Routes to Reform: Civil-Military Relations and Democracy in the Third Wave (Oxford Studies in Democratization) 9780198803362, 0198803362

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Routes to Reform

O X F O R D S T U D I E S I N D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N Series Editor LAURENCE WHITEHEAD Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the Cold War. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. RECENTLY PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright Legislative Institutions and Lawmaking in Latin America Eduardo Alema´n and George Tsebelis International Politics of Authoritarian Rule Oisı´n Tansey Building Trust and Democracy Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Countries Cynthia M. Horne Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman, and Timothy J. Power Democracy in Small States Persisting Against All Odds Jack Corbett and Wouter Veenendaal Youth in Regime Crisis Comparative Perspectives from Russia to Weimar Germany Félix Krawatzek Conditionality and Coercion Electoral Clientelism in Eastern Europe Isabela Mares and Lauren E. Young

Routes to Reform Civil–Military Relations and Democracy in the Third Wave D AV I D KU EH N AND AU R EL C R O IS S A N T

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948841 ISBN 978–0–19–880336–2 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803362.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgments This work has been in the making for a long time and we, the authors, have accumulated a long list of debts to those who supported us on that journey. First of all, we are grateful for the financial support of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), whose generous research grant (CR 128 4-2) made the project of collecting and analyzing data on civilian control of the military in 66 new democracies possible. We are indebted to our colleagues Paul W. Chambers, Philip Lorenz, and Siegfried O. Wolf, with whom we developed the concept and theory underlying this study and collected data on civilian control in seven Asian new democracies in a previous research project. The data collection process would not have been possible without the tireless support of our highly motivated research assistants: Anika Bergmann, Robin Dyck, Nina Engelbracht, Paula Gonza´lez, Jil Kamerling, David Kirchner, Konstantin Krome, Hans Lueders, Raphael Marbach, Anne-Marie Parth, Peter Schneider, Philipp Typus, Alina Ripplinger, Christine Schlegel, Susanne Schneider, André Strecker, Lisa Voigt, and Christina Weber. Anna Hengge edited the original manuscript and helped us prepare the bibliography. Parts of Chapter 2 draw on work originally published in Aurel Croissant et al., 2010, “Beyond the Fallacy of Coup-ism: Conceptualizing Civilian Control of the Military in Emerging Democracies”, Democratization 12(5), 950–975; Aurel Croissant et al., 2013, Democratization and Civilian Control in Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan; and David Kuehn et al., 2017, “Conditions of Civilian Control in New Democracies: An Empirical Analysis of 28 ‘Third Wave’ Democracies”, European Political Science Review, 9(3), 425–447; and small parts of Chapters 4 and 6 draw on empirical analyses originally published in Chapters 3 and 4 of Aurel Croissant et al., 2013, Democratization and Civilian Control in Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Over the course of preparing the manuscript, we presented individual chapters, parts of the empirical analyses, and the book’s core arguments in numerous invited talks, conferences, and workshops. Without any claim to completeness, these include the American Political Science Association’s

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Annual Meetings; the European Consortium for Political Research’s Joint Sessions of Workshops; the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association; the World Congress of Political Science of the International Political Science Association; the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society’s International Conferences; the Biennial Conferences of the European Research Groups on Armed Forces and Society (ERGOMAS); the Institute for Political Science at Heidelberg University; the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, Hamburg; the National Endowment for Democracy; the East Asia Institute, Seoul; the ˙Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim Üniversitesi; and the V-Dem Institute, Gothenburg. We thank the organizers and participants of these talks, panels, and workshops for the chance to discuss the goals, methods, and preliminary findings of our project. Different parts of the manuscript have been read and commented on by numerous scholars and colleagues over the years. We particularly thank Belén Gonza´lez, Felix Haaß, and Adam Scharpf for their systematic reading of the empirical chapters, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments and suggestions. Last, but certainly not least, we thank our editor, Dominic Byatt, and his colleagues from Oxford University Press for their practical support and unwavering patience during the whole process.

Contents List of figures List of tables

1. Civilian control of the military in new democracies 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Why study civilian control in third wave democracies Analytical framework and arguments of this book Cases, data, and methods The plan of the book

2. Conceptualizing and theorizing civilian control 2.1 Conceptualizing civilian control 2.1.1 What civilian control is 2.1.2 Five decision-making areas 2.1.3 How to measure civilian control

2.2 Establishing civilian control in new democracies 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.2.3 2.2.4

Existing scholarship Our approach The causal mechanisms: Civilian control strategies The power resources of civilian control strategies

2.3 Democracy and civilian control 2.3.1 Democracy and its partial regimes 2.3.2 Civilian control and the survival and quality of democracy

2.4 Conclusion

3. Mapping and explaining civilian control in third wave democracies

x xii

1 4 7 10 13

20 21 23 25 28

32 33 37 38 42

49 50 52

56

58

3.1 The universe of third wave democracies 3.2 Civilian control in third wave democracies

58 61

3.2.1 The five decision-making areas 3.2.2 The overall strength of civilian control

62 72

3.3 Determinants of civilian control in third wave democracies 3.3.1 Operationalization of independent variables 3.3.2 Multiple regression analyses 3.3.3 Determinants of civilian control across the five decision-making areas

3.4 Conclusion 3.5 Appendix 3.5.1 The population of third wave democracies

77 77 81 86

91 93 93

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CONTENTS

4. Reforming civil–military relations 4.1 South Korea: Incremental institutionalization of civilian control 4.1.1 Civilian control 4.1.2 Strategies 4.1.3 Resources

4.2 Chile: Military prerogatives, tutelary democracy, and the success of delayed reform 4.2.1 Civilian control 4.2.2 Strategies 4.2.3 Resources

4.3 Spain: Pacted transition, aborted coup, and swift reforms in civil–military relations 4.3.1 Civilian control 4.3.2 Strategies 4.3.3 Resources

4.4 Philippines: Weak institutions, failed praetorianism, and civil–military symbioses 4.4.1 Civilian control 4.4.2 Strategies 4.4.3 Resources

4.5 Madagascar: Fragile institutions, weak incumbents, and the military as kingmaker 4.5.1 Civilian control 4.5.2 Strategies 4.5.3 Resources

4.6 Russia: Weak institutions, strong incumbent, and the personalization of civilian control in the early Putin era 4.6.1 Civilian control 4.6.2 Strategies 4.6.3 Resources

4.7 Conclusion

5. The effect of civilian control on democracy 5.1 Empirical approach 5.1.1 Social determinants 5.1.2 Economic determinants 5.1.3 International determinants

96 97 98 99 100

102 103 104 106

107 108 109 110

112 112 114 115

117 118 120 121

122 123 125 126

128

133 134 135 136 138

5.2 Survival of democracy

139

5.2.1 Description 5.2.2 Analysis 5.2.3 Summary

141 145 152

5.3 Civilian control and the partial regimes of embedded democracy 5.3.1 Description 5.3.2 Analysis 5.3.3 Summary

153 155 159 164

CONTENTS 5.4 Conclusion 5.5 Appendix

6. Democratic survival and quality 6.1 Civilian control and democratic breakdown 6.1.1 The military as perpetrator of democratic breakdown 6.1.2 The military as partner of civilian-led democratic breakdown 6.1.3 The military as bystander of democratic breakdown 6.1.4 Discussion

6.2 Civilian control and democratic quality 6.2.1 Low civilian control and democratic quality: Brazil 6.2.2 High civilian control and democratic quality: Taiwan 6.2.3 Discussion

6.3 Conclusion

7. Conclusion 7.1 Summary of findings 7.2 Lessons for the promotion of civilian control in new democracies 7.3 Implications for future research

Bibliography Index Supplementary appendices discussing the data and regression analyses in Chapter 3 and Chapter 5, along with the dataset, are available on a companion website at www.oup.co.uk/companion/RoutesToReform

ix 166 167

169 169 170 176 181 184

188 189 194 198

201

203 203 211 216

221 254

List of figures 1.1. Military-led coups and coup attempts worldwide, 1950 to 2020

3

1.2. Successful military-led coup d’états by regime type, 1950 to 2017

4

3.1. Third wave democracies included in the dataset, 1974–2010

60

3.2. Density plots of the degree of civilian control in Elite Recruitment and Public Policy

63

3.3. Density plot of the degree of civilian control in Internal Security

65

3.4. Density plots of the degree of civilian control in National Defense and Military Organization

66

3.5. Changes in civilian control over Elite Recruitment and Public Policy, first to last year

68

3.6. Changes in civilian control over Internal Security, first to last year

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3.7. Changes in civilian control over National Defense and Military Organization, first to last year

71

3.8. Flowchart of the aggregation process

73

3.9. Density plot of the aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI)

73

3.10. Changes in the aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI), first to last year

74

3.11. Bar plot of regional averages of CCI: first and last year

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3.12. Substantive effects of variables in Model 4, standardized

86

3.13. Substantive effects of variables on Elite Recruitment and Public Policy, standardized

89

3.14. Substantive effects of variables on Internal Security, standardized

90

3.15. Substantive effects of variables on National Defense and Military Organization, standardized

91

5.1. Substantive effects of variables in Model 2, standardized

148

5.2. Marginal effects of recalculated CCI and likelihood of democratic breakdown

149

5.3. Change in Partial Regime A to D Index, first to last year in dataset

158

5.4. Standardized effect sizes

162

5.5. Change of multiplicative indices of Partial Regimes A/B and C/D, first to last year

168

6.1. Development of CCI and Indices of Partial Regimes B and C in Brazil, 1985–2010

193

LIST OF FIGURES

xi

6.2. Development of CCI and Indices of Partial Regimes B and C in Taiwan, 1992–2010

197

6.3. Development of CCI and Indices of Partial Regimes B and C in four third wave democracies

200

List of tables 1.1. Countries in the dataset

12

2.1. Areas and indicators of civilian control

29

3.1. Summary statistics of civilian control over the five decision-making areas

62

3.2. Determinants of civilian control: Descriptive statistics

81

3.3. Determinants of civilian control in third wave democracies, aggregate

Civilian Control Index (CCI)

82

3.4. Determinants of civilian control in third wave democracies, disaggregated

across the five decision-making areas

88

3.5. List of third wave democracies

94

4.1. Overview of the six case studies

97

5.1. Descriptive statistics

134

5.2. List of all third wave democracies that experienced breakdown

142

5.3. Civilian control (rCCI) and democratic breakdown, regression results

146

5.4. Civilian control (5 areas) and democratic breakdown, regression results

150

5.5. Summary statistics of the four Partial Regime Indices

156

5.6. Regional averages of four Partial Regime Indices, first to last year in the

dataset 5.7. Regression results, determinants of Partial Regimes A to D

156 160

5.8. Regression results, determinants of Partial Regimes A to D, disaggregated

civilian control scores

163

6.1. Democratic breakdown during the third wave (1974–2010)

185

7.1. Summary of the 11 structural determinants of civilian control

206

1 Civilian control of the military in new democracies This book examines the conditions under which new democracies succeed or fail in establishing firm and lasting civilian control of the military.¹ The authors introduce a multidimensional conceptual framework to evaluate the degree of civilian control in new democracies and to trace developments over time. Furthermore, we propose a theory of civilian control in new democracies that integrates rationalist, structuralist, and institutionalist arguments into a single coherent model to explain when, how, and through which causal mechanism new democracies succeed or fail in establishing and sustaining civilian control over the military. We test this theory in a multi-method research design that is based on an original dataset on civilian control over the military in 66 countries that have made the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule at least once in the period from 1974 to 2010. Finally, the study traces the effects of different degrees of civilian control on the survival and democratic quality of third wave democracies. In doing so, we combine large-N statistical analyses with detailed case study narratives of several countries. Democracy has been expanding across the globe at an unprecedented rate in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The global trend that has been dubbed the “third wave of democratization” took off in Portugal in 1974 and spread, in sequence, to Spain and Greece, and then to other regions, including Latin America, Asia, Sub-Sahara Africa, and Eastern Europe and Eurasia.² In the 2000s, however, the third wave slowed down, followed by a halt in democratic progress, and, more recently, a worrying trend of “democratic regression” or ¹ “Armed forces,” “armed services,” or “the military” are used interchangeably throughout this book. ² Samuel Huntington has suggested that the third wave began on April 25, 1974, with the military coup in Portugal that became a political revolution, and ultimately opened the way to democratization. While there is a controversy about when exactly the third wave came to a halt, Larry Diamond and Freedom House suggest that it may have been in 2006, the year when the Royal Thai Army staged a coup d’état against the elected government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (Diamond 2015). From 2006 to 2018, 113 countries have seen a net decline in political and civil freedoms, and only 62 have experienced a net improvement (Freedom House 2018). Similarly, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project reports a notable decline in the average global level of liberal democracy, “primarily in the more democratic regions of the world” (Lu¨hrmann et al. 2018, 1).

