Regime penalty and capability dividend: European public support for security cooperation

How does a potential partner’s regime type affect European public support for security cooperation and does military technology moderate this effect? We investigate how the European public navigates the conflict between political reliability and strategic utility. Using a pre-registered survey experiment with 15,400 participants across seven European countries, we manipulate the potential partner’s political regime and technological capacity in the context of a missile development project between the European Union and a non-member partner country. Ordinary least squares models show that democratic partners enjoy higher public support than both authoritarian and backsliding regimes, while technological sophistication independently increases support. Backsliding democracies receive more support than autocracies. High technology does not erase the regime penalty. The democracy advantage remains larger than the capability dividend. Structural equation model results suggest that regime effects operate through perceived reliability and perceived reputational cost with the larger indirect path running through trust. We contribute by empirically examining the tension between capacity and regime type in shaping public support.