Preferences on Arms Trade in 5 Western Major Export Countries

• In Event: Attitudes Related to International Relations and Foreign Policy

Abstract

Despite significant politicization and heated public debates in some major exporting countries, systematic cross-country research on public support for arms trade is currently lacking. We go beyond the usual single item approach in eliciting favorable or opposing global attitudes in this field by implementing a conjoint experiment. This allows us to elicit differentiated compound attitudes for varying combinations of background conditions. Relevant background conditions are derived from a political economy approach to arms transfers where economic considerations are matched with various security-related and norm-related aspects. These three dimensions are each operationalized by at least two different attributes (human rights situation, security importance of recipient country, number of created jobs, etc.).
We draw on an original population-representative survey with embedded experiments (ca. N = 10,000), fielded in June-August 2023 with quota-representative opt-in online panels. Our focus is on the cases of NATO’s top-5 exporting countries of major arms: the USA, France, Germany, Italy and the UK. We expect substantial differences between the five countries with respectto the share of principled pacifists as well as the relative weightings of the three dimensions of arms trade.

Authors

• Fabian Haggerty, LMU Munich

• Lukas Rudolph, University of Konstanz

• Paul W. Thurner, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen