scholarly journals The Comparative Legitimacy of Arms Exports - A Conjoint Experiment in Germany and France

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lukas Rudolph ◽  
Markus Freitag ◽  
Paul Thurner
Keyword(s):  
Security Policy ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Systematic Research ◽  
Public Preferences ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Arms Trade ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Arms Exports ◽  
Trade Preferences

Despite fierce politicization and heated public debates in arms-exporting democracies, systematic research on mass public preferences on arms trade is lacking. Combining political economy models of arms trade with the literatures on trade preferences and foreign policy attitudes, we argue that citizens trade off economic incentives, strategic interests and moral considerations when assessing arms trade and that deeply rooted `strategic cultures’ lead to differences in citizen preferences between countries. To derive the implicit weighting of different features of arms trade, we draw on population-representative conjoint survey experiments (N=6,617), fielded in November/December 2020 in two of the global top-5 exporting countries of major arms: Germany and France. We find that both country populations show structured preferences towards arms exports which predominantly center around their moral repercussions. However, German respondents place more weight on moral consequences and, compared to French respondents, a larger share is in fundamental opposition. We conclude that these diverging preferences potentially conflict with plans of a common European defense and security policy.

scholarly journals Swiss Defence Industry in the Global Arms Trade – Successes and Challenges

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donatas Palavenis
Keyword(s):  
Security Policy ◽  
Small States ◽  
Sharp Rise ◽  
Arms Transfers ◽  
Defence Industry ◽  
Peace Research ◽  
Arms Trade ◽  
Arms Exports ◽  
Military Expenditures ◽  
Successes And Challenges

When we talk about the Defence Industry (DI), arms transfers, and military expenditures we mostly refer to data accumulated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). In the SIPRI Top 20 list of largest exporters of major arms for 2019, small states hold consecutive positions: Israel takes 8th place, Switzerland is 13th, and Sweden, Norway, and Belarus place 15th, 17th, and 20th respectively. The author analyses the Swiss DI case due to several reasons; its place in SIPRI Top, its sharp rise of Swiss arms exports in the recent year, its Swiss neutrality strategy, the country’s multilingual society, and its all-government approach to the arms industry, though still contributing to the limited scholarly studies on contemporary Swiss DI. This paper aims to explore Swiss DI and its strategies, to identify the country’s defence and security policy influence towards DI, and to discuss the Swiss DI stance and future perspectives in the context of the global arms trade. At the same time, this paper also highlights Swiss DI successes and failures that could be of significant use to other small states aiming to develop or enhance their relevant DIs.

2 Change and stability of U.S. and German foreign and security policy attitudes

2016 ◽  
pp. 42-123
Author(s):  
Fabian Endres ◽  
Sebastian Jungkunz ◽  
Matthias Mader ◽  
Jana Pötzschke ◽  
Hans Rattinger ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Security Policy ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Foreign And Security Policy

Party Animals: Asymmetric Ideological Constraint among Democratic and Republican Party Activists

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 889-904 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert N. Lupton ◽  
William M. Myers ◽  
Judd R. Thornton
Keyword(s):  
Coalition Formation ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Opinion Leadership ◽  
Value Conflict ◽  
Major Party ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Party Activists

Existing literature shows that Republicans in the mass public demonstrate greater ideological inconsistency and value conflict than Democrats. That is, despite a commitment to the conservative label and abstract belief in limited government, Republican identifiers’ substantive policy attitudes are nonetheless divided. Conversely, Democrats, despite registering lower levels of ideological thinking, maintain relatively consistent liberal issue attitudes. Based on theories of coalition formation and elite opinion leadership, we argue that these differences should extend to Democratic and Republican Party activists. Examining surveys of convention delegates from the years 2000 and 2004, we show that Democratic activists’ attitudes are more ideologically constrained than are those of Republican activists. The results support our hypothesis and highlight that some of the inconsistent attitudes evident among mass public party identifiers can be traced to the internal divisions of the major party coalitions themselves.

Arms Export Controls under Siege of Globalisation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John N. T. Helferich
Keyword(s):  
Security Policy ◽  
International Security ◽  
National Level ◽  
Export Control ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Export Controls ◽  
Arms Exports ◽  
Arms Export ◽  
German Security Policy ◽  
Control Regime

While defence industrial production is increasingly transnationalised, the control of arms exports still takes place almost exclusively on a national level. With the example of the German export control regime, this work analyses if the current situation yields arms export control risks that could undermine German security policy principles. Furhermore, inferences about IR theory are drawn based on the current regulation and its implementation. Looking at three particular case studies, this work finds that transnational production and trade indeed creates a number of arms diversion risks, however, these risks are predominantly a result of political choice rather than a phenomenon of hyper-globalisation. This work contributes to key discourses in International Security.