Routes to Reform. David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant, Oxford University Press. © David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803362.003.0001

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CIVILIAN CONTROL OF THE MILITARY IN NEW DEMOCRACIES

“autocratization” (Diamond 2020; Lu¨hrmann and Lindberg 2019). In fact, prominent global democracy barometers such as the Freedom House Index (Freedom House 2022), the EIU Democracy Index (EIU 2022), the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI 2022), and the Varieties of Democracy Project (Boese et al. 2022) concur that there is a global decline in the democratic quality of many political systems. Assaults on democratic institutions and norms are typically related to social polarization, populist confrontations, and identity politics, which feed off deepening economic inequalities, erosion of political trust, declining social cohesion, and the transnationalization of national politics (Haggard and Kaufman 2021; Merkel and Lu¨hrmann 2021; Przeworski 2019). Scholars have adopted terms such as “democratic backsliding” and “autocratization” to describe the incremental dismantling of the rule of law, respect for civil liberties, constraints on the executive within democracies, and the regression of democratic regimes toward regime hybridization or outright authoritarian rule (Bermeo 2016; Cassani and Tomini 2019; Haggard and Kaufman 2016; Lu¨hrmann and Lindberg 2019; Waldner and Lust 2018). As a striking difference to earlier waves of democratic erosion and breakdown, military intervention seems not to play the major role in these recent developments, even though military coups in Portugal (1974) and in Thailand (2006) have heralded the beginning and the end of the third wave, and the number of successful military coup d’états in 2021 exceeded everything the globe had seen since the early 1990s (Boese et al. 2022).³ In fact, both the “democratic coup” in Portugal and the “anti-populist coup” in Thailand are rather untypical phenomena. The 1974 Portuguese coup demonstrates that military coups are not always bad for democracy and can usher in successful democratic transitions. Yet, most transitions from authoritarianism to democracy do not involve military coups and many coups do not lead to democratization (Derpanopoulos et al. 2016; Derpanopoulos et al. 2017; Marinov and Goemans 2014; Miller 2016). At the same time, military-led coups in democracies, like in Thailand, have still been rare as methods of regime change since the 1990s (see Figure 1.1). Figure 1.2 shows the annual number of successful military-led coup d’états by regime type, from 1950 to 2017. From the 1960s to the 1980s, most democratic regimes fell to military coups or communist revolutions. Based on the best available data (Eschenauer-Engler and Herre 2021), there were a total of 115 successful military-led coups in 1950–73. Out of those, 13 occurred in ³ According to V-Dem, there were five military coups in 2021, which all occurred in autocratic regimes: Sudan, Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Myanmar. Moreover, in January 2022, another military coup d’état derailed Burkina Faso’s electoral democracy (Boese et al. 2022).

Number of military coup attempts (successful and failed)

CIVILIAN CONTROL OF THE MILITARY IN NEW DEMOCRACIES

3

15

10

5

0 1960

1980

2000

2020

Year

Figure 1.1 Military-led coups and coup attempts worldwide, 1950 to 2020 Source: Based on data by Eschenauer-Engler and Herre (2021).

countries that had been coded democratic by the Polity IV project in the year before the coup (Marshall and Jaggers 2017).⁴ From 1974 to 1990, a mere eight successful coups occurred in democracies (autocracies: 55), and another 11 in 1991–2017 (autocracies: 26). All this despite the fact that, according to Freedom House, the number of democracies almost doubled from 40 in 1973 to 76 in 1990 and then increased to 118 in 2017 (Freedom House 2018). Since the beginning of the new millennium, democratically elected governments were removed by military officers in only six instances: Fiji (2006), Guinea-Bissau (2012), Honduras (2009), Mali (2012), and Thailand (2006, 2014). Similar to military coups, military rule has also become exceedingly rare in the twenty-first century (Geddes et al. 2018; Croissant and Kuehn 2015). While military rule can take many forms, Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz provide a useful differentiation of two distinct forms of “militaryled autocracy,” namely collegial military rule by a council of military officers, and personalist rule by a military strongman. In regimes with collegial military rule, political power resides within a governing junta composed of members of ⁴ The Polity IV project considers a country democratic if it has a polity value of 6 or higher (Marshall and Jaggers 2017).

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CIVILIAN CONTROL OF THE MILITARY IN NEW DEMOCRACIES

Number of successful military coups

10

Regime type Autocracy Democracy

5

0 1960

1980 Year

2000

2020

Figure 1.2 Successful military-led coup d’états by regime type, 1950 to 2017 Source: Coup data by Eschenauer-Engler and Herre (2021), data on regime type based on Polity IV. Note: Regime type denotes whether a country was democratic in the year before the coup took place, based on the classification of Polity IV (polity value of 6 or higher).

the armed forces (Geddes et al. 2014, 151). One example is the military regime in Myanmar since the coup d’état of February 2021 (Croissant 2022). Military strongman rule takes the form of “one-man rule” by a single active or retired military officer, who rules relatively unconstrained by other military officers or political institutions (Geddes et al. 2014, 154). Examples include Thai Prime Minister, General Prayuth Chan-o-cha, Prime Minister Commodore Frank Bainimarama in Fiji, and Egypt’s President, Field Marshal Abd al-Fattah asSisi. All three strongmen instigated coups removing democratically elected incumbents and then succeeded in staying in power through authoritarian elections that trampled over even the minimum requirements for free and fair elections (Bell et al. 2021).

1.1 Why study civilian control in third wave democracies If the third wave has come to a halt and has been followed by a new wave of democratic reversal, and if there is a pronounced shift from old-fashioned coup politics and military rule to other modes of democratic backsliding

WHY STUDY CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

5

and autocratization, why study civil–military relations and democracy in the third wave? We see at least four reasons for the topic’s timeliness and importance. First, the normative assumption underlying this book is that democracy is generally a good thing. Despite the obvious fact that democracy is not yet universally practiced nor uniformly accepted, we share Amartya Sen’s argument that democracy is a universal value because people anywhere have good reasons to see it as valuable (Sen 1999). And while the social and economic performance of many democracies is lackluster (Easterly 2006), one of the few robust facts in the social sciences is that, all other things equal, democracies are more likely than authoritarian regimes to experience positive political outcomes, such as socioeconomic development, and less likely to suffer from economic crises or “mega disasters” such as mass famine (Halperin et al. 2010; Sen 1999). As is common in the political science literature, we define “democracy” in procedural terms (see Chapter 2). Our approach rests on the assumption that a minimal, electoral conception of democracy will not suffice for the study of the relationship between civilian control and democracy. What do we really “know” when we “know” that Burundi and Taiwan, or Bangladesh and Portugal are all democracies, despite evident differences in the integrity of elections, effectiveness of civil liberties, or levels of political participation, not to mention the strength (or weakness) of the rule of law in these countries? Therefore, this study adopts the model of “embedded democracy” developed by Wolfgang Merkel and his co-authors (Croissant and Merkel 2019; Merkel 2004). Among other things, this allows us to differentiate between “liberal” and “non-liberal” forms of democracy, and to theoretically deduce the relationship between civilian control and other partial regimes of a (liberal) democratic political regime. Second, despite the global trend against military rule and toward maintaining at least the appearance of civilian government, civil–military relations continue to be a vital topic for students of international and comparative politics. The practical implications of civilian control (or the lack thereof ) are important for battlefield effectiveness (Cohen 2003; Narang and Talmadge 2017) and military effectiveness in missions other than war (Bruneau and Croissant 2019; Croissant and Kuehn 2017); military innovation and strategic culture (Avant 1994; Posen 1984; Rosen 1996); foreign policy decision-making (Feaver and Gelpi 2004; Yamaguchi and Welch 2005); domestic armed conflict (Powell 2017; Roessler 2011; Weeks 2014); and, especially, democratization and democratic consolidation—which is the topic of this book.

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CIVILIAN CONTROL OF THE MILITARY IN NEW DEMOCRACIES

Third, for democracy to thrive, the power of the armed guardians of state security must be limited by strong institutions of control. The challenge to establish functional institutions of civilian control over the military is especially acute in countries with a strong legacy of “praetorianism,” that is, the absence of political institutions that establish effective civilian control over the military. Still, implementing a sound “institutional framework of civilian control over the military constitutes the neuralgic point of democratic consolidation” (Przeworski 1991, 29). Yet, the overwhelming scholarly consensus on the importance of the topic contrasts with the scarcity of carefully specified theories and systematic theory-testing that would allow to identify the conditions under which elected governments and democratically established institutions can succeed or will fail in ensuring civilian control of the military (Feaver 1999; Kuehn 2019). Fourth, civilian control of the military is a concept that is key to but often misunderstood in works on the political roles of militaries in new democracies. As we have argued elsewhere, extant theories and studies in democratization and authoritarian studies often concentrate on solving or preventing the threat of coup d’états (Croissant et al. 2010). However, as Pion-Berlin (1997, 218) notes, “[C]oup avoidance is not the same as civilian control.” Our empirical analysis in Chapter 3 shows that transitions from authoritarian rule to political democracy during the so-called third wave have often contributed to profound changes in the military’s role in politics, often without the military shedding all of the political influence and power it had under authoritarian rule. Despite their retreat from government to barracks, military leaders often successfully carved out political niches within their new political orders, a process that Samuel Valenzuela (1992) called the institutionalization of “reserved domains of policy making” and the military’s assertion as a “tutelary power.” These “perverse institutionalizations” include guaranteed representation of military officers in parliament, wide-ranging prerogatives of the military in the provision of internal security, or institutional autonomy in defense and military policy. Furthermore, the de facto political power of militaries that emerges from their ability to engage in collective action or to use brute force (North et al. 2009, 170) enables military officers to limit the effective power of democratically elected authorities to govern, even without the need to supplant civilian governments. In fact, as our empirical explorations in Chapters 4 and 5 find, militaries in the early twenty-first century are more likely to endanger democracy by degrading its quality and depth than by overthrowing it. Finally, informal contestation, that is, military challenges to civilian authority such as disobeying official regulations or withholding political support

ANALY TICAL FRAMEWORK AND ARGUMENTS OF THIS BOOK

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for the government can be a threat of significant magnitude for democracy, even if the military is not able to secure formal prerogatives during the first transition.

1.2 Analytical framework and arguments of this book This monograph makes four main arguments. First, our framework is Huntingtonian in orientation as it is based on the explicit analytical distinction between civilians on the one hand and the military on the other, which is “the sine qua non of all civil-military theory” (Feaver 2003, 12). From this perspective, the key issue is how to create and preserve a military that is subordinate to political control but is also effective and efficient (Feaver 1996). In comparative politics and democratization studies, researchers typically focus on the concept of civilian control of the military (Bruneau and Trinkunas 2006). This monograph is in this tradition. We argue that for explaining civilian control, the basic civil–military distinction, and the assumption of a principal tension between civilian and military interests are analytically and empirically useful (see Chapter 2). That is, we do not buy into the heroic simplification of the civil–military crux offered by Acemoglu and Robinson, who presume that “for various reasons, the military represents the interests of the elites more than those of the citizens” and “simply take as given the possibility that, at some cost, the elites can control the military” (2006, 224). While in practice, the objectives of the military can be aligned with those of a “wealthy elite,” we assume that military officers have distinct interests which can encompass a diverse array of concerns, from securing organizational autonomy and ample military budgets, to immunity from human rights prosecution and the preservation of ethnic group priorities. From this perspective, military officers are actors in their own right, rather than servants of the “rich” (see also Haggard and Kaufman 2016; Huntington 1968; Nordlinger 1970; Perlmutter 1974; Wright and Escribà-Folch 2012). Moreover, militaries are also political organizations with a stake in preserving their quota of power (Pion-Berlin 2006, 271). Since autocracies tend to enjoy less popular support and legitimacy than democracies and must therefore rely on the agents of coercion to ensure regime survival and stability, military officers are an essential part of most authoritarian ruling coalitions (Barany 2012). In many authoritarian regimes, militaries have therefore accrued numerous perks and privileges, and they are likely to fend off efforts by democratic governments to take away these advantages after the transition (Pion-Berlin 2006, 271).

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CIVILIAN CONTROL OF THE MILITARY IN NEW DEMOCRACIES

Second, we argue that civilian control is best defined as the exercise of the will of the country’s elected leadership over the armed forces (Croissant et al. 2010; see also Feaver 1999; Gibson 2009; Kohn 1997). Building on the works by Alagappa (2001), Pion-Berlin (1992), Trinkunas (2005) and our previous publications (Croissant and Kuehn 2009; Croissant et al. 2010, 2011, 2013) we propose to conceptualize civilian control as a continuum of the distribution of decision-making power between the military leadership and elected civilian elites over five substantive decision-making areas: Elite Recruitment, Public Policy, Internal Security, National Defense, and Military Organization. The degree of civilian control in each area depends on whether institutions exist that enable civilians to exert their authority vis-à-vis the military, and whether the military attempts to thwart civilian decision-making authority through informal contestation. Operationalized as such, civilian control over each area can be measured ordinally with three intensities: high, medium, and low. Civilian control in a given area is high if the military does not enjoy formal prerogatives and does not contest civilian authority. It is medium if the armed forces, due to formal regulations or informal challenges to the civilian leadership, enjoy political privileges but are unable to monopolize them; or if civilian decision-making authority is not institutionalized but depends on the personal rapport of civilians with the military. Civilian control is low if the military dominates decision-making or implementation in that area. Chapter 2 presents a full description of the five areas and the respective indicators of civilian control. Third, we argue that most existing work in the field of comparative civil– military relations exclusively focuses on the causal effect of structural, institutional, and/or ideational factors but neglects the mechanism through which these causal factors work, which leaves the role of agency unspecified (Kuehn 2013, 2019). In our previous works on civil–military relations in Asia (Croissant 2015; Croissant 2018; Croissant et al. 2013; Croissant and Kuehn 2009; Croissant and Kuehn 2018; Kuehn 2008; Kuehn 2013), we proposed fully specified causal models that systematically combine the “structure” of causal factors and the “agency” of relevant actors. Analytically, our theoretical argument centers on civilian leaders as relevant actors who do or do not initiate change in civil–military relations (see also Agu¨ero 1995; Trinkunas 2005). In our model, we argue that the success and failure of establishing and upholding civilian control of the military depends on the political elites’ ability to contain the military’s political power through “control strategies” that make the military comply with their political decisions. Civilian strategies vary in the extent of coercion applied against

