Making It Personal: Regime Type and Nuclear Proliferation (original) (raw)

Research on nuclear proliferation has identified numerous factors associated with states' decisions to pursue nuclear weapons, including the nature of the security environment, alliances with great powers, technological resources, and regional status aspirations. Yet study after study has found that regime type has little or no effect on the decision to pursue nuclear weapons. Indeed, in a literature that features little consensus, one point of "specific agreement" is that "regime type has only a minimal effect on proliferation" (Sagan 2011, 236). We argue, however, that conventional approaches comparing the behavior of democracies to that of non-democracies have resulted in incorrect inferences. We combine insights from the study of comparative authoritarianism with those on the causes of nuclear proliferation and argue that leaders of highly centralized, "personalistic" dictatorships have more to gain, and less to lose, by pursuing nuclear weapons than leaders of other regime types. Using our more nuanced classification of regime types, as well as a more theoretically-appropriate modeling approach, we find that regime type in fact has a significant impact on states' decisions to seek nuclear weapons: personalistic regimes are substantially more likely to pursue these weapons than other regime types. This finding is robust to different codings of proliferation dates and a wide range of modeling approaches and specifications. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for both theory and policy.