Public Opinion and the New Social History: Some Lessons for the Study of Public Opinion and Democratic Policy-making

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence R. Jacobs ◽  
Robert Y. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social History ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Public Preferences ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
The Relationship

The study of mass public opinion has been an important area of social science research, and it has been of particular concern for political scientists, because the relationship between public opinion and government policy is central to theories about democracy and political power (e.g., see Dahl, 1956; Downs, 1957; Devine, 1970; Weissberg, 1976). Our main argument in this essay is that political scientists and others should be open to a variety of approaches in studying trends in public opinion and the relationship between public preferences and government policies, and that they should begin to pay attention to the findings and methods of recent historiography and, especially, the “new social history.”

scholarly journals Filling arms production data gaps: South America as a case in point

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Lopes da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Total Output ◽  
South American ◽  
International Peace ◽  
Government Purchases ◽  
Peace Research ◽  
Arms Trade ◽  
Data Gaps ◽  
Arms Exports ◽  
Collection Methods

In this article I argue that the data collection methods and procedures behind the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) global arms trade database can also be used to approximate domestic purchases of local production of major conventional arms. The total output of domestic arms industries would then be the sum of what is domestically retained (procured) plus arms exports, if any. The feasibility of this idea is tested by presenting new data on domestic arms production for five South American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela) between 1960 and 2015. The results show the critical role government purchases play in maintaining domestic arms industries.

scholarly journals Pandemics meet democracy. Experimental evidence from the COVID-19 crisis in Spain

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Amat ◽  
Andreu Arenas ◽  
Albert Falcó-Gimeno ◽  
Jordi Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Public Preferences ◽  
International Response ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Authoritarian Government ◽  
Global Coordination

The COVID-19 outbreak poses an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies. Despite the global scale of the problem, the response has been mainly national, and global coordination has been so far extremely weak. All over the world governments are making use of exceptional powers to enforce lockdowns, often sacrificing civil liberties and profoundly altering the pre-existing power balance, which nurtures fears of an authoritarian turn. Relief packages to mitigate the economic consequences of the lockdowns are being discussed, and there is little doubt that the forthcoming recession will have important distributive consequences. In this paper we study citizens' responses to these democratic dilemmas. We present results from a set of survey experiments run in Spain from March 20 to March 28, together with longitudinal evidence from a panel survey fielded right before and after the virus outbreak. Our findings reveal a strong preference for a national as opposed to a European/international response. The national bias is much stronger for the COVID-19 crisis than for other global problems, such as climate change or international terrorism. We also find widespread demand for strong leadership, willingness to give up individual freedom, and a sharp increase in support for technocratic governance. As such, we document the initial switch in mass public preferences towards technocratic and authoritarian government caused by the pandemic. We discuss to what extent this crisis may contribute to a shift towards a new, self-enforcing political equilibrium.

17. Economic Security

2018 ◽  
pp. 253-267
Author(s):  
Gary M. Shiffman
Keyword(s):  
Security Policy ◽  
Resource Constraints ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Institutional Constraints ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Organized Violence ◽  
Economic Tools

This chapter examines the concept of economic security as a framework for analysing and countering organized violence. It first provides a brief historical overview of the economic science of security and applies economic theory to Security Studies. Through various case studies, this approach allows the reader to understand how states leverage traditional economic tools to influence, alter, and deter another actor’s behaviour. The chapter considers three categories of organized violence: warfare, crime, and insurgency. It shows that the various decision makers involved in combating organized violence have different goals and face different constraints. It also describes five vectors of economic incentives: goals, resource constraints, institutional constraints, information, and time. Finally, it discusses four economic tools of security policy: sanctions, trade, finance, and aid.

Public Opinion and Foreign Policy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua D. Kertzer
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Public Preferences ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
And Gender

How does the public think about foreign affairs, and how do these public preferences shape foreign policymaking? Over the past several decades, scholarship on public opinion and foreign policy has proliferated, partially due to a growing interest in the “first image” and the ways in which individuals matter in international relations, partially due to an experimental revolution that gave political scientists new methods they could use to study public opinion, and partially due to a range of searing debates—on topics ranging from the Iraq War to globalization—whose fault lines political scientists attempted to map. Scholarship in this area is thus so vast that it is impossible to comprehensively capture in an annotated bibliography of this length. Instead, the discussion that follows focuses on a curated sampling of the field, focusing, in particular, on six sets of substantive questions, drawing on a mix of classic and contemporary scholarship. It begins by reviewing what we know about how foreign policy attitudes are structured, before focusing on public opinion about two different areas of foreign policy: the use of force, and foreign economic issues like trade and investment. It then turns to the effects of sex and gender, along with the role of cue givers in shaping foreign policy preferences—whether partisan elites, international organizations, or social peers. It concludes by reviewing the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy, whether in democracies (as in theories of democratic constraint and accountability), transnational public opinion (as in theories of soft power and anti-Americanism), or in nondemocratic regimes, a relatively new area of research.

China's Arms Merchants: Profits in Command

1992 ◽  
Vol 132 ◽  
pp. 1101-1118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Hyer
Keyword(s):  
Early Period ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Arms Transfers ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Low Profile ◽  
Arms Trade ◽  
Arms Exports ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Oil Tankers

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, Beijing has engaged in foreign arms transfers. Transfers during the early period went almost unnoticed because they were on a very small scale, were almost invariably gratis, and had little or no impact on the world's arms trade. This low profile changed during the 1980s as China became one of the world's major arms dealers. Beijing estimates that income from arms exports is about US$1.34 billion annually, but other sources estimate that it is over US$2 billion. This dramatic increase attracted attention in October 1987 when Chinese Silkworm missiles fired from Iran badly damaged oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, including American-reflagged Kuwaiti tankers. Only then did the international community recognize that China had become a major arms supplier to the Third World.

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