ANALY TICAL FRAMEWORK AND ARGUMENTS OF THIS BOOK

9

the military and the degree of intrusion into military autonomy. A strategy is robust if it includes a coercive element and intrudes deeply into military autonomy. This includes strategies such as sanctioning, counterbalancing, and monitoring the military. Conversely, a strategy is weak if it neither uses coercion nor intrudes deeply into internal military issues. This includes, for instance, attempts to appease the military by offering corporate or personal political, material, and ideational benefits to the military. While robust strategies can have a more profound impact on the military’s opportunity and disposition to prevent or advert civilian control than weaker strategies, civilian actors do not decide for or against a certain strategy in a political, historical, or social vacuum. Rather, civil–military relations take place within an environmental context that provides resources, opportunities, and constraints to the civilian’s strategy choices (Croissant et al. 2013, 51). This means that even though robust strategies may grant civilians the best leverage against the military, they will not always be feasible or even the best strategy to maximize civilian control. In fact, an all-too-robust approach can have unintended consequences if civilians do not possess sufficient resources to back up their attempts to enforce military compliance. For example, civilian elites may choose a weak strategy and consent to honor compromises that benefit the military during the transition and that restrict the possible range of democratic civilian control, because they fear that any attempt to tilt the balance of power between civilians and the military would provoke potentially dangerous contestation of civilian authority by military officers. The context of these decisions and the resources and opportunities (or lack thereof ) to civilians correspond to the wide range of structural and institutional factors that have been proposed in the existing literature to explain civil–military relations. In Chapter 2, we identify a set of causal factors that plausibly can affect the successful application of civilian control strategies, such as internal and external security threats, international support for democratic reforms in civil–military relations, the strength of civil society, the degree of institutionalization of the democratic regime, a consensually unified civilian elite structure, the legacies of authoritarian civil–military relations, and the strength of popular support for a democratic political system (see also Croissant et al. 2013; Kuehn et al. 2017). In contrast to other approaches, however, we argue that these factors do not affect the degree of civilian control directly, but through the mechanism of control strategies. Fourth, we argue that the effects of different degrees of civilian control on democratic political regimes differ by substantive decision-making areas and affect different partial regimes of embedded democracy in different ways.

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While the existing scholarship is based upon the a priori assumption that effective civilian control is essential for the effective functioning of democratic procedures (Dahl 1989, 250), this relationship is usually neither rigorously theorized nor investigated empirically. Moreover, even studies which have recognized the importance of placing the military under the authority of the elected government have not made it a priority to analyze the consequences of facilitating or—insofar as elected government officials are unsuccessful in their attempts to subordinate the military—obstructing the effective functioning of a democratic regime. In this book, we address these lacunae, and identify the relationship between civilian control and the various aspects of democratic rule. We do not argue that civilian control alone is sufficient for the consolidation or survival of a democracy. As a matter of fact, firm control over the military apparatus can be used by civilians for illiberal and undemocratic means, as in the then-electoral democracy of Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an took advantage of the opportunity of a failed military coup d’état in 2016 to purge the military and strengthen his personal control over the military and other security forces in order to dominate all domains of politics (Sentek 2019; see Chapter 6). Either way, the consequences for democratic governance, and the status of civil liberties and political freedoms can be dire.

1.3 Cases, data, and methods Most existing studies on civil–military relations in new democracies focus on the empirical analysis of a small set of countries in post-communist Eurasia, or cases from Latin America and Southern Europe. There are only very few comparative studies on civil–military relations and democratization in SubSahara Africa or Asia, and comparative cross-regional studies are exceedingly rare (an exception is Barany 2012). These studies of militaries’ roles in democratizations in one part of the world have made important contributions to the knowledge on civil–military relations in individual countries or regions, but they bear some similarity to the parable of the blind men and an elephant: Each study offers insightful accounts of their own country or region, but based on their experience, they cannot agree on what the whole is. Therefore, this study provides descriptions and analyses of civil–military relations and civilian control in 66 countries from six different regions (SubSahara Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, post-communist Eurasia, Southern Europe, East and South Asia, and Northern Africa and the Middle East) that have made at least one transition to democracy between 1974 and

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2010. In this, we draw on an original dataset that has been compiled in two research projects funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) that we conducted at Heidelberg University from 2008 to 2015. As of now, this unique dataset contains the most comprehensive and robust data on civilian control over the military in new democracies around the globe. To evaluate the degree of civilian control for these cases, we undertook extensive and in-depth surveys of the scholarly literature on civil–military relations for each of the countries. While the quantity and quality of the existing scholarship differs across cases, at least 15 scholarly sources (articles, book chapters, and monographs) were consulted for most cases. In some cases, this data was complemented by additional information gathered from legal texts, expert interviews, policy-related documents, and reports by international non-governmental organizations such as the International Crisis Group as well as media reports. The coding of the 14 indicators that we employed to measure the degree of civilian control at a given point in time was conducted by a team of over 20 individual coders, including the authors, and justified with specific references to documentation and specific data points that supported the coders’ conclusions. To maximize validity and cross-case comparability, all coding choices were discussed in regular working sessions in the presence of the authors and all coders. The dataset comprises detailed information on civil–military relations in all new democracies with a population of more than a million (as of 2010) that have made at least one transition to democracy between 1974 and 2010. A regime qualifies as a democracy if it displays a Polity value of +6 or higher according to the Polity IV dataset (Marshall and Jaggers 2013). In order to identify the time of the transition, we chose the first year in which the Polity value was greater than 5 in the 1974–2010 period. We excluded cases where democratization was the result of foreign intervention such as Iraq, Cambodia, or Timor Leste, as in these cases the reform of civil–military relations was strongly dominated by external actors, which constitutes a radically different set of environmental conditions for civil–military interactions than the vast majority of transitions that were dominated by domestic forces. We also excluded countries without permanent armed forces (Haiti, Panama). Finally, to distinguish regimes from temporary democratic interregnums and periods of chaos, we included as cases only democracy spells of at least three years. This threshold is substantively useful in that it derives from the definition of democracy as a regime, that is, a set of institutional rules that need some time to be established, practiced, and changed (Fishman 1990). Accordingly, Thailand from 1992 to 2005 is included in the dataset, but Thailand’s brief democratic

Table 1.1 Countries in the dataset Former authoritarian regime

Sub-Sahara Africa

East & South Asia

Southern Europe

Military

Burundi, Lesotho, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan

S Korea, Pakistan, Thailand

Greece

Military strongman

Benin, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Mali Liberia, Malawi, Sierra Leone Kenya, Senegal, Zambia

Bangladesh

Spain

Philippines

Portugal

Personalist Party

Ruling Monarchy Others

Indonesia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Taiwan

Post-Communist Eurasia

Latin America and Caribbean

Middle East and North Africa

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Uruguay

Turkey

Georgia, Serbia

Dominican R.

Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech R., Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine

Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay

Nepal Namibia, South Africa

Source: Former authoritarian regime types according to Geddes et al. 2014. Note: Italics: At least one autocratic reversal of three or more years during time span.

Lebanon

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interregnum, which followed after military rule between September 2006 and December 2007, did not make the cut (democracy was reestablished in January 2008 but failed again in 2011). These selection rules produce 71 democratic spells in 66 countries, totaling 1,112 country-years. The sample includes countries from all geographical regions except Northwestern Europe and all types of outgoing authoritarian regimes (see Table 1.1), and represents the full range of possible outcomes, from full democratic control to weak (or no) civilian control of the military. In analyzing the development of civil–military relations in the 66 countries, this monograph draws on a multi-method approach that systematically combines multivariate regression analyses with in-depth case studies. The statistical analyses are employed to uncover cross-case patterns in the development of civil–military relations across all cases; to test the theoretical argument on the relevance of the structural and institutional factors for the success and failure of civilian control in new democracies; and to provide an empirical base for selecting cases for in-depth case analyses. However, statistical analysis has its limitations, and the results leave us without a comprehensive explanation for civilian control. Therefore, the case studies in Chapters 4 and 6 serve to provide further empirical detail on civil–military relations in select third wave democracies, to trace the historical development of civilian control, which allows us to test the proposed causal mechanisms, and to provide a more complete picture of the phenomenon of civilian control in new democracies.

1.4 The plan of the book In the following chapters, the principles of analysis and the general theory summarized in this introduction are put to work in the comparative analysis of civil–military relations in 66 third wave democracies. Chapter 2 lays out our concept of civilian control over the military in new democracies which differentiates between five partial areas (Elite Recruitment, Public Policy, Internal Security, National Defense, and Military Organization) and how we operationalize this concept. We then proceed to discuss our theoretical argument that the establishment of civilian control in new democracies is best explained by the interplay between the strategic agency of civilian decisionmakers and the effects of three sets of conditions or potential explanatory factors that can hamper or facilitate the institutionalization of civilian control: (1) initial conditions (including praetorian legacies and military control over the regime transition); (2) civilian bargaining power (including democratic

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institutionalization, international support, and strength of civil society); and (3) factors that shape the military bargaining power vis-à-vis civilian authorities (security environment, socioeconomic development and inequalities, elite conflicts, and mass discontent). This differentiation into three sets of conditions is an analytical one and it allows us to systematically integrate our agency-model of civil–military reforms with the existing literature. Finally, we discuss the concept of “embedded democracy” (Merkel 2004), which consists of five interdependent partial regimes (electoral regime, political rights, civil rights, horizontal accountability, effective power to govern) as the starting point for the discussion of the relationship between the survival of democracy and the democratic quality of political institutions and processes in third wave democracies on the one hand, and the strength or weaknesses of civilian control on the other. We identify two main mechanisms through which civilian control is causally linked to the breakdown of new democracies. The first is the “supplantment” or “displacement” (Finer 1988) of a democratic government or regime by the armed forces. The second is the “weak democracy” mechanism, through which the military either partners with civilian elites in the overthrow of democracy or remains a bystander while civilian incumbents move against the democratic order. We also discuss the relationship between the strength of civilian control and the level of democratic quality in post-authoritarian regimes, focusing on four of the five partial regimes of the embedded democracy. Chapters 3 and 4 describe and explain the empirical patterns of civil– military relations in 71 democratic spells in 66 third wave democracies that lasted at least three years between 1974 and 2010. Chapter 3 sets out with a description of the universe of cases that constitutes the population of our analyses. Next, we present a comprehensive descriptive analysis of intra- and cross-regional patterns, problems, and developments of civilian control in the five individual decision-making areas of civilian control conceptualized in Chapter 2. We then present descriptive evidence on an aggregate measure of civilian control that integrates the five areas of civilian control into a single continuous variable, the Civilian Control Index (CCI). We show that, overall, third wave democracies have been relatively successful in ensuring civilian control over the processes and outcomes of Elite Recruitment and the making of Public Policy. Furthermore, civilians in most new democracies have been able to ensure control over their military’s Internal Security missions (including law enforcement and public order), even though large changes over the course of time remain rare. In contrast, National Defense and Military Organization exhibit a generally lower degree of civilian control than the other areas.

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Within these general patterns, we identify considerable variation across the different regions of the world. Post-communist countries in Eastern Europe and Eurasia started out with comparatively strong traditions of civilian control and registered only moderate changes in levels of civilian control. In contrast, Latin America is the one region in which third wave democracies, on average, had the most difficult initial conditions in terms of civilian control. Despite robust changes in the post-authoritarian period, including the removal of the armed forces from positions of overt political power and the reduction of their informal and formal veto power over policy decisions in many countries, Latin America is still the region with the lowest average degree of civilian control. In Southern Europe, third wave democracies also inherited weak institutions of civilian control. Yet, Greece, Portugal, and Spain experienced the greatest change and achieved the highest average degree of civilian control in 2010. The remaining two regions in our study, Asia-Pacific and Sub-Sahara Africa, experienced less improvement in terms of levels of civilian control, on average, though there are tremendous differences between countries within the two regions. Building on these findings and drawing on the theoretical model presented in Chapter 2, we test the impact of three sets of determinants of civilian control, including 11 explanatory factors that potentially affect civilians’ ability to establish and maintain effective control over military institutions. The statistical analysis finds that of the factors that define civilians’ bargaining power, civil society strength was found to be the single most powerful predictor of civilian control, both in terms of the overall aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI), but also in terms of Elite Recruitment, Public Policy, and Internal Security. Among the set of variables that defines military bargaining power, economic development is the strongest predictor of civilian control, having a strong, positive effect on civilian control, both in the aggregate as well as in all five individual decision-making areas. In contrast, initial conditions such as praetorian legacies and military control over the mode and outcome of the democratic transition seem to be less relevant for explaining civilian successes or failures in establishing civilian control over Military Organization when controlling for other factors, at least in the long run. While the initial conditions were very diverse, civilians in many regions and nations succeeded in pushing the military out of positions of political power and establishing some degree of oversight, or maintaining control already established before or during the transition to democracy. Chapter 4 complements the statistical analyses in Chapter 3 through six case studies that serve two important purposes. First, they provide additional

