How do government spending and leader survival affect one another when leaders are motivated by survival and policy concerns? A formal model developed to address this question indicates variation across regime type in winning coalitions' spending preferences and the cost of leader replacement results in democrats and dictators best securing their survival with different spending distributions and varying in their responsiveness to their constituents' preferences. Consistent with the formal model's implications, I find that, on average, the spending distribution that maximizes a dictator's chances of survival includes more military spending than the distribution that best secures a democrat's tenure, dictators allocate more of their resources to military spending than democrats, and greater variance in spending patterns exists in dictatorships than in democracies. These results contribute to our understanding of how institutions and actors' preferences interact to shape policy outcomes and have implications for a wide range of political behaviors.