How Global Competition Accelerates National Technology Adoption

Why States Race to Adopt New Technologies

Helen V. Milner and Sondre Ulvund Solstad ask whether world politics—specifically the structure of the international system—shapes how quickly countries adopt new technologies. They challenge the common focus on domestic determinants of technology uptake and argue that leaders' decisions about promoting and adopting new tools are driven in part by concerns about vulnerability to coercion or attack by other states.

How the Authors Study Change Over 200 Years

The authors conduct a systematic, historical cross-national examination of states’ technology adoption across the past two hundred years. They link measures of the international system’s concentration of power (how much power is concentrated in a few states versus more evenly distributed) to the timing and speed of national technology adoption, and they test temporal causal relationships between shifts in systemic concentration and subsequent adoption behavior.

Key Findings

• Countries adopt new technologies more rapidly when the international system is less concentrated—that is, when power is more widely distributed and interstate competition is higher.
• Temporal tests indicate that changes in systemic concentration precede and predict changes in adoption rates, consistent with a causal effect from system structure to technological uptake.
• Government policies designed to speed technology adoption are correlated with heightened concerns about rising international competition and vulnerability.

Why This Matters for Political Science and Policy

The paper reframes technological change as not only an economic or domestic policy outcome but also a strategic response to international security dynamics. If a competitive international system incentivizes faster adoption, then episodes of global technological waves may be driven in part by shifts in great-power structure and rivalry. That insight links scholarship on international security, statecraft, and economic development, and suggests that policymakers’ technology strategies are shaped by global strategic context as much as by domestic capability.