The Spanish cadet in the European military context a comparative analysis of the professional socialisation

Research on the attitudes, motivations and social and political behavior of European cadets have been made throughout the last decade. Nowadays Spain also joins those surveys. Thru the analysis of polling data, we can consider the different attitudes of Spanish cadets in relation with the other European ones. The conclusion is that although the Spanish political transition to democracy has not ended already in the military teaching system, there are a lot of similarities among Spanish and European cadets.

Banning Obsolete Weapons or Reshaping Perceptions of Military Utility: Discursive Dynamics in Weapons Prohibitions

The paper focuses on the argumentative process through which new international norms prohibiting the use of weapons causing severe civilian harm emerge. It examines the debate surrounding the use and usefulness of landmines and cluster munitions and traces the process through which NGOs change conceptions of military utility and effectiveness of certain weapons by highlighting their humanitarian problems and questioning their military value. By challenging military thinking on these issues, NGOs redefine the terms of the debate – from a commonplace practice, the use of such weapons becomes controversial and military decisions need to be justified. The argument-counterargument dynamic shifts the burden of proof of the necessity and safety of the weapons to the users. The process witnesses the ability of NGOs to influence debates on military issues despite their disadvantaged position in hard security issue areas. It also challenges realist assumptions that only weapons that are obsolete or low-cost force equalizers for weak actors can be banned. To the contrary, the paper shows that in the case of landmines and cluster munitions, defining the military (in)effectiveness of the weapons is part and parcel of the struggle for their prohibition.

The Sociology of educational mismatch

This paper studies the theoretical relationships between core research lines of sociology such as intergenerational mobility, class structure, cultural capital and educational mismatches. By educational mismatch we mean two things. Firstly an individual can be horizontally mismatched whereby their field of study is inadequate for the job. Another direction of educational mismatch is the so called vertical mismatch where worker possesses more/less education than the job requires resulting in over-/under-education. While analyzing the educational mismatches I keep present the conclusions of Rational Action Theory on individuals’ rational choices in their educational careers. I arrive to conclusions where the influences between educational mismatches and social classes are bidirectional and one can establish fairly clear theoretical links between class of origins and likelihood of being educationally mismatched.

State capacity and military conflict

In 1500, Europe was composed of hundreds of statelets and principalities, with weak central authority,no monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, and overlapping jurisdictions. By 1800, only ahandful of powerful, centralized nation states remained. We build a model that explains both the emergenceof capable states and growing divergence between European powers. We argue that the impactof war was crucial for state building, and depended on: i) the financial cost of war, and ii) a country sinitial level of domestic political fragmentation. We emphasize the role of the "Military Revolution",which raised the cost of war. Initially, this caused more cohesive states to invest in state capacity, whilemore divided states rationally dropped out of the competition, causing divergence between Europeanstates. As the cost of war escalated further, all states engaged in a "race to the top" towards greater statebuilding.

Institutional Determinants of Military Spending

Drawing on a database for 1988-2006 containing information on 157 countries, we investigate the effects on military spending of government form, electoral rules, concentration of parliamentary parties, and ideology. From an OLS regression on pooled data, our results show that presidential democracies spend more than parliamentary systems on defense, whereas the presence of a plurality voting system will reduce the defense burden. Our findings suggest that, in contrast to theoretical predictions in the literature, institutions do not have the same impact on the provision of all public goods. We present as well evidence regarding the effect of ideology on defense spending.