Has democracy produced a shift in Latin American budget priorities from military to civilian spending? Do discerned shifts from military to civilian spending within democracies represent “hard choices,” that is, are they shifts of the “zero-sum” variety in which resources from one budget are effectively given to another? A budgetary model is developed to explain the change in nonmilitary relative to military spending. Cross-sectional time series data for a large number of Latin American countries in the period from 1974 to 1995 are used to test the model. Results show that level of democracy has a significant positive effect on the size of nonmilitary relative to military budgets, that Latin American democratization is producing significant budgetary changes, and that democratic countries rely on zero-sum trade-offs that defy prediction.
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