Strategy, Resources, Elites and Publics

StratREP examines how public opinion, elite discourse, resource constraints, and international dynamics shape grand strategy and the allocation of scarce security resources. Operationalizing these variables and integrating them into a unified framework, StratREP combines large-scale text analysis of national security strategies (NSSs), surveys, and disaggregated defense spending to reveal how discourse and material behavior interact over time and across countries, enabling us to ask and answer questions like: Do leaders do what they say? Can words predict actions? I will use a comprehensive corpus of NSSs to systematize understanding of countries’ strategic discourse, measure differences in discursive alignment and strategic culture, and analyze this with states’ material behavior (military investments/capabilities) and citizens' views. While my data collection effort is global, I focus my analysis on Europe and the transatlantic community. I push existing boundaries in three areas. First, no research has gathered a comprehensive NSS collection and applied text-as-data tools to extract comparable quantitative data. Second, I disaggregate military expenditures and capabilities development and measure their relationship. Third, I integrate evidence from each into a comprehensive model of strategic behavior. Such a model is critical as Europe rearms in a challenging security environment – its applications are practically limitless. One would be to empirically test whether countries with heightened threat perceptions spend more on different types of defense or increase capabilities — not simply because the threat is greater materially. Discourse analysis measures perceptual changes that precede or lag \"real\" changes. Systematically operationalizing security discourse alongside new data on material choices is a promising avenue to develop and test such hypotheses explicitly, rigorously, and replicably, rather than relying on intuition.