When do militaries withdraw from politics and submit to civilian control? This is a vital question given that civilian control of politically passive militaries is a prerequisite for democratization and is also strongly associated with international and domestic peace. This project examines the effects of international and domestic conflict on the military's role in politics in non-democracies and states transitioning to democracy. It argues that conflicts that threaten to topple a state's leader increase military intrusion into politics, while conflicts that do not pose the same risk exacerbate splits in the military's officer corps and decrease military involvement in politics. While previous studies use proxy measures to capture different aspects of civil-military relations, this project will use a new cross-national dataset on military intrusion into politics and relative civilian control. The scope of the study is all non-democracies and states transitioning to democracy from 1960 to the present. Accordingly, the project will provide new insight into the civil-military relations of such states as China, Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Iraq.
Intellectual Merit: This project provides an answer to the puzzle of civil-military relations: It is the degree to which the state leader is threatened that matters it military intrusion. State leaders can leverage domestic or international threats that do not directly endanger their rule to exacerbate intra-military tensions and to compel the military to withdraw from politics. However, conflicts that pose a more severe threat to the leader weaken that leader's position, given their need for military protection. This leads to military intrusion into politics and weaker civilian control.
The testing of this theory will rest heavily on novel, cross-national data collection on the role of the military in politics. Preliminary analysis in the proposal using extant data on military control of ministries of defense (MODs) for a limited number of years provides initial support for the theory, but this project proposes to conduct tests using a much-expanded dataset that covers 1960 to the present and captures much deeper aspects of states' civil-military relations. These data will include not only military control of the MOD, but also military representation in national cabinets, intelligence agency leadership positions, and national security councils. These objective measures map much more closely onto the concepts of civilian control and the military's political role than existing data and can, thus, allow for truer tests of theories that incorporate civil-military relations as either dependent or independent variables.
Broader Impacts: This project provides a broader impact on society in two ways: by addressing a pressing national security dilemma for U.S. policy-makers, and by generating a dataset which will be useful to scholars addressing a wide range of policy questions. First, the events of the Arab Spring have demonstrated the importance of the military as a political actor-with the military asserting a political role for itself in some cases, but in others, stepping back and allowing democratization to proceed. This project will generate and test a theory that provides a framework for policy-makers to predict military intrusion into politics in a range of states, including those undergoing democratic transitions. This will allow policy-makers to more accurately assess the prospects for democracy to take hold in such states.
Further, this project will generate clear predictions about the effect of a state's security environment on the propensity of its military to take a political role. Accordingly, given the ability of the United States to affect other countries' security environment through troop deployments, military aid, and military cooperation agreements, this study has clear relevance to U.S. policy-makers interested in reducing military intrusion into politics in recipient countries.
Secondly, the data generated by this project will have broad applicability beyond testing the theory outlined here. This data could be used by scholars to address such questions as the relationship between civil-military conflict and states' tendency to get involved in international crises and the propensity for crises with states with poor civil-military relations to escalate to war-questions that directly relate, for example, to the ongoing Ukraine-Russia crisis.
