This paper examines empirically whether democracies allocate fewer resources to the military than dictatorships do. It employs a panel of up to 112 countries over the period 1960-2000 to estimate a standard demand for military spending model. While papers on the determinants of military spending...

Reporting bias – the media’s tendency to systematically underreport or overreport certain types of events – is a persistent problem for participants and observers of armed conflict. We argue that the nature of reporting bias depends on how news organizations navigate the...

Scholars have long attempted to make distinctions among states based on regime type. Two of the most commonly used measures by both scholars and policymakers are the Freedom House Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties measures. Despite their popularity, little is known about...