Ideology and Defense: An analysis of budgets and troop deployments in 37 European countries from 1961-2024.

Description

The role of partisanship and ideology in foreign and defense policies is receiving increasing scholarly attention, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and renewed military investment in Europe. It is, hereby, often assumed that right-wing parties are more in favor of a strong military and inclined to engage in military actions abroad more easily than left-wing governments. However, this assumption is largely based on anecdotal evidence and has seldom been examined systematically across a wide range of countries and over longer periods of time. Introducing a new dataset of defense spending and troop deployments for 37 OECD and/or EU countries from 1961-2024, we examine whether the ideology of governments influence their defense policies, and how. Time-series regression analyses suggest that there is no relationship between cabinet ideology and troop deployment, however, they indicate a limited, specification-dependent relationship between ideology and military spending.

Period	2 Jul 2026
Event title	13th European Workshops in International Studies
Event type	Conference
Conference number	13
Location	Izmir, TurkeyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International