Replication Data for: The Correlates of Brazil’s Military Expenditures, 1822-1945: the Politics of Defense Policy in a Non-Democratic Era

The complex relationships between domestic factors, the armed forces, and the international system are key to the analysis of any country’s defense policy. Defense spending is a 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-tradeoff was not a central concern for policymakers because there was no mass-based national political party. Leveraging an original dataset created through meticulous historiographical research and employing time series analysis techniques we investigate the factors shaping Brazil’s military expenditures in 1822-1945. This is the first study of its kind for the Brazilian case for this period. Our findings indicate that political instability often led governments to increase military funding, yet levels of electoral democracy and greater military political power and military-generated political crises were not associated with higher defense budgets, challenging conventional hypotheses. Finally, the article provides systematic quantitative evidence on the negative association between defense spending and Brazil’s freeriding on the US security umbrella throughout the first half of the 20th century.