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qualitative detail and nuances on the data evaluated in the large-N analyses in the previous chapter. Second, they allow us to trace the processes of civil–military interactions after the transition to democracy by analyzing the strategies of political control used by civilians; how they are linked to the structural determinants; and how such strategies affected the transformation and reform of post-authoritarian civil–military relations. Based on the findings in Chapter 3, we analyze three cases of successful institutionalization of civilian control (South Korea, Chile, and Spain) and three cases of failed or weak institutionalization (the Philippines, Russia, and Madagascar). The six case studies allow us to substantiate the relationship between different structural factors and key strategies of civilian control and how such strategies succeeded or failed in institutionalizing democratic civilian control over the armed forces in the respective countries. In this regard, the case studies on the three successful cases of institutionalizing civilian control display important insights regarding the chosen control strategies. On the one hand, there were important differences in the mix of strategies, particularly regarding the early-on prioritization of the role of the defense ministry and a particular emphasis on the democratic socialization of the military, as in Spain and Chile. On the other hand, control strategies such as counterbalancing, selective recruitment, and co-optation of military elites—important especially in the three cases of weakly institutionalized civilian control—were of little (South Korea), or no importance at all (Chile, Spain). Second, governments in all three countries emphasized appeasement and acquiescence in the early years, but successive governments adopted new and effective instruments such as retributive transitional justice, sanctioning military insubordination or sedition, and ministerial and legislative oversight and public control of the armed forces by civil society and media. The governments in Spain, Korea, and Chile benefited from several favorable conditions that strengthened their bargaining power relative to the military’s bargaining power. In all three democracies, the maturing of democratic institutions came with remarkable progress in the development of civil societies, both in terms of the number of organizations, and in terms of their ability to shape political agendas, whereas socioeconomic development was the third beneficial factor, not least because economic growth and prosperity strengthened the performance legitimacy of democratic institutions and political authorities, supported the maturation of political institutions and civil society, weakened the role of coercion as an instrument of political control and competition, mitigated the politically destabilizing effects of distributional conflicts, and

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provided civilian governments with the fiscal space to adequately aliment the military. The three cases of stagnant or weakly institutionalized civilian control differ vastly from the successful cases in terms of strategies deployed by civilians and the structural factors with which they were faced. The most striking similarity between the Philippines, Madagascar, and Russia, however, is the attempt to personalize and centralize political control by the president. In all three states, the extent of civilian control depended (and still depends) much on the strength of the incumbent. All three post-authoritarian nations exhibited weak civil societies (less so in the Philippines, more so in Madagascar and Russia); weak democratic institutions; a challenging economic environment (in Russia in the 1990s); and potential for mass discontent (less so in Russia, more so in the Philippines and, especially, Madagascar). In all three countries, civil– military relations were not determined by institutions, political parties, or the legislature, but mainly depended on the incumbent’s ability to co-opt elites in the security sector, economy, and politics, and to pacify social discontent through a combination of performance, legitimation, and repression. While the previous chapters have treated civilian control in new democracies as the phenomenon to be explained (the “dependent variable”), Chapters 5 and 6 aim to identify the effects of successful or failed civilian control on democratic governance in third wave democracies. In this, we analyze whether the degree of civilian control affects democratic regime survival and the democratic quality of post-authoritarian political regimes. Chapter 5 addresses the question whether the degree of civilian control is correlated with the survival or breakdown of democracy. Multivariate regression analyses confirm that democracies are more likely to survive if civilian authorities achieve a high degree of civilian control of the military. In contrast, where democratic governments lack the effective capacity to rein in the armed forces, the military remains a threat to democratic survival. To account for effects of a weak or declining degree of civilian control on the quality of democracy, we then turn to linear regression analyses of the relationship between civilian control and different partial regimes of the “embedded democracy.” We find that the overall degree of civilian control is a crucial determinant of democratic quality across two partial regimes of embedded democracy: political rights (Partial Regimes B) and civil liberties (Partial Regime C). Our findings suggest that countries in which the military does not enjoy much political influence and is under the control of the democratically elected authorities do better in ensuring the political rights and civil liberties of their citizens. In contrast,

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the overall degree of civilian control had no independent effect on horizontal accountability (Partial Regime D) and electoral integrity (Partial Regime A), though civilian control over Elite Recruitment has a strong, positive effect on the democratic quality of the electoral regime (A) of an embedded democracy. As suggested by extant literature on democratic quality and consolidation, socioeconomic development, measured by the GDP p.c., is the single most powerful predictor of democratic quality across all four partial regimes. The quantitative analyses in Chapter 5 cannot uncover empirically the mechanisms through which civilian control affects the survival and quality of democratic institutions and processes. Consequently, the following Chapter 6 complements the statistical analyses with case studies to understand how the degree of civilian control affects the survival and quality of democracy in third wave democracies. First, the chapter contextualizes the statistical findings in greater detail by delving into the 18 instances of breakdown of third wave democracies from 1974–2010, distinguishing three distinct military roles as (i) perpetrator, (ii) partner, or (iii) bystander in processes of democratic regime breakdown. Second, we conduct two process-tracing case studies to uncover how the development of civilian control has affected political rights and civil liberties. Together, the case study evidence on the two countries corroborates the theoretical arguments outlined in the second chapter of this book. Supporting comparative case evidence from Portugal, Romania, South Africa, and Turkey reiterates the crucial importance of civilian control, not only for democratic survival, but also for the quality of third wave democracies. Chapter 7 concludes the book with a summary of the findings and discussion on their implications for the academic study and political practice of reforming civil–military relations in new democracies. It also outlines paths for future research. Drawing on the statistical and case study insights, we conclude that changes in civil–military relations in new democracies need to be driven by civilians who need to act prudently, systematically making use of the strategic resources at their disposal to institutionalize civilian control. We suggest that civilians should adopt a gradualist approach to civil–military reforms that favors coalition building and a willingness to recognize the legitimate institutional and material interests of the military. This includes some degree of restraint in civilian attempts to increase leverage over the core questions of military organization, especially personnel management, particularly early on in the democratic period. Instead, civilian reformers should concentrate first on ensuring the military’s acceptance of democracy and keeping the military out of the political processes of elite selection and policymaking before attempting to expand their authority into the matters of defense and military

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policy. External democracy-promoters should recognize the crucial importance of civil–military relations for democratic stability and quality and should support domestic civilians in their attempts at institutionalizing civilian control. They, in particular, should emphasize the benefits of a gradual approach toward the restructuring of civil–military relations, and offer training and resources to strengthen civil society and build up effective civilian expertise in defense ministries and parliamentary committees. In terms of future research, our study is relevant for three strands of research. First, our multidimensional approach to conceptualizing and measuring civilian control and the empirical data we collected will be useful to strengthen the nascent scholarship on the nexus between control and military effectiveness. Second, while this book focuses exclusively on new democracies, its conceptual and theoretical apparatus can serve to broaden the study of political–military relations in authoritarian regimes, which thus far has been narrowly focused on the occurrence and avoidance of military coups. Finally, our findings on the crucial role of civil–military relations in democratic stability and quality should also inspire the burgeoning literature on “autocratization” and democratic “erosion” and “backsliding,” which thus far has not sufficiently appreciated the different roles played by military institutions in these processes.

2 Conceptualizing and theorizing civilian control The discussion of civilian control in this book takes place within the general framework of what is called “civil–military relations”—a concept that encompasses all interactions between a state’s armed forces, and the other sectors of society in which the armed forces are embedded. As is typical in political science, we take a narrower focus on the “political–military relations” of a given country, that is, the structures, processes, and outcomes of the interactions between the political regime and its actors on the one hand, and military officers on the other (Croissant and Kuehn 2015, 258). Thus, for our purposes, the “civil” component of the term “civil–military relations” refers to the political leadership, which can best be defined in terms of function. Our main concern are those elites in national governments who have direct influence and decision-making authority over policy issues. The individuals may or may not hold the most senior positions in their organizations. Thus, monarchs, presidents, prime ministers, cabinets, parliaments, party leaders, courts, and parliaments, are all possible forms of civilians (Alagappa 2001, 4; Schiff 2009, 44). The definition of “military” used in this study refers to state organizations or groups of state organizations that fulfill three defining criteria: First, they are permanently established by constitutional law. Second, they claim the monopoly over certain weapons of war. Third, their primary purpose is the application of coercive force to eliminate or deter any threat to the existence of the nation-state (Edmonds 1988, 26). The conventional armed services— army, navy, air force—form the core of the military, but they can also include the marine corps, presidential guards, police and border security troops, and government militias if those are part of or under the command of the armed forces. What is excluded from this definition are non-state armed groups, such as guerilla armies, vigilantes, and terrorist organizations, as well as those state armed forces that are not under the control of the military. This chapter lays out the conceptual and theoretical groundwork for the empirical analyses in the remainder of the volume. It is organized in four parts. Routes to Reform. David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant, Oxford University Press. © David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803362.003.0002

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We first define and conceptualize civilian control. Starting with a definition of civil–military relations that keeps the basic contrast between civilian society on the one hand and the military organization on the other, we argue that civilian control is a particular form of distribution of political authority and decision-making power between political and military elites. We further argue that civilian control is not a question of either/or, but a matter of degree, and that it is useful to analytically disaggregate the concept of civilian control into five different decision-making areas. Our operationalization of each of these decision-making areas allows measuring the civil–military distribution of decision-making authority in each of the five decision-making areas as well as the overall state of civilian control in a given political regime. The second section discusses in detail our theoretical argument that the establishment of civilian control in new democracies is best explained by the interplay between the strategic agency of civilian decision-makers and those structural and institutional factors that define the power resources that allow civilians to enact effective control strategies. This approach also permits us to systematically integrate our agency-model of civil–military reforms into the existing literature. The focus in the third section is on the relationship between democracy and civilian control. As the conceptual starting point, we lay out the concept of the “embedded democracy,” which consists of five interdependent partial regimes (electoral regime, political rights, civil rights, horizontal accountability, effective power to govern). This is followed by a discussion of the relationship between civilian control and each of these five partial regimes as well as the survival of democracy. The final section summarizes the chapter.

2.1 Conceptualizing civilian control The fundamental issue in civil–military relations is how to create and preserve a military that is subordinate to political control but is also effective and efficient. Peter Feaver has called this the “civil-military problematique” (Feaver 1996), and McMahon and Slantchev (2015) describe it as the “guardianship dilemma.” Our focus is on the control aspect of civil–military relations. The issue of political control of the military is not unique to democracies: it also pertains to autocracies and even regimes under military rule (Feaver 1999, 25).¹ If the armed forces of a country are strong enough to deter or eliminate ¹ In military regimes, even though political leaders and fighting groups alike wear uniforms, responsibility is divided between the “military as an institution” and the “military as government” (Stepan 1971). Wearing the same uniform does not prevent those officers who constitute the government from

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threats to the existence of the nation-state, they are also typically strong enough to pose a threat to the political regime and its leadership. Historically, three out of every four failures of democracy were caused by military coups (Marinov and Goemans 2014, 801), but in autocracies, the military was also involved in 60 percent of all extra-constitutional leadership changes in the period from 1946 to 2008 (Svolik 2012). Since Samuel P. Huntington published his seminal study The Soldier and the State in 1957, the development of theory to guide the study of military and politics has been based largely on the theoretical perception that military and civilian authorities constitute two distinct groups and that there is a latent tension between them. This implies a dichotomy between two sharply bounded and coherent institutions. This is not the case in practice. In all states, the “civilians” consist of a variety of actors, subgroups, and organizations. While the military is more cohesive and, per definition, hierarchical, there may be several military actors due to factionalism, inter-services’ rivalries, or because of divide-and-rule strategies of political leaders (Alagappa 2001, 30). The civil–military distinction, however, implies that military officers are actors in their own interest and not just the automatic agents of some civilian wealthy elite, at least not in principle. The perception that military officers always or regularly serve the interest of a specific class (cf. Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Boix 2003) is inconsistent with the empirical evidence from legions of studies on the relation of soldiers, state, and society in Latin America, Sub-Sahara Africa, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. In the twentieth century, scores of countries in the so-called Global South saw their military organizations and officers remain relatively autonomous from powerful societal interests and behave more independently and assertively than in advanced, industrialized democracies (Alagappa 2001; Finer 1962; Huntington 1968; Perlmutter 1974; Nordlinger 1977). Finally, our emphasis on the separation between the civil and military spheres does not suggest adherence to the Huntingtonian assumption that the political leadership, for reasons of national security, should avoid any interference in the military’s professional sphere in order to maximize military effectiveness. We also do not think that civilian political control, by definition, produces good policies. Historically, there are myriads of examples of autocratic and democratic governments that have disparaged military advice and made decisions that corroded military effectiveness and national security. worrying about whether the “military as an institution” is willing and able to defend them or whether others in the military are likely to turn around and unseat them (Feaver 1999, 215).

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However, Peter Feaver (2011) got it right: under civilian control, civilians have the “right to be wrong” even if they do not possess the technical expertise and may live to regret their decision (see also Feaver 1999, 215). However, Deborah Avant’s work on military innovation highlights the importance of civilian monitoring and strong civilian control of the armed forces (Avant 1994), and Barry Posen (1984) convincingly argues that military organizations will stagnate without civilian involvement and will be ill-suited to meet the requirements of their political leaders’ grand strategy.

