Diversity or Convergence
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Diversity or Convergence? Explaining the Development of Defense-industrial Policies

Funded by the DFG: WE 3653/4-1 (until the end of 2019)

Brief Summary of the Project

In past as well as in present times, governments attempted through a variety of defense-industrial policies to guarantee a stable capacity for military innovation of arms at reasonable cost. As buyer, regulator and sometimes even owner, governments may apply three policy instruments for this purpose: procurement (rules), export regulation, and ownership; each of which may combine state with market action in multiple ways.

Against this backdrop, the objective of this research project is to (i) explore governments’ defense-industrial policies and to (ii) explain them both across countries and over time. The project’s framework will build on analytical concepts from comparative capitalism, which have proven fruitful in political economy, and seek to find out how they "travel" to the defense-industrial sector – a traditional issue of security studies.

The project, therefore, aims for a two-fold contribution. First, it provides security studies not only with a cross-country comparison (rather than a single case study), but also an innovative institutionalist approach to analyze states and markets in the defense-industrial sector. Second, the project introduces the so far neglected defense-industrial sector to comparative capitalism and theorizes more explicitly the role of the state, politics and power in policy-making. The primary explanation expects that four types of institutional configurations will respectively shape governments’ policy by generating a distinct logic of action within the defense-industrial sector: liberal, enabling, influencing, planning. More specifically, distinct domestic institutions of each type create an opportunity structure for public and private actors to coordinate their actions according to distinct mechanisms, which range from the market over associations and (informal) networks towards hierarchical direction. As a result, each type of institutional configuration implies different complementarities and advantages, which tend to reproduce themselves over time according to a path-dependent logic.

Whereas the project primarily adopts the comparative capitalism perspective, it will also investigate alternative explanations and ask, for instance, to what extent threats, functional pressures, or military culture drive defense-industrial policy-making. Case selection aims for variation of the main independent variable and focuses on typical cases within each type of institutional configuration.

To that end, the project examines the development of policy-making within the defense-industrial sectors of the liberal United Kingdom, enabling Germany, influencing France and planning India. Temporally, it distinguishes old (1970s until mid-1980s) from new (1990s until today) defense-industrial policies. Process-tracing is applied to systematically link the macro-level of institutions with the micro-level of actors in order to find out the conditions and mechanisms, which drive defense-industrial policies over time and space.


Please contact Moritz Weiss if you are interested in the research project.