FREELOADER OR FAITHFUL FRIEND: Factors Influencing Taiwan’s Defense Spending

Many American policymakers, including Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, are incredulous regarding Taiwan’s contemporary level of defense spending, believing it should be much higher to match the growing military and security threat posed by the PRC (Colby, Taipei Times, 2024). Some commentators suggest Taiwan is free riding off the U.S. military, taking advantage of growing U.S. hard power capabilities in the Indo-Pacific to channel its expenditures towards domestic services. In this thesis, I investigate the impact of four key variables predicted by the academic literature on Taiwan’s military policy to have impact on the defense spending question: predicted U.S. military support, the level of perceived threat from the PRC, confidence in the Taiwanese military, and political party support. I use a mixed-methods approach to test those variables’ impact on both Taiwanese voters and elite politicians’ decision-making regarding defense spending, studying the results of two large-n public opinion surveys from the latter half of 2024, while scrutinizing the political debates in Taiwan’s legislature over the National defense budget for FY2025. I find that free riding is not in play at either level of domestic politics: voters’ support for higher defense spending is positively rather than negatively correlated with the estimated likelihood of U.S. support; those legislators that voted in 2025 to make significant cuts to the budget of the Ministry of National Defense likely had low expectations for the helpfulness of U.S. military assistance. More pro-Unification political leanings and lack of confidence in the Taiwanese military led citizens at both levels to not support higher defense spending, while higher threat perceptions vis-à-vis the PRC only encouraged more support among voters, and not among policymakers, for higher defense spending. These results suggest domestic political polarization, rather than a zero-sum game of spending with the U.S., best explains Taiwan’s current levels of military expenditures. In the future, the U.S. may encourage more approval for higher defense spending amongst Taiwanese voters by making clear its de facto support for Taiwan’s defense, but encouraging that approval at all levels of domestic politics will also require tackling the polarization challenge.