the fact that parties of the left will view military expenditures more from their potential benefits, for example, in terms of employment generation. For such governments, military expenditure may work as a kick-starter for the economy if it ever fell into depression.

But left-wing governments are bound to highlight social welfare spending, a consideration which leads to the decline in military spending. This becomes all the more important in election years. This fact has been pointed out by the study of Bove, Efthyvoulou, and Navas (2012) when accounting for the political cycles impact on public spending. Thus, leftist governments “tend to cut military spending and increase social spending in election years, hostage to their ideological orientation to increase social spending”.