Bomb or build? How party ideologies affect the balance of foreign aid and defence spending
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148119883651 |
| Author | Georg Wenzelburger,Florian Böller |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148119883651
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2020, Vol. 22(1) 3 –23
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148119883651
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Bomb or build? How
party ideologies affect
the balance of foreign aid
and defence spending
Georg Wenzelburger and Florian Böller
Abstract
This article contributes to a growing literature that questions the traditional ‘politics stops at
the water’s edge’ paradigm. Left- and right-wing parties hold diverging ideologies and articulate
specific party programmes regarding policy priorities in the realm of foreign and security affairs.
The impact of partisan contestations over foreign policy priorities can be traced in defence and
foreign aid spending. We understand this ‘bomb-or-build’-balance as two sides of a coin which
shapes the international posture of democracies. Our quantitative analysis of 21 OECD countries
(1988–2014) reveals that the ideological positions of the parties in government influence the
relative importance of military expenditures versus foreign aid. The more the ideological position
of a government is tilted towards the military (and against internationalism), the more the ‘bomb-
or-build’-balance shifts in favour of military spending (and in disfavour of foreign aid).
Keywords
defence spending, foreign aid, foreign policy, party ideology
Introduction
Why do some democracies favour ‘hard power’ instruments and invest in their military
while others position themselves as ‘civilian powers’ and put emphasis on international
development assistance? We argue that in order to explain the puzzling variance in spend-
ing on defence and foreign aid – what we term as the ‘bomb-or-build’-balance (BBB) – it
is necessary to consider the underlying domestic politics. In particular, we hold that the
ideological positions of the parties in government influence the relative importance of
military versus foreign aid expenditures. The more the ideological position of a govern-
ment is tilted towards the military (and against internationalism), the more the BBB shifts
in favour of military spending (and thus in disfavour of foreign aid). While our argument
Department of Political Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany
Corresponding author:
Florian Böller, Department of Political Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Erwin-Schroedinger-Straße,
67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany.
Email: boeller@sowi.uni-kl.de
883651BPI0010.1177/1369148119883651The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsWenzelburger and Böller
research-article2019
Original Article
4 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(1)
is linked to the idea that foreign aid and military spending are two ways to shape foreign
policies, we do not argue that they are mere substitutes (see Most and Starr, 1984). Instead,
a government may also increase or decrease both components to varying extents, which
nonetheless changes the spending profile overall. In our conceptualisation, the strength of
foreign aid compared to military spending symbolises the relative importance of one
component over the other and therefore indicates the ideological profile of foreign policy
of a certain government, or, in our words, its BBB.
The allocation of government spending on military and foreign aid, the two most impor-
tant budgetary items of foreign policy, is a salient topic within domestic debates and is
informed by the ideology of actors and parties. In Finland, for example, the centre-right
Sipilä government attenuated the country’s long-standing ‘civilian power’ emphasis by
implementing significant cuts to foreign aid while increasing the defence budget (see
Guardian, 2015; Sipilä, 2017). In Germany, the BBB also became a salient issue during the
last federal election campaign in 2017 (see Monath, 2017). Left-wing parties criticised
Germany’s growing military budget and advocated instead to bolster foreign aid and other
civilian foreign policy instruments, while the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD) party favoured the reverse policy mix (see AfD, 2017; Delcker, 2017). The debate
on foreign policy spending priorities also extends to the level of transatlantic relations.
Here, US President Trump repeatedly lambasted European allies, and in particular
Germany, for not meeting NATO’s (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) spending goal.1
Germany’s secretary of defence, Ursula von der Leyen (2018), countered Trump’s attacks
by highlighting Germany’s investments in development assistance and suggested to
include foreign aid in NATO’s burden sharing considerations, as both were ‘two sides of
the same medal’ (see Pointer, 2018).
In this article, we are going beyond anecdotal evidence of partisan contestation on
foreign and security policy and present a systematic analysis of the BBB. We provide
theoretical and empirical arguments that the foreign policy priorities of democracies as
reflected in the relative importance of spending on military versus foreign aid are influ-
enced by the ideologies of the parties in government. At the same time, we also consider
the impact of international factors, in particular, the involvement of a country in military
conflicts, and domestic institutional constraints.
Our article contributes to a growing literature that questions the old paradigm accord-
ing to which ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’. While there is a rich tradition within the
Foreign Policy Analysis literature, which focuses on the domestic sources of international
affairs, for example, regarding parliamentary control, political contestation among soci-
etal actors and public opinion (see Coticchia and De Simone, 2016; Kaarbo, 2015; Mello
and Peters, 2018), scholars only recently started to investigate the role of political parties
on foreign policy decision-making more systematically and in comparative perspective
(see, for example, Verbeek and Zaslove, 2015; Wagner et al., 2017).
Our contribution to this strand of the literature is theoretical and empirical in nature.
On the theoretical side, the argument is that both spending on military and development
assistance can be perceived as two sides of a coin with parties on the left and right advo-
cating diverging ideas regarding the adequate BBB. On the empirical level, we provide a
quantitative account of the partisan impact on foreign and security policy of 21 OECD
(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries (1988–2014) that
corroborates our theoretical expectations.
In the next section, we review the literature on parties in foreign policy. The third sec-
tion develops a theoretical argument as to why foreign aid and military expenditures are
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