Defense allocations in Eastern Europe: Alliance politics and leadership change

Abstract

To investigate the influence of international and domestic factors on the defense spending of the East European members of the Warsaw Pact, we evaluate competing hypotheses of 1) intra‐alliance dynamics and 2) the effect of changes in political leadership. We analyze data from 1965–1982, both pooled and for each state individually. We conclude that the defense spending of the Pact members does not go primarily toward the purchase of Pact‐wide deterrence and that models based upon the public‐goods approach have little explanatory power when applied to Eastern Europe. Additionally, we find that East European leadership changes produce only a small impact on military spending levels.