Budgeted Signaling: Rethinking Post-Cold War EU Member States’ Defense Spending and Militarization

What explains European states’ defense spending behavior? This paper seeks to answer this question by first examining the current debates around this topic. While each of these debates has its own merit, it is far from offering comprehensive explanations. Therefore, I developed three hypotheses to evaluate which one holds the most explanatory power. Through testing four different models with controls and country-fixed effects, I find European states want to signal their credibility as security actors through defense spending. This has important implications for what militarization is and how the process of militarization goes beyond security purposes.