Titolo completo

The Double-Edged Order: How Globalisation Shapes Militarisation across Political Regimes in a Multiplex World

In today’s multiplex international system, as integration deepens through political, economic and social linkages, many scholars expect globalisation to reduce militarisation. From this perspective, globalisation is often assumed to shape defence spending in a broadly similar direction across states. However, if we take regime type seriously, this expectation loses its persuasiveness. Building on this literature, we test whether the effect of globalisation on defence spending is conditioned by regime type across 169 countries from 1992 to 2022, using multiple panel model specifications, including dynamic and year fixed-effects models. The results reveal a clear divergence: democracies treat integration as external assurance and reduce their military burden, hybrid regimes exhibit no distinct response to globalisation, while autocracies perceive greater regime risk in integration and hedge through coercive capacity. As a result, in an increasingly embedded world of cooperative institutions, norms and trade interdependence, democracies tend to carry lower military burdens relative to autocracies. This regime-conditioned relationship holds across alternative measures of globalisation.
Keywords: globalisation, regime, multiplex system, militarisation, military spending, threat