Societal stress, political instability, and levels of military effort.

The article presents information on societal stress, political instability and levels of military effort. A comprehensive theory explaining the variation in levels of military effort will ultimately have to include both domestic and foreign determinants, for national security policy, of which the size of a country's military effort is an integral part, is the product of interplay among both domestic and foreign sources. This article reports some of the domestic findings of a broader study, which attempts to construct such a theory. The cost of this strategy of reporting solely domestic findings is that only one aspect of the question of military effort is presented here. The other domestic factors as well as foreign ones may also have an impact on these levels. The advantage of the strategy, however, warrants such an approach, for it will allow concentration on a select set of domestic variables from a perspective that differs markedly from other cross-national comparative studies that look at civil violence and national coercive levels. While most of these studies view levels of civil violence as being determined primarily by interaction between the sources of societal frustration and governmental coercive power that exist within a nation, here the level of a country's military effort will be looked upon as being basically a response to the amount of societal stress and political instability that are present within it.