This Paper is part of a 3-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council investigating how security policy is developed in the United Kingdom. After an initial exploratory phase consisting of in-depth interviews with British security elites, an experiment was designed to examine whether making changes to security and defence policy in the context of the fixed-term Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) enables the government to avoid paying audience costs following inconsistent behavior. The experiment was conducted on UK security elites, as well as on general UK audiences.
