An analysis on unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) from the perspective of domestic audience costs

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2578749 _(Table of contents)

The accelerating fame of armed drones has been changing the landscape of warfare for the last century. Although the gradual technological improvement of these tools has significantly altered the policy-making processes of actors in the international system, little attention has been paid to examination of what kind of a pattern in ownership has merged, so far. This paper tries to unveil whether there exists a relationship between the characteristics of states and the amount of ownership of unmanned combat aerial vehicles. Building on the propositions of domestic audience costs theory, the theoretical expectation took the shape of observing higher numbers of UCAVs in countries with leaders who are more likely to be held accountable for their decisions to be involved or not to be involved in an international armed conflict. Audience costs literature puts forward a comparative perspective for conflicting leaders’ instinct for the minimization of human and material costs. By the use of armed drones brings the promises of easier militaristic involvement decisions by leaders and promotion of those successes for political capital. By using the data that is provided on import and export numbers of UCAVs and previous academic work that categorized regime types and democracy levels of states, this research finds out that although there is no such statistically significant relationship among different authoritarian regime types, there is a piece of empirical evidence for the expected interaction across various democratic levels.