Spending priorities and democratic rule in Latin America

Has democracy produced a shift in Latin American budget priorities from mil itary to civilian spending? Do discerned shifts from military to civilian s pending within democracies represent "hard choices:" that is, are they shif ts of the "zero-sum" variety in which resources from one budget are effecti vely given to another? A budgetary model is developed to explain the change in nonmilitary relative to military spending. Cross-sectional time series data for a large number of Latin American countries in the period from 1974 to 1995 are used to test the model. Results show that level of democracy h as a significant positive effect on the size of nonmilitary relative to mil itary budgets, that Latin American democratization is producing significant budgetary changes, and that democratic countries rely on zero-sum trade-of fs that defy prediction.