The correlates of transatlantic burden sharing: revising the agenda for theoretical and policy analysis

While recent work has attempted to update the research agenda for transatiantic defense burden-sharing, there remain significant gaps between the public choice defense economics literature and the security studies literature. The presence of such a gap is unfortunate, because defense spending choices are likely shaped by factors identified by the public choice literature, as well as the strategic and cultural variables that the security studies literature tends to focus on, as well as domestic macroeconomic factors. The independent variables identified in recent qualitative literature are extremely useful analytically, and, fortunately, they have reasonable proxies in available quantitative data, which enables scholars to study them across large groups of countries and many years. This article builds upon such work to synthesize the most notable of the factors identified in the current literature, and offers some common analytical ground that will benefit both scholars and practitioners..