Last week on Deep Dive, we focused on new research about how an independent central bank can be an asset for countries trying to put down rebellions within their borders. This week, we’ll look at the security effects of another mechanism that countries use to signal financial stability: Keeping their budgets in order.

Fighting a war requires raising money, and raising money requires convincing potential donors and lenders that you’re a good investment risk. When countries go abroad to raise war funds, an independent central bank can help convince creditors that their loans will be repaid before the country’s financial system goes belly up. When countries raise money at home, however, the result depends more on the public’s faith in the country’s fiscal policy than its monetary policy. When people get taxed, they want to be able to tell where the money goes. When they can’t, they tend to get restless.

For political scientists Gary Cox and Mark Dincecco, the most basic element of a sound fiscal policy is what they call a “credible budget.” This means a budget that the state is legally required to produce, has a defined length (usually a year), and can be evaluated by some sort of representative body. In short, the state should be able to show how much it wants to spend, how long it will take to spend it, and be willing to take questions about why it is spending $1.7 trillion on bad jets.

Cox and Dincecco take that definition for a spin in their new article in the Journal of Politics, where they use the experience of states in early modern Europe to test whether credible budgets lead to improved performance in wars. In that period, when European states were still consolidating their power and state institutions were frequently in flux, there was considerable variation in how states arranged their fiscal affairs. One thing everyone agreed on, however, was that spending more money made you more likely to win wars. Most leaders of the era saw wars as essentially spending contests – whoever could bring more cash to bear would win in the end.

By tracking the fiscal structure of ten European powers, Cox and Dincecco measured how moving toward budget credibility affected both state spending in wartime and the outcomes of the wars the states were involved in. The numbers they come up with are pretty convincing. In states with no credible budgets, wars resulted in hardly any added expenditure. Rather than finding ways to raise more money, rulers demanded in-kind contributions to the war effort from their subjects, including labor and conscription. In states that took on credible budget structures, however, not only did peacetime spending increase but wartime expenditures grew some 38% beyond peacetime levels.

That massive increase in spending bought victories. Studying wars that states with credible budgets fought against those without them, Cox and Dincecco find that the states with more advanced fiscal structures won over two thirds of the time.

The debate Cox and Dincecco are most interested in influencing with their work is over the origin of the apparent advantage democracies have in fighting wars. Some argue that democracies win wars against autocracies because when a state’s population is involved in the decision to go to war, they will offer more inputs to the war effort and extract fewer costs to stand up a fighting force – basically, that participatory democracy makes warmaking go smoother. Others, however, say that what democracy really does is prevent executives from getting involved in stupid wars that they can’t win. By constraining executive power, it incentivises military moves that are actually in the country’s best interest. Cox and Dincecco come down on the latter side. Credible budgeting, they point out, is hardly limited to participatory democracies, and the martial benefits of fiscal responsibility do not fade just because autocracies are the ones being responsible. When any kind of executive is held accountable for their spending choices, the researchers argue, their chances of military success improve.

Orla Berry reported on the ways Maltese nights have become a bit more hospitable. Malta recently became the first European country to legalize recreational marijuana. Under the new law, growing and possessing the drug in small quantities will be legal, and people who have been convicted of marijuana-related offenses can apply to have their records expunged. Other countries in Europe are tracking the situation in Malta, in part to see if the new law offers a better path for disincentivizing trade in illegal drugs than the policy used in The Netherlands, where marijuana is still technically illegal but decriminalization has created a gray area for drug traffickers to work in.

Elsie Mares argued that US political commentators should treat migration not as an issue of domestic security but instead as a response, in part, to US foreign policy. Most people who migrate from Latin America to the US say they would prefer to stay in their homes, but that they face threats of violence and dire economic situations there. Much of the political and economic pressure driving people to flee their home countries comes as a result of climate change, the war on drugs, and other phenomena that are directly linked to US policy decisions. US migration policy, Mares pointed out, relies on making false distinctions between people who we perceive as being forced to leave their homes due to specific violent threats – refugees – and those who chose to leave. Yet, she argued, the people who really have the power to make choices about the main drivers of migration are US policymakers.

Adam Wernick chronicled the work YouTubers are doing to keep trash out of the ocean and in the comments section, where it belongs. Influencers have banded together to create Team Seas, a project that aims to raise $30 million for ocean health non-profits and remove 30 million pounds of garbage from the world’s oceans and major waterways. Even if successful, the project will only target a fraction of the estimated 20 billion pounds of plastics that find their way into oceans each year. But organizers see the purpose of the project as being not simply to have a direct impact on the problem of pollution, but to activate the millions of people – mostly young – who follow and support the project into further environmental awareness and activism.

The arc of the moral universe bends all kinds of ways, but some of those ways are pretty funny.

People usually attribute the collapse in funding for area studies in the US to the end of the Cold War, but actually it was a response to an alarming spike in dad jokes.

Live look at how the application of deterrence theory to cyber operations is going.

A new competitor with the F-35 for the leading metric by which to measure pointless US military spending.

The National Football League, the de facto most socialist US sports league, seems to have taken a turn and is now, judging from this map, going full tankie. The NFL’s official position is that Taiwan is part of China, but also that Ireland is a single republic and, if you squint, that Gibraltar belongs to Spain.

He’s not the first DC denizen to vastly overstate the impressiveness of his BASE, but he gets points for novelty at least.

Much like a direct-to-streaming TV reboot or any Gen-Xer you talk with, this poster presupposes you come to it knowing a bunch of information about the 1990s.

Perhaps the greatest combination of lede and photo composition in the history of journalism.