How do civilians prevent their militaries from engaging in politics? Scholars are divided in their answer to this question, with some highlighting the constraining effects of political institutions and others emphasizing the importance of norms of civilian control. We integrate these two approaches and develop a dynamic theory of civilian control, arguing that control over the military is achieved once civilianized institutions are adopted and sufficient time has passed to permit: (1) the development of a shared norm of civilian control within the military; and (2) learning among military elites that fosters a belief that civilian rule is robust to military challenges. As a result, civilian control is self-reinforcing. We evaluate these claims by developing a latent variable model that tests for the presence of self-reinforcing institutional dynamics. We generate estimates of civilian control for all countries, 1945-2010 and find strong support for our expectations. In the summer of 2016, Turkish military personnel seized control of the Bosphorus bridges as jets flew overhead in Ankara. Members of the armed forces were attempting to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdŏgan from office. Although it quickly failed, the coup attempt took many by surprise. The years of rampant military intervention in politics appeared to have been over in Turkey. The previous two decades were characterized by stable civilian rule, enough time to suggest that the democratic regime should have consolidated itself from such challenges (Huntington, 1993; Svolik, 2015). The conventional wisdom was that Erdŏgan successfully defanged the military as a source of political opposition (Hannah, 2016; The Economist, 2016). Yet, as these events demonstrate, the military is seldom tamed easily. Why were observers so surprised by the Turkish coup attempt and why does control of the military remain tenuous in regimes where seemingly strong civilian institutions have been established? These questions are central to our understanding of civilian control, defined here in terms of the extent to which civilians dominate political decision-making within a polity, and the robustness of this dominance to military involvement in politics.1 Existing answers to this question broadly originate from two theoretical frameworks. The first is institutionalist and understands civilian control as an outcome behavior emerging from civilian and military elites pursuing unique interests within a fixed institutional setting. Civilian control is achieved when the structure of political institutions is such that the preferences of civilian elites dominate those of the military. This approach links civilian control with political regimes where civilians enjoy a monopoly on de facto, if not de jure authority over members of the armed forces.2 While this provides a robust and generalizable means of understanding civilian control across polities, it ignores the fact that 1For definitions of civilian control relating to civil-military preference divergence and policy implementation and compliance see Feaver (1999, 2003), and Desch (1999). 2 For qualitative examples of institutional typologies of civilian control see Nordlinger (1977); Stepan (1988); Welch (1976); and Colton (1979). The quantitative literature has employed a variety of regime type indicators and indexes to capture this construct (Poe and Tate, 1994; Lai and Slater, 2006; Sechser, 2004; Weeks, 2008, 2012; Talmadge, 2015). Game theoretic treatments of civil-military interactions as a single-iteration game also assume a fixed institutional setting, though recent work has begun to incorporate temporal dynamics into formal models of military coups (Little, 2016).
Self-Reinforcing Civilian Control: A Measurement-Based Analysis of Civil-Military Relations
Published 2020 in International Studies Quarterly
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- Publication year
2020
- Venue
International Studies Quarterly
- Publication date
2020-03-01
- Fields of study
Political Science
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