Description
States often employ arms transfers as a means of signaling political alignment and assuring allies of their defense commitments. While widely assumed to reinforce alliance ties, the empirical evidence on how arms sale or their denial affect perceptions of assurance remains limited. To address this gap, I will conduct a survey experiment with UK and Polish nationals, varying whether the United States approves or denies an arms transfer request from their governments. This design choice allows me to capture the effect of the arms transfer phenomenon more comprehensively: that of both approval and denial on perceived assurance. I expect that the effect depends on the prior strength and status of the bilateral relationship. When it is relatively higher, the denial of the arms sale request is likely to generate a significant negative effect, whereas the approval will have at most a marginal increase in perceived assurance. Conversely, in relatively weaker bilateral relationships, an approval is likely to have a significant positive influence, while a denial would still produce a negative effect on perceived assurance from allies.