2.1.1 What civilian control is There is no consensus in the literature as to the definition of civilian control of the military, nor is there agreement on what exactly it entails, or how it should be measured. Until recently, most of the literature equated civilian control with the absence of military coups d’état. However, the assumption that civilian control exists where militaries do not attempt to supplant a government by threat or use of violence, is of limited value. The lack of a coup in a given country can result from diametrically opposed degrees of military power. It may indicate perfect civilian political control over the military; but it can also indicate effective military tutelage over the government so that military officers do not need to carry out a coup in order to compel political leaders to yield resources or policy concessions (Feaver 1999, 218; Narang and Talmadge 2017, 2). While the experiences of third wave democracies such as Thailand, Turkey, and Mali demonstrate that military coups remain a relevant challenge to some electoral democracies that have persisted for over a decade or more (see Chapter 5), military forces today “are more likely to endanger democracy by lessening its quality and depth than by threatening its outright and swift overthrow” (Agu¨ero 2009, 60). Moreover, often militaries do not attempt to expand their political power but want to preserve autonomy from the state and defend existing prerogatives that they acquired during the transition from authoritarian rule to a democratic government (Pion-Berlin 1997, 33; Serra 2010, 44–45). Fortunately, in recent years, scholars have advanced more nuanced understandings of civilian control that share two fundamental assumptions (Croissant et al. 2010; Pion-Berlin 1992, 1997; Pion-Berlin and Martinez 2017; Trinkunas 2005). First, civilian control is about the degree of political authority of civilian elites relative to the military. Thus, it is relational rather than absolute (Pion-Berlin 1997, 33). Second, and related, political–military relations

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can best be understood as a continuum ranging from full civilian control to complete military dominance over the political system. In this sense, we define “civilian control” as a particular state in the distribution of political authority in which civilian political leaders (either democratically elected or autocratically selected) have the full authority to decide on national policies and their implementation. Under civilian control “civilians make all the rules, and they can change them at any time” (Kohn 1997, 142). They may delegate the implementation of some policies to the military, but there is a clear dividing line between political decisions and military implementation of political goals, and the line is wherever the government of the day and the constitution draw it (see also Betts 2009; Gibson 2009, 249; Michael 2007, 522). Civilian control requires the creation of institutions that define the distribution of decision-making and oversight authority such that it favors political leaders. In addition, for civilian control to be present, civilians must be capable of disciplining the military through nonmilitary means. We can only meaningfully speak of civilian control of the military if political leaders can sanction military officers’ actions or behavior that transcends the dividing line between civilian and military spheres of authority and responsibility (North et al. 2009, 170). If civilians do not have authority over all relevant policy matters and sanctioning ability over the military, civilian control is limited or absent, depending on the extent of military power. If a military keeps out of “high politics,” does not engage in meddling with the selection of the political leadership—but does enjoy independent political decision-making power in some substantive policy arenas, for instance in security or defense policy—and remains widely autonomous from civilian interference in its internal affairs, civilian control is limited. If, in addition, the military retains the right to assume an active role in governance when it perceives a crisis, a regime is in fact under military tutelage. Finally, the term “military control” shall be reserved for situations in which the military controls government, usually through collegial bodies representing the officer corps (“military regime”), or because decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a single military officer (“military strongman rule”; Geddes et al. 2014).²

² We do not contend that civilian control is unique to democracy. There is a rich literature on civil–military relations in authoritarian regimes that demonstrates the ability of political leaders to find effective solutions to the “guardianship dilemma” (Bruneau and Croissant 2019; Croissant and Kuehn 2015). Still, we contend that democratic control is more effective and efficient than most kinds of political control in non-democratic systems.

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Notably, our understanding of civilian control does not equate political control of the military with the absence of political activities by military officers. In most democracies, active-duty soldiers engage in activities that are indisputably political, such as joining political parties and casting their ballots in elections. Moreover, a key professional responsibility of military experts is to share their views on military issues with civilian policymakers and to provide advice to political leaders. Even if military leaders do not control decisionmaking, they are certainly involved in the process of making foreign policy and national security policies (Betts 1991; Nielsen 2005, 69; Young 2019). Historically, in many democracies, one can find instances in which military officers employed tactics such as “political appeal,” “politicking,” lobbying over military funding and arms acquisitions, “alliance building,” and “shoulder tipping” (Brooks 2019, 218–219). Such political activities are not trivial. However, they are different from limitations to the elected civilians’ effective power to govern, such as reserved representation of military officers in parliament and institutional autonomy in defense and military policy that characterize political– military relations with incomplete or weak civilian control of the military.

2.1.2 Five decision-making areas Civilian control of the military comes in many shapes. In democracies, it is subject to clear and well-understood rules that must be independent of the identity of political officials. It is concentrated in government, and control over the government is subject to political competition and institutional constraints (North et al. 2009, 110–121, 255). The effective design and use of a certain set of institutions is an indispensable element for ensuring political control of the military, which is jointly exercised by the executive and legislative branches of government—supported by a cadre of expert advisers, the civilian foreign policy and national security community, and a free media. Civilian ministries of defense (MODs) and parliamentary defense committees are key institutions. Nevertheless, their mere presence does not guarantee effective control. For example, Portugal had a ministry of defense that was in reality powerless until the late 1980s, while the MODs in Brazil and Indonesia remain relatively weak in comparison with the influence of the armed forces (Pion-Berlin and Martinez 2017, 185–186; Lorenz 2015). The same has been true of the newly democratized states of East Central Europe and East Asia, which had MODs but not fully-fledged democratic civilian control over defense and military policy until the 2000s (Bruneau and Goetze 2006, 76; Kuehn 2013).

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In order to differentiate various forms and patterns of civil–military relations and to systematically assess the degree of civilian control, scholars proposed to analyze the distribution of decision-making power in various policy areas. The first such systematic multidimensional conception of civil–military relations was Timothy Colton’s seminal study on the changing range and forms of political participation of the Soviet military (Colton 1979). Following Colton’s work, a range of different approaches were proposed to capture the different patterns of the civil–military power relationship (Agu¨ero 1995; Alagappa 2001; Ben-Meir 1995; Pion-Berlin 1992; Trinkunas 2005). Building on this body of scholarship in our previous work (Croissant et al. 2010, 2011, 2013) we have proposed a conceptual framework that disaggregates civilian control into five decision-making areas: Elite Recruitment, Public Policy, Internal Security, National Defense, and Military Organization (see Table 2.1). Full civilian control exists if civilians enjoy uncontested decisionmaking power in all five areas, while soldiers rule over all five areas in the ideal-type military regime. (A) The area of Elite Recruitment defines the rules, criteria, and processes of recruiting, selecting, and legitimizing political office holders, meaning the degree of openness of the political processes to competition, and the degree of participation, that is, the inclusiveness of political competition (Dahl 1971, 4–6). If active support of the military is necessary to obtain or hold control of civilian government institutions (as in Thailand from 2008 to 2014), a society does not have full civilian control of the military. If military officers, who are appointed by military leaders serve in the government, for example as legislators (as in Myanmar from 2010 to 2021), a society does not have full civilian control of the military. Civilian control is also undermined when public offices are excluded from open competition and if the military influences electoral procedures. (B) Public Policy comprises the rules and procedures of the processes of policymaking and policy implementation regarding all national policies except the narrowly understood aspects of security, defense, and military policy. To determine civilian control over policymaking, it must be analyzed to what extent the armed forces can assert their preferences in the processes of agenda setting, policy formulation, and policy adoption. While all policy issues are important to gauge the degree of civilian control over this area, it is particularly relevant if the military has any influence, formal or informal, on the national budget. Regarding control over policy implementation, it must be analyzed to what extent the military is able to exert influence on state administrative agencies charged with implementing political decisions.

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(C) Internal Security entails the decisions and concrete actions regarding the preservation and restoration of domestic law and order, including counterinsurgency operations, counterterrorism and domestic intelligence-gathering, daily law enforcement, and border control (Collier 1999; Trinkunas 2005). Measures of the degree of civilian control over this area are the extent to which civilians formulate the goals and decide on the measures for upholding internal security, the degree of military control over the agencies of domestic security and law-enforcement, and the ability of civilians to exert effective oversight over the military’s internal security operations. (D) National Defense includes all aspects of defense policy, ranging from the development of security doctrines to the deployment of troops abroad and the conduct of war (Alagappa 2001; Trinkunas 2005). Civilian control over this area can be gauged by analyzing to what degree civilians can effectively devise and decide on defense policy, and to what extent they are able to effectively oversee the military’s implementation of these policies. As many studies demonstrate, it is very difficult for civilians in many new democracies to effectively define defense policy (Croissant and Kuehn 2017). The reason for this is that these political leaders often have neither the knowledge nor the political incentives to pay much attention to defense issues, at least in times of “normal politics” (Pion-Berlin and Trinkunas 2007). (E) Finally, the area of Military Organization comprises decisions regarding all organizational aspects of the military institution, including the “hardware,” that is, the military’s institutional, financial, and technological resources, and the “software” of military organization, for instance decisions on military doctrine, education, and personnel selection (Bland 2001; Cottey, et al. 2002). It requires, among other things, that the military as a corporate body does not enjoy ownership of significant economic assets that it can alienate or acquire without consent of the civilian authorities (e.g., in Egypt and Pakistan), does not control its own budget, and does not select its own leaders. Enforcing civilian control over this area is probably the hardest to achieve in new democracies. As Narcı´s Serra (2010, 43) noted, a regime transition “usually leads the armed forces to entrench themselves in military autonomy. The military increase their control over their own organizations and fight off attempts at control from outside, reinforcing, in some cases, the elements that set them apart from the rest of society.” Meanwhile, establishing political control of the military budget will inevitably create conflict between government and the military, whereas taking economic assets away from the military by dissolving military businesses and other alternative sources of revenues implies that governments must secure higher defense budgets. This, however, will be in a

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trade-off relationship with budgets from other ministries and might trigger a “guns-versus-butter” priority debate, which civilian politicians would prefer to avoid (Bowman 2002; Witten and Williams 2011).

2.1.3 How to measure civilian control How do we measure the degree or extent of civilian control? Many scholars have focused on the presence or absence of coups, though this is a poor indicator for the extent to which a military is under civilian control or supremacy (Desch 1999; Feaver 2003). Others proposed to search for signs of military friction or “the degree to which the military is willing to display public opposition to announced civilian policy” (Feaver 1999, 220). While important, this approach suffers a problem similar to the “fallacy of coup-ism” (Croissant et al. 2010): there may be a lack of friction because civilian leaders are securely in charge, or because they are following the military’s lead (Avant 1998, 382–382). We contend that the degree of civilian control in each of the five areas we have described depends on the existence of institutions that enable civilians to exert their authority vis-à-vis the military. We propose fourteen indicators to identify the extent to which effective civilian institutions have been established, and remaining military prerogatives and patterns of contestation circumscribe civilian decision-making power. Based on these considerations, we measure the degree of civilian control in each institutional indicator on a trichotomous, ordinal scale as high, medium, or low. Table 2.1. presents the operationalization and measurement of our multidimensional concept of civilian control. Civilian control on a given indicator is high if the military does not enjoy an acquired right or privilege, formal or informal, to exercise effective control (Stepan 1988, 93). It is medium if the armed forces, due to formal regulations or informal challenges to the civilian leadership, enjoy political privileges but are unable to monopolize them; or if civilian decision-making authority is not institutionalized but depends on the personal rapport of civilians with the military. Civilian control is low if the military dominates decision-making or implementation in that area. By evaluating the degree of civilian control over the five decision-making areas, it is possible to identify the level of civilian control in a given country at a given point in time, as well as track changes over time and identify crosscountry differences. Furthermore, the nuanced analytical framework allows for systematically theorizing the causal factors and mechanisms that explain

Table 2.1 Areas and indicators of civilian control Area

Dimension

Indicator High

Elite Recruitment

Competition for public office

Reserved representation for military personnel Military authority on the rules of political competition

Political participation

Public Policy

Policymaking

No formal or informal guarantees for military representation in political bodies Military has no authority over the selection of political decision-makers

Degree of Civilian Control Medium Low Some privileged access to political office

Majority of decisive political positions are reserved for the military

Some authority over the process of selecting political decision-makers but cannot dominate procedures or outcomes of the process Active-duty officers are eligible in a few individual cases

Military dominates rule-setting, process, and outcomes of elite selection

Eligibility of active-duty military officers

Active-duty officers are not eligible for political office

Military veto power over formation and dissolution of governments

No military influence over the making or breaking of governments

Occasional and isolated de facto influence

Military authority over the budgeting process

No military participation in the allocation of state expenditures

Institutionalized military prerogatives or de facto capture of some budget items

Regular eligibility of military officers or existing rules of non-eligibility are regularly ignored Formal regulations establish military as veto actor or military systematically demands a tutelary role Military dominance over budgetary process Continued

Table 2.1 Continued Area

Dimension

Indicator High

Internal Security

Military authority over public policymaking

No institutionalized prerogatives or informal intervention

Policy implementation

Military authority over public administration

Policymaking

Military authority over internal security policymaking Separation of police/other security agents and military

No military-dominated state-in-state structures and no military oversight of civilian administrative authorities No institutionalized prerogatives or informal intervention Strict separation; no military command over internal security agents except in clearly defined emergencies Institutional framework for monitoring military operations; military accepts civilian oversight

Control over security agents

Civilian oversight over military internal security operations

Degree of Civilian Control Medium Low Some isolated institutionalized or informal military participation Military replaces civilian administration in certain (functional or geographical) areas

Systematic exclusion of civilians from at least one policy field

Some institutionalized or informal military authority Subordination of police or other agencies in limited specified geographic areas or missions

Civilian administrative authorities are under military oversight, or significant militarized parallel structures Systematic exclusion of civilians from internal security decision making Police or other security agents subordinate to military command, or no separate civilian police

Civilian capability to monitor military internal security operations is limited

No effective civilian oversight; military autonomous in the conduct of operations

National Defense

Military Organization

Policymaking

Civilian authority over defense policy making

Policy implementation

Civilian oversight over military defense activities

Policymaking

Civilian authority over decision-making on military “hardware” and “software”

Policy implementation

Military compliance with and civilian monitoring of decisions on “hardware” and “software”

Source: Kuehn et al. (2017).

