Abstract The complex relationships between domestic factors, the armed forces, and the international system are key to analyzing any country’s defense policy. Defense spending is the most tangible product of defense policymaking. This article delves into the intricacies of those relationships by examining the correlates of the defense burden in a pre-democratic period in Brazil, where the democratically informed guns-versus-butter trade-off was not a central concern for policymakers because there was no national mass-based political party. Leveraging an original dataset […]