Abstract
Scholars have devoted considerable effort to exploring the possible connection between regime type and patterns of military spending in Latin America. This research has failed to demonstrate a significant relationship between them, in part because identifying regimes by whether they are civilian or military is not a useful way to measure military influence over decisions about budgetary allocations. This article rejects the use of regime type as an independent variable. Instead, a general definition of regime is proposed, and a number of Latin American regimes are categorized in terms of dominant patterns of civil-military relations. Statistical analysis of military budget shares between 1967 and 1980 for 26 regimes suggests that regimes are a useful unit of analysis and that patterns of civil-military relations can shed some light in accounting for trends in military spending. The data and analysis are used to pose a number of hypotheses about how explicitly political variables influence decisions over public spending for military and nonmilitary purposes.
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