Institutionalized civilian dominance over defense policy and active day-to-day participation of civilians in defense policymaking; under all circumstances, political leaders remain free to accept or reject the advice of the military experts; military accepts civilians’ policy prerogative Civilians in all branches of government are able to monitor military activities Civilians have full authority over decisions about military organization, the rules of conduct, and the limits of military autonomy, and provide the guidelines for the armed forces’ corporate identity Civilians are able to monitor and audit military activities to guarantee the implementation of their decisions

Lacking or ambiguous legal regulations; military personnel dominate defense bureaucracy; occasional instances of ad hoc military contestation against civilian authority

Civilians are systematically excluded from defense policy decision-making

Military has the ability to selectively withdraw itself from effective oversight Civilian decision-making is limited to certain aspects of military organization due to lack of institutionalized channels, or the military exerts veto power over decisions

Military’s defense operations are not subject to civilian monitoring The military alone defines military organization and determines the scope of its professional autonomy

Military does not implement civilian decisions, or civilians lack institutionalized oversight mechanisms

No civilian oversight; military completely autonomous in internal affairs

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the (un-)successful establishment of civilian control in new democracies, which we address in the following section. Of course, the five policy-making areas differ in how close they are to the military’s own core sphere of influence (National Defense and, especially, Military Organization). The closer an issue area is to the military’s core interests, the harder it might be for civilians to exert control over it. Therefore, we expect that new democracies may find it easier to institutionalize civilian control over Elite Recruitment and Public Policy than over National Defense or Military Organization, resulting in slower expansion of civilian control into core spheres of military interest and different levels of civilian control across different areas (Pion-Berlin 1992; Trinkunas 2005). At the same time the implications of weak civilian control are not the same across those areas. Because they are farther away from the core of the democratic process, weak civilian control over Military Organization or National Defense poses less of a risk for democracy then if civilian control is not firmly institutionalized over Elite Recruitment or Public Policy (Pion-Berlin 1992; Trinkunas 2005).

2.2 Establishing civilian control in new democracies Extant literature on civil–military relations offers an immensely rich tapestry of explanations for the development of military roles in politics. Generally, those explanations reflect the times in which they were developed. They sought to explain military coups d’état and nonintervention in politics in the 1950s and 1960s; the military as an agent of socioeconomic modernization and as state-builder in the 1960s and 1970s; the military’s exit from politics in the 1980s and 1990s; and the political roles of militaries in consolidating democracies and in authoritarian regimes in the 2000s and 2010s. Moreover, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe and Eurasia in the 1990s have led to a revival of theorizing about civil–military relations in mature democratic states.³ The literature on “security sector reform (SSR)” as well as comparative authoritarianism research has also widened the scope and enriched the conversation in the past two decades (Cottey et al. 2002; Edmunds 2012; Geddes et al. 2018; Svolik 2012).

³ For more detail, see Alagappa (2001); Croissant and Kuehn (2015); Feaver and Seeler (2009); Pion-Berlin (2001).

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2.2.1 Existing scholarship Building on Craig Parsons’ typology of theories in political science (Parsons 2007), existing explanations can be grouped into three families of theoretical arguments (Kuehn 2019): ideational, structural, and institutional.⁴ The first category comprises ideational (or normative) approaches, which emphasize the role of beliefs, values, and identities of soldiers, society, or both for shaping civil–military interaction. The classic roots of ideational explanations lie in Huntington’s (1957) argument that military subordination is based on the ethos of the officer corps, which considers acceptance of civilian control as one core responsibility of the professional military officer. In civil–military studies, Huntington’s professionalism theory comes closest to what Geddes (2003) calls a “paradigm.”⁵ However, it lost its hegemonic position because of internal contradictions and its inability to explain the empirical variation of civil–military relations in different regions of the world, though no new paradigm emerged.⁶ A second, society-focused strand emphasizes the role of ideas, norms, and values within civilian society. The most important exponent of this position is Samuel Finer who identified the type of political culture as a key determinant of civil–military relations in developing and industrialized countries (Finer 1985). Other authors focused on the extent of militarization of political cultures and whether cultural values shield democracies from military adventurism and political interventions (Kuehn and Levy 2021; Levy 2016; Mares 1998). Finally, the most recent contribution to the ideational approach is Rebecca Schiff ’s concordance theory, which brings together the two ideational perspectives. The underlying premise of concordance theory is that military acceptance of civilian supremacy is more likely and domestic military intervention can be avoided if there is agreement among the military, the political leadership, and the citizens regarding the composition of the officer corps, the

⁴ According to Parsons (2007), psychological arguments constitute a fourth type. However, our review of the field indicates that psychological explanations are mostly absent from civil–military relations’ research (Kuehn 2019). ⁵ By “paradigms,” Barbara Geddes (2003, 2–3) refers to the “collections of theories, hypotheses, applications, and favored methodologies [that] encompass a set of factual and explanatory knowledge claims, in other words, theories, that are widely accepted by adherents. And they structure further research: determining which facts are theoretically salient, defining what constitutes a paradox and what questions urgently require answers, identifying which cases need to be examined, and what kinds of evidence are considered meaningful.” ⁶ Critical reviews of Huntington’s theory are legion; for some more recent contributions, see Feaver (1996, 1999, 2003); Nielsen and Snider (2009); and Travis (2017).

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political decision-making process, recruitment, and military style, including separation or removal of civil–military boundaries (Schiff 2009). Accordingly, there is not a single but multiple models of civil–military relations that all can produce civilian control of the military, including the strict separation of military and civilian spheres of responsibilities that lies at the core of Huntington’s professionalism model. However, as Schiff acknowledges, her theory does not address the question “why it is that some nations can or have achieved concordance while others have not” (Schiff 2009, 13). The second category of theoretical arguments comprises structural explanations that focus on the domestic and/or international contexts that guide civil– military interactions, identities, and interests. Domestic-focused explanations emphasize the effect of social and economic structures and developments of a given society on civilian control and civil–military frictions. The list of factors includes economic conditions such as poverty (Luttwak 1968), development and underdevelopment (Alagappa 2001; Huntington 1968), and poor economic growth and decline (Geddes et al. 2018; Londregan and Poole 1990; O’Kane 1987); economic inequality and distributive conflict (Acemoglu et al. 2008; Needler 1975; Svolik 2012); horizontal inequalities and ethnic conflicts (Harkness 2016); and national resource endowments and economic dependence (Acemoglu et al. 2008; Collier and Hoeffler 2006; Kposowa and Jenkins 1993). One of the most recent contributions to this tradition is Milan Svolik’s theory of civil–military interaction. According to Svolik (2012), economic inequality and military intervention into politics follow a curvilinear relationship: military coups are particularly likely in countries with medium levels of economic inequality, while highly unequally and very equally distributed wealth will lead to more stable civil–military relations. In contrast, international explanations highlight the impact of international military cooperation and military assistance (Rowe 1974; Ruby and Gibler 2010; Savage and Caverley 2017), foreign powers’ policy signals to national military leaders (Thyne 2010), or membership in international organizations (i.e., NATO, EU) for the prevention of coups and the establishment of civilian control in new democracies (Barany 2012; Pion-Berlin et al. 2019). According to these perspectives, strong linkages with democratic countries and leverages of Western, mature democracies raise the costs of military interventions into politics (e.g., Marinov and Goemans 2014). Finally, threat-based theories of civilian control emphasize the causal role of external and internal security threats (Desch 1999, 11). External and internal threats create opposite motives and opportunities for civil–military interaction: external threats are argued to decrease military political involvement

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because the pressures of international competition discipline military adventurism and provide a mission toward which resources must be devoted. In contrast, a primarily domestic threat configuration leads to increasing military involvement in politics, as the military becomes a maker of domestic political decisions (Desch 1999; Staniland 2008, 334; Woo 2011, 8–17). Third, a number of (neo-)institutionalist explanations for development and non-development in civil–military relations have been developed. Institutions, defined, as “formal or informal procedures, routines, norms, and conventions embedded in the organizational structure of the polity or political economy” (Hall and Taylor 1996, 938) structure civil–military relations by defining power relations and hierarchies, empowering some actors while closing channels of power to others (Croissant et al. 2013, 47). There are two broad categories of institutionalist arguments: one highlights the role of regime types, the other focuses on the impact of different civilian institutions and control mechanisms. Regime-type explanations focus on how properties of authoritarian political–military relations affect post-authoritarian civil–military relations. In societies with a long tradition of politically empowered military establishments, the goal of post-authoritarian civil–military reforms is the “demilitarization of politics.” In contrast, party regimes and ruling monarchies often have a strong tradition of military subordination under the supremacy of the ruling party or under the helmet of a dynastic ruler. Thus, the reform objective in these settings is the “depoliticization of the military” (Barany 2008, 601). In contrast, advocates of the “democracy advantage” thesis basically argue that democratically established institutions are the most effective means by which the armed guardians of a state’s security can be guarded from their own organizational impulse to take over the reins of government (Bruneau and Tollefson 2006, 264). First, democracies tend to be better than authoritarian regimes in channeling social grievances and interests into the political arena, which pacifies political conflicts and reduces the likelihood that social problems become so pressing that large shares of the population would support military intervention in politics (Lehoucq and Pérez-Liña´n 2014). Secondly, because democracies provide comprehensive guarantees of civil liberties and political rights, they tend to have stronger civil society organizations that can act as “powerful safeguard[s] against military intervention when they ‘talk back’ or resist a coup by mobilizing protests or refusing to comply with plotters” (Belkin and Schofer 2003, 605). Yet, it is only through the effective use of democratically established institutions that civilians may actually assert control (Bruneau and Tollefson

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2006, 264; see also Pion-Berlin 1992; Pion-Berlin and Martinez 2017). Therefore, another group of (neo-) institutionalist arguments focuses on specific mechanisms and institutions to control the military. Deborah Avant, David Pion-Berlin, and Peter Feaver separately pursued different forms of neoinstitutionalist explanations. Pion-Berlin theorized how the properties of institutional design either facilitate or inhibit military attempts to influence policy processes in post-authoritarian civil–military relations in the Southern Cone (Pion-Berlin 1997). Deborah Avant (1994) and Peter Feaver (2003) have taken a different approach, applying adaptations of the principal–agent framework to explain the state of civilian control and military responsiveness in mature democracies. Avant argues that structural differences between political institutions—unified in Britain but separated between executive and legislative branches of government in the United States—provide different incentives for military and political actors to create an army that is sensitive to civilian goals and enable civilian leaders to force necessary military change (Avant 1994, 10). Peter Feaver’s neo-institutionalist delegation theory treats civil–military relations in mature democracies as a principal–agent relationship, with the civilian executive monitoring the actions of military agents, the “armed servants” of the nation-state. The interactions of political and military actors play out in the specific institutional setting of the government, and military obedience is not automatic but depends on strategic calculations of whether civilians will catch and punish military misbehavior (called “shirking”) (Feaver 2003, 54–75). Finally, the flourishing “coup-proofing” literature focusses on the specific strategies of governments to control their military organizations (Brown et al. 2016; De Bruin 2020; Escribà-Folch, Bo¨hmelt, and Pilster 2020; Greitens 2016; Pilster and Bo¨hmelt 2015; Quinlivan 1999). Where military loyalty is mainly based on the preferential recruitment of military officers based on group membership such as ethnicity, family relations, or party membership, military interventions against governments are unlikely to occur and succeed. Alternative mechanisms of “coup-proofing” such as intrusive monitoring of the military through intelligence services and counterbalancing the military’s potential political power with other security agencies might actually trigger preventive coups by the military (Sudduth 2017). While much of this scholarship focuses on authoritarian regimes, such arguments have also been used to explain the implementation of civilian control in democracies. For example, Peter Feaver discusses a set of six mechanisms for civilian monitoring at different levels of intrusiveness, and five broad mechanisms of civilian punishment of the military (Feaver 2003). Finally, as we elaborate in more detail in the

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next section, our approach also focuses on the different control strategies that political leaders in new democracies can apply.

2.2.2 Our approach The difficulty with civil–military relations theory, as we have seen, is not the lack of proposals for variables that potentially affect civil–military relations. But, “the field has simply not produced a large body of consensus findings that enjoy widespread support and that would apply with equal force to a wide range of countries” (Feaver 1999, 236). To address this theoretical weakness, we propose an approach to theory building that draws on a number of individual existing theoretical arguments, but integrates them into a coherent, integrative model of civil–military relations in new democracies. To that end, we start by theorizing a model of the process (or mechanism) through which civilian control becomes established (or not) and integrate the various factors that are commensurate with the underlying theoretical logic into this model. In our previous works on civil–military relations in emerging democracies (Croissant et al. 2010, 2011, 2013; Kuehn et al. 2017), we argued that the success of civilian efforts to establish and uphold democratic civilian control depends on the ability of political leaders to contain the military’s political authority and their ability to resist civilian supremacy through “control strategies.” These control strategies are the mechanism through which civilian control works. However, we argue that elected civilians in new democracies need resources to use different strategies of political control. These resources correspond to the wide range of explanatory factors proposed in the existing literature. Different from what has often been suggested in this research field, however, we argue that they do not affect the degree of civilian control directly, but through the mechanism of control strategies. Our theoretical argument thus integrates existing arguments into a coherent explanatory framework that mitigates two of the major shortcomings of existing approaches: the focus on competing single-factor explanations, and the under-specification of the causal mechanisms through which the proposed factors affect civil–military relations (Kuehn 2019). Before discussing our framework, two caveats are in order. First, our approach is not designed to explain extrication from authoritarian rule in

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general, or democratization from military rule in particular (e.g., Geddes 1999; O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986; Przeworski 1991; Wright and Escribà-Folch 2012). Second, we assume that reforms in civil–military relations essentially have an endogenous character. External support or developments elsewhere may be an important ingredient for the implementation of such reforms, as the security sector reform literature stresses (Blair 2013; Born 2006; Edmunds 2012). Still, the engines of change in civil–military relations are primarily internal. To create a new situation of stability, military reforms must have an endogenous character: “External support and similar developments elsewhere are to be welcomed but these factors cannot replace the domestic forces that have to conceive and execute reform” (Serra 2010, 241).

2.2.3 The causal mechanisms: Civilian control strategies Analytically, our theoretical argument centers on elected civilians as relevant actors who do or do not initiate reforms in post-authoritarian civil–military relations. We assume that civilians will generally be interested in extending their authority and oversight over the military and reducing the military’s prerogatives and spheres of political influence. This does not mean that civilian actors would not accept constraints on their own decision-making power posed by powerful military elites during the democratic transition. Indeed, the “military challenge” for civilian actors is how to achieve the inauguration of a democratic government without provoking military resistance, and accepting the military’s reserved domains of policymaking can help to accomplish the extrication from authoritarian rule without being deposed (Agu¨ero 1995; Przeworski 2003, 81–85). Once this transition has been accomplished, however, civilian leaders have incentives to reduce military autonomy and decision-making prerogatives to protect democratic institutions against future threats and to satisfy the demands of interest groups, political constituencies, or rival ministries for cuts in military spending and the reallocation of scarce resources (Agu¨ero 1998; Hunter 1997, 8–16; Pion-Berlin 2006). On the other hand, the military leadership will, all else being equal, prefer to keep more prerogatives and, therefore, less civilian control. Military bureaucracies are resistant to change, prefer the status quo and, if they are to change, they favor incremental reform because it minimizes disruption and provides opportunities for them to influence the process during the implementation period (Posen 1984, 2). This is due to the military’s three basic sets of

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motives: institutional, functional, and relational. Institutionally, the military’s foremost goal is survival as a state organization, and secondly maximization of its autonomy, organizational power, and access to perks and privileges. Functionally, the military generally prefers internal and external security, social order, and stability (Abrahamsson 1972, 75–79; Finer 1962; Huntington 1957; Nordlinger 1977, 53–61). In addition, the military will also have certain preferred views on how to pursue defense and security policy, which might or might not be similar to the views of the civilians (Avant 1994; Feaver 2003). Finally, the military’s relational (Feaver 2003) interest centers on maintaining autonomous authority over decision-making matters and freedom from oversight beyond the core institutional and functional interests. This is valuable because it allows the military to preserve their decision-making autonomy, generous budgets, numerous perks and privileges, and even immunity from prosecution. Militaries prefer not to give up these advantages (Croissant et al. 2011; Hunter 1997; Pion-Berlin 1997; Pion-Berlin 2006). The challenge for civilians, then, is to cut back on existing military prerogatives and the military’s ability to resist attempts to establish and enforce civilian supremacy. We argue that to do so, civilians have to rely on what we and others have called “control strategies” (Croissant et al. 2013; Trinkunas 2005). Based on the existing scholarship on mechanisms of civilian control and coup-proofing, we conceptualize six ideal-typical control strategies, which can be grouped into two broad categories. First, robust strategies that include a coercive element and intrude deeply into internal military issues, such as monitoring, counterbalancing, and punishing the military. Second, weak strategies that neither apply coercion nor intrude deeply into internal military issues. These include, for instance, attempts to appease the military by offering corporate and individual spoils for the military and its leaders. The actual control mechanisms can entail a variety of institutional techniques and practices, each of which carries its own particular advantages and disadvantages. The first and most robust strategy is counterbalancing. It means that civilians try to strengthen their authority over the military by taking advantage of inter-service and intra-agency conflicts among different segments of the security sector. This mechanism includes playing off different armed services against each other, the creation of paralleled armed organizations (such as paramilitary police, presidential guards, or special security forces not under the command of the military), and other balancing mechanisms (Feaver 2003, 82). For example, Frazer (1995) explicitly advocates civilians establish competing institutions with coercive capabilities (such as separate paramilitary

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groups), which can serve as counterweights deterring military insubordination and/or compelling military compliance with civilian authorities. Many civilian autocrats rely on counterbalancing to prevent military leaders from overthrowing them (De Bruin 2017; Lutscher 2016; Pilster and Bo¨hmelt 2011; Pilster and Bo¨hmelt 2015). Yet, the burgeoning literature on coup-proofing suggests that counter-balancing lowers military effectiveness in warfighting (Pilster and Bo¨hmelt 2011; Talmadge 2015). In addition to the fact that counterbalancing might generate resentment among the military leadership who might feel their privileges threatened, it is a more costly and less attractive mechanism for democratic governments (Pilster and Bo¨hmelt 2012). A second set of strategies concerns the sanctioning and punishment of military attempts to defy, oppose, circumvent, or break civilian authority. Specific measures include cutting defense budgets, reducing privileges previously enjoyed by the military, and constraining military autonomy, but also variations on forced detachments from the military such as discharges, purges, and “reputational attacks” (Feaver 2003, 87–94; Herspring 2001, 3). One frequent example of this approach in new democracies is the purge of segments of the officer corps or factions of the armed forces who had been the dominant power group during the authoritarian regime. In contrast to mature democracies, however, political leaders in new democracies may be uncertain whether they can punish the military without provoking a military backslash. Therefore, the threat to punish military behavior may not be credible. While it is difficult to change the internal characteristics of the military, especially in democracies, and punishment is often neither feasible nor effective, monitoring as a control strategy is essentially concerned with the creation of screening, oversight, and reporting systems inside or outside the armed forces (Feaver 2003, 75–87; Nelson 2002, 158; Trinkunas 2005, 11). While monitoring alone cannot enforce compliance, the very possibility of detecting misbehavior and the anticipated costs concerning the military’s legitimacy, reputation, or professional pride reduce the probability of military insubordination (Feaver 2003, 68–75). External monitoring mechanisms include institutions such as parliamentary committees and a system of (civilian) ombudsmen, and the use of third parties to watch the military and report on the activities and outputs, such as the news media and defense-oriented think tanks (Cottey et al. 2002b). Intra-service monitoring includes, among other things, regularized inspection to deter insubordination, public investigative hearings, and specific mandated reports (Feaver 2003, 81–85). The most intrusive form is the notorious Soviet model of a dual chain of military and political command throughout the armed forces by appointing political

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commissars (Perlmutter and LeoGrande 1982). Another internal monitoring device is military intelligence services responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information concerning military units and services. In contrast to non-democracies, however, these mechanisms are difficult to implement or to legitimate in democracies, which is why democracies tend to rely on less intrusive internal mechanisms and put greater weight on external forms of monitoring. A fourth mechanism concerns military socialization in democratic values and fostering democratic professionalism through professional training and education. Political education and ideological indoctrination have been frequent forms of changing military ethics, especially in revolutionary party regimes and totalitarian systems. Yet, scholars and policymakers also argue that military education programs, often involving foreign military assistance and military educational exchanges organized by Western democracies, help to install democratic values in officers hailing from recently democratized states (Atkinson 2006; Atkinson 2010; Blair 2013). They aim at transforming the ideational makeup and self-conception of the military and involve military and civic education programs, confidence-building measures such as higher education for officers at civilian institutions and in international training programs (Bruneau and Trinkunas 2008), and the reorganization of leadership principles in order to strengthen the acceptance of democratic civilian control. In contrast to most other mechanisms of democratic civilian control, educating democratic soldiers tends to be a long-term strategy and is less suited for the short-term enforcement of civilian supremacy (Frazer 1995, 40–41; Herspring 2001, 331–333; Larson 1974). The fifth strategy is ascriptive selection or “preferential recruitment,” most often at the officer level, to ensure that only individuals enter into the higher ranks of the officer corps who share civilian preferences. In authoritarian regimes, this strategy aims at forging bonds between regime and military elites based on shared ethnic, tribal, regional, or sectarian affiliations between the two groups (Brown et al. 2016; Harkness 2021). In democracies, and especially in those with mass armies, more regularized practices are parliamentary and ministerial screening and promotion and selection procedures for most senior and sensitive posts that simply aim to winnow out people who do not accept the idea of civilian control (Feaver 2003, 79). However, as Huntington (1957) argues, tinkering with ascriptive characteristics, an element of what he calls “subjective control,” runs the risk of politicizing the military such that it becomes an arena for the political struggle of the various civilian groups

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represented or not represented in the accession policy and thereby enfeebling civilian control in the long term (Feaver 1999, 227). Finally, the sixth and weakest control mechanism is acquiescence, which includes all attempts by political leaders to generate military loyalty in exchange for granting corporate or personal privileges and spoils to the armed forces. A first form of appeasement is based on what Claude Welch (1976) described as “noli-me-tangere” approach: civilians tolerate a degree of autonomy to the military in matters of lesser importance as an incentive for military acceptance of the ethic of subordination. Other forms would include impunity for past or current human rights abuses and refraining from intrusion on the military’s political prerogatives (Agu¨ero 1995; Agu¨ero 2001; Feaver 2003, 78). Finally, this strategy may also concern the distribution of financial spoils and attendance to the economic demands of individual officers, factions, or the military-as-institution (Mani 2011). This includes, but is not restricted to, sustaining or increasing levels of defense budgets and tolerating the military’s ownership, management, or stake-holding of economic enterprises that generate financial resources or goods directly benefiting the military.

2.2.4 The power resources of civilian control strategies None of these six strategies in itself is sufficient, and although we expect that robust strategies may grant political leaders the best leverage against the military, they will not always be available or, if chosen, succeed in enforcing civilian control. In fact, an all-too-robust approach can have unintended consequences and might lead the military to openly challenge civilian authority if civilians do not possess sufficient material or institutional resources to back up their attempts to enforce military compliance. Under these circumstances, civilians might need to resort to weaker strategies. For example, civilian leaders may choose to appease the military and consent to military tutelage that restricts the possible range of democratic outcomes, because they worry that any attempt to impose civilian control could provoke a military backlash. Ultimately, then, we can conceive of the establishment and enforcement of civilian control as a bargaining struggle over the distribution of decisionmaking power between civilian and military elites that is affected by three sets of factors: initial conditions, civilian bargaining power, and military bargaining power. The distinction between the three sets is analytical in nature and has primarily an ordering function. The three categories include a total of 11 factors, which plausibly could affect the successful application of civilian control strategies in new democracies.

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Initial conditions define the difficulty for civilian elites to establish and maintain civilian control after the transition. Historical legacies of military engagement in politics under previous regimes can influence the pace and scope of military reforms in new democracies, but they do not determine their outcomes (Agu¨ero 1995, 1998). In the short term, however, civilians need to spend more political capital on establishing civilian control if the military was the dominant force in the authoritarian ruling coalition and managed to play a key role in the transition to democracy, safeguarding or extending existing prerogatives. At the same time, civilians can make use of existing instruments of civilian control to exert influence over the military while the military will find it hard to resist if it has little institutionalized political clout. In sum, two aspects define the initial conditions: praetorian legacies, especially the preceding type of authoritarian regime, and the degree of military control over the process and outcome of the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Praetorian legacies. Neo-institutionalist approaches in civil–military relations and in democratization studies agree that the legacies of military engagement in politics under authoritarian (and pre-authoritarian) regimes play an important role for the pace and scope of military reform in post-authoritarian democracies (Agu¨ero 1995; Agu¨ero 1998; Barany 1997; Barany 2012). Legacies of “military praetorianism,” that is, a tradition of politically empowered military establishments and commonplace military interventions into politics affect civilian control in a nominally democratic system through a number of causal roots. First, democracies may simply lack institutional models through which political leaders can exercise control over the military. Without such an apparatus of civilian control, the choice faced by democratic governments may be one of either tolerating military autonomy or destroying the armed forces altogether. In contrast, political leaders in newly democratized states will find it easier to employ robust control strategies if they can rely on institutions of civilian control that have been established during the authoritarian regime, for example in well-institutionalized dominant-party regimes (Cottey et al. 2002; Croissant 2018). Furthermore, in military authoritarian regimes, the armed forces as a whole are likely to enjoy privileged political and economic power— and they may want to preserve those privileges under democratic institutions (Stepan 1988). In addition, societies with a praetorian legacy have a history of recurrent coups. One of the more solid findings in contemporary coup studies is that the occurrence of coups in the past increases the probability of coups in the future (Belkin and Schofer 2003; Londregan and Poole 1990). The more often coup attempts have succeeded in the past, the more likely it is that would-be coup plotters will believe that another coup attempt will also succeed, and the more likely it is that military officers possess the strategic

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skills, and military units have the organizational capabilities to execute a coup. Moreover, coups tend to undermine civilian institutions, such as legislatures and courts, that are necessary for serving as a check against future coups (Belkin and Schofer 2003, 608). In sum, the variation in civil–military institutional arrangements in authoritarian regimes affects the ability of civilians in post-authoritarian regimes to achieve robust political control of the military. Where civilian control has been weakly institutionalized under the authoritarian regime, as is the case typically in societies with strong praetorian legacies and, more specifically, institutionalized military rule, civilian leaders find it more difficult to establish political control over the armed forces compared to societies without a past of military interventionism and civilian autocracies. Military control over the transition. While post-authoritarian civil–military relations are not predetermined by historical contexts of the preceding regime, the persistence of its power structures may play an important role in the emerging democratic polity. Military elites tend to prioritize the maintenance of military unity, institutional autonomy, economic privileges, or immunity from human rights prosecution more than maximizing their stay in power. Military regimes are therefore more likely to negotiate their extrication and make bargains with civilian elites, which lead to democratization (Geddes et al. 2014, 153–154; Wright and Escribà-Folch 2011, 284). The stronger the military’s sway over the transition towards a democratic government, the stronger are the guarantees for military autonomy and privileges. These deals are more difficult to be revised by democratic leaders when military leaders had permitted the development of military-backed patronage parties, because this increases the likelihood that allies of the military have significant representation in democratically elected bodies such as constituent assemblies, state legislatures, or the presidency (Wright and Escribà-Folch 2011, 292–293). Thus, we expect that, under such conditions, democratic leaders will find it difficult to install political control over the military. The outcome may be a democracy in which some sectors associated with the authoritarian regime continue to enjoy the protection of the armed forces, whereas the armed forces will exercise tutelage over the democratic process (Diamond 2008, 181–182; Przeworski 2003, 86). Initial conditions have an impact on the trajectories of post-authoritarian civil–military relations, but they do not determine the outcome of military reforms in new democracies. The second set of factors affect what we call civilian bargaining power, that is, elected civilians’ ability to challenge the military’s existing prerogatives, their vulnerability to the costs of conflict with the military intent on holding onto its privileges, and their ability to resist a potential military backlash to civilian attempts to expand civilian control: the larger their bargaining power, the more likely it is that they will be able

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to successfully employ robust control strategies against a resistant military. Ultimately, civilian bargaining power, their assertiveness, ability to persist in conflict, and cost vulnerability depend on the support they receive from within and without the polity (for a general discussion, see Moe 2005; Tsebelis 2002, Chapter 2). Drawing on the previous discussion of the existing literature, we identify three sources of support civilians can draw on to confront the military: the degree of institutionalization of the democratic system, the strength of civil society, and international support for democratic reforms in civil–military relations. Institutionalization of the democratic system. Following Haggard and Kaufman who adopt Samuel Huntington’s definition, we define institutionalization as a process through which organizations and procedures achieve stability and gain sufficient significance to surpass their function (Haggard and Kaufman 2016, 226–227; Huntington 1968, 12). A democratic system is highly institutionalized when all relevant political actors develop expectations and behavior based on the premise that the fundamental contours and rules of the democratic process and the political behavior of the relevant actors will prevail into the foreseeable future. In a highly institutionalized democracy, the relevant political actors do not attempt to work against or act outside of the democratic institutions and procedures. Political conflicts will be resolved according to the established democratic norms and procedures, and violations of these norms and rules are likely to be both ineffective and costly (Linz and Stepan 1996). Both political incumbents and challengers respect the results of free and fair elections, constitutional constraints on democratically generated power are respected, civil liberties and political freedoms are protected, and winners and losers of the political contestation alike expect the other side to fully commit to the adherence to the democratic rules of the game (Haggard and Kaufmann 2016, 227). This makes military insubordination more costly because it raises the expectation that in the case of civil–military friction, the mass public will support the democratic leaders against the military (Belkin and Schofer 2003; Diamond and Plattner 1996; Feaver 1999). We expect, therefore, that the institutionalization of a democracy—if successful—positively affects the ability of political leaders to strengthen their authority over the armed forces and to roll back military power and privileges. Civil society. A few studies highlight the importance of “perpetually lived organizations,” such as viable political parties and a rich associational life (North et al. 2009, 171, 259) for the institutionalization of political control over the military. There are a number of causal routes through which civil society and political organizations can strengthen civilian leverage vis-à-vis the military. First, democratic control of the military is greatly facilitated if

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the legislative and executive branches of government can draw on external controls of the military. Non-governmental organizations, civic associations, think tanks, and the media can provide such external monitoring and, thus, help to reduce the civil–military information asymmetry and lower the costs of civilian oversight of the security sector. This form of “public control” would complement control by the executive, legislature, and judiciary (Lorenz 2015). Second, by starting public debates and “increase[ing] public literacy on security issues” (OECD 2007, 39), civil society can help prepare the political terrain for later reforms when military elites and their political allies are opposed to certain aspects of military reform. For example, Trinkunas finds that civil society organizations can force civilian decision-makers into employing more robust strategies than originally intended (Trinkunas 2000, 92). Similarly, human rights groups can use the courts to initiate human rights trials against the military even when the government decides to refrain from doing so (Trinkunas 2005, 242–243). Finally, such organizations can act as crucial backstops against power-grabbing impulses of their militaries because they enhance the possibility of collective and organized resistance against military encroachments into politics (Belkin and Schofer 2003, 605; Caparini et al. 2006; Zunes 2017). International support. Democracy promoters that are active in the field of civil–military relations reform highlight a particular liberal understanding of civil–military relations that emphasizes civilian control over the military as a key element of democratic reforms (Bruneau and Trinkunas 2006, 778). Key actors in the field are (mostly Western) governments and their development cooperation agencies, the OECD, and other international or supranational organizations. In particular, the European Union (EU) has promoted civil and democratic control of armed forces in Central and Eastern European countries as well as Turkey as part of those countries’ pre-accession process. Some scholars contend that the EU’s rigorous architecture of monitoring and enforcement of the 1993 Copenhagen criteria strengthened the civilian bargaining power vis-à-vis the military by shifting the power configuration in favor of the civilians and provided compelling pressure to strengthen their democratic control systems (Betz 2004; Cottey et al. 2002; Duman and Tsarouhas 2006). Similarly, NATO in the 1990s “firmly resolved democratic principles as both a mainstay of its new security concerns and a requirement for admission” (Diamond 2008, 140; McMahon and Baker 2006, 78), enhancing civilian-led defense institutions which subordinate the military. In addition, both scholars of civil–military relations and defense education practitioners have promoted multinational training in defense education institutions as a means to transfer democratic norms of civilian control to foreign officers (Blair 2013). Others,

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however, note that despite the efforts by Western governmental agencies to promote democratic reforms in civil–military relations, there have been only a few attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of such programs systematically (Bruneau and Trikunas 2006, 778; Cunningham 2015; Krieger 2018). Moreover, some studies also cast doubt on the significance of the impact of NATO enlargement and EU accession mechanisms on civilian control in new democracies in Europe and the EU’s neighborhood (Pion-Berlin et al. 2019; Sentek 2020). The third set of factors determine military bargaining power. We consider military bargaining power to be dependent on factors that increase the military’s actual ability to engage in and withstand a conflict with civilian elites, as well as factors that diminish civilians’ willingness to challenge the military’s existing prerogatives, for instance because civilians require the military’s support to stay in office against challenges from within and beyond national borders. The existing scholarship suggests six potential factors that might challenge civilians’ position in office and make it dependent on the military’s coercive power: domestic and international security threats, levels of economic development and inequality, and political polarization at both elite and mass levels. Security threats. According to threat-based theories of civilian control, external and internal security threats create opposite motives and opportunities for civilian leaders to implement civilian control over the armed forces. Many studies contend that intense internal security threats and intrastate armed conflict emphasize the military’s internal security role and, thus, reduce the willingness and ability of civilians to employ robust control strategies. In contrast, there is less scholarly agreement on the effect of external threats on civil–military relations. Some highly influential studies argue that external threats decrease military political involvement and contribute to better civilian control because the pressures of international competition and crisis underscore the need for the military to withdraw from politics in order to increase military effectiveness. A heightened external security risk helps to forge civilian–military unity of purpose and provides incentives for the military to focus on its external security role and for civilians to develop awareness of security threats as well as expertise in defense and national security affairs (Andreski 1968; Desch 1999; Huntington 1968; Staniland 2008; Woo 2011). However, others stress that the effect of external threats is similar to that of domestic threats as they put a premium on the military’s coercive abilities and pose a barrier for civilians to alienate the military (Agu¨ero 1995; Alagappa 2001; Lasswell 1941; Thompson 1975). In line with our general argument, we follow this second strand and expect that civilians will be less willing to

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confront the military’s prerogatives when they face internal or external security threats. Economic development and inequality. Socioeconomic development has long been considered crucial to explain civil–military relations as it raises standards of living and softens social conflict (Agu¨ero 1995; Alagappa 2001; Huntington 1996; Luttwak 1968; Londregan and Poole 1990; Needler 1975). At the same time, socioeconomic modernization, driven by economic development, usually leads to the emergence of a large middle class that cushions the conflict between the ultra-rich elite and the underprivileged masses (Boix 2003; Lipset 1959; Lipset 1981). Furthermore, economic development also tends to result in the growth of the civilian parts of the state apparatus that can act as a counterweight to the political power of the military (Alagappa 2001, 50). Finally, a diversified and large economy provides revenue chances outside of the state for the political elite and options outside of the military institution for officers dissatisfied with their careers, thereby reducing the potential for existential conflict between civilian elites and military officers (Cheibub et al. 1996). All these effects of modernization reduce the relevance of coercion as an instrument of political competition and, thus, weaken the military’s bargaining power vis-à-vis civilians. On the other hand, contemporary “distributive conflict models” (Haggard Kaufman 2012; Haggard Kaufman 2016; Pengl 2013) in democratization and authoritarianism studies argue that it is not economic development per se that affects the potential for disruptive conflict in society—and hence the prevalence of military coercion. Rather, these scholars stress the contentious effects of economic inequality: economic inequality increases the benefits the elites draw from the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, since democratic redistribution is more severe than in equal societies. On these grounds, several scholars hypothesize that inequality hinders democratic consolidation (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Boix 2003; Houle 2009). Accordingly, civil– military relations reflect the extent to which political leaders must rely on military coercion to prevent the poor masses from revolting against economic inequality (Alagappa 2001; Acemoglou and Robinson 2006; Svolik 2012). In countries with high levels of economic inequality, the military might be indispensable in repression which allows them to acquire a politically pivotal role and, in turn, greater autonomy and resources. In societies at low levels of income inequality, mass threats to the regime are small. Rulers do not depend on their militaries for internal repression. Because the military is not in a politically pivotal position, these regimes are able to achieve “perfect political control” of the military. In contrast, governments in societies at higher levels of economic inequality are more dependent on military protection against the

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revolutionary potential of mass contention. Because military leaders do not simply routinely represent the rich or other societal interests that may ally with them (Nordlinger 1977), this creates plenty of opportunities for civil–military conflict, and highly unequal societies are particularly vulnerable for military intervention or tutelage (Svolik 2012, 129–136). Finally, elite conflicts and mass discontent put a premium on the military’s coercive ability, especially when it erupts in large-scale anti-government protests (Pion-Berlin et al. 2014). Untamed and perhaps violent inter-elite conflict also might strengthen the military’s bargaining power relative to the elected decision-makers as competing elites might be lured into “knocking at the barracks door for armed forces support” (Linz 1978, 30). A military that is courted by civilians is difficult to control, because this puts military leaders in a pivotal position and allows them to play civilian forces off against each other. Moreover, if civilian politicians seek military support, military establishments will find it easier to intervene in politics, either by a coup or by a gradual expansion of power and prerogatives (Diamond and Plattner 1996; Serra 2010). In contrast, when a strong consensus exists across elite factions that the army should be independent of political struggles, and no elite faction seeks the military’s support in situations of political crisis and conflict, civilians will find it easier to expand their authority over the military (Diamond and Plattner 1996, xxix; North et al. 2009, 221). The military’s bargaining power vis-à-vis civilian leaders is also affected by the extent to which citizens support the existing political regime and its representatives or whether mass protest or demonstrations signal widespread public dissatisfaction with the incumbent democratic regime, its lack of political legitimacy, and its alienation of key social groups (Frantz and Ezrow 2011, 63–64; Przeworski 2019). For example, Hunter reports that civilian unrest in Brazil reduced the civilian government’s willingness to challenge military prerogatives (Hunter 1994, 33). Moreover, public discontent with cynical elites, chaotic politics, and controversies surrounding electoral outcomes can increase the leverage of the military and provide military officers with an opportunity to reinsert the armed forces into the political process, as has been the case in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines (Barracca 2007; Croissant et al. 2013; Kuhonta and Sinpeng 2014; Lorch 2017).

2.3 Democracy and civilian control There is a general agreement in political science that democracy is a “civil” form of political order, in which popularly elected civilians dominate the

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political process by virtue of their popular mandate, not the military or other armed actors by virtue of their control over the means of violence (Dahl 1989, 245; Diamond 2002, 31). Feaver, arguing from the perspective of civil–military relations, points out that “in a democracy, the hierarchy of de jure authority [always] favors civilians over the military, even in cases where the underlying distribution of de facto power favors the military” (Feaver 1999, 215). Moreover, curbing the military’s autonomy and political power and placing the military under the authority of the elected government is a key (though, not sufficient) condition facilitating the consolidation of new democracies (Agu¨ero 1995, 148; Diamond and Plattner 1996; Pion-Berlin 1997, 220; Serra 2010, 27; Valenzuela 1992, 87). However, even scholars who have recognized the importance of the role of the armed forces in transitions from authoritarian rule to a consolidated liberal democracy have not located civil–military relations and the interaction of civilian control and democratic consolidation at the center of their analyses (Linz and Stepan 1996; Serra 2010, 24; Stepan 1988). Thus, even though scholars agree that effective civilian control is essential for the proper functioning of democracy, we currently do not know to what extent and how exactly weak civilian control undermines democracy beyond the obvious truism that weak civilian control in the form of a military coup could topple the democratic system per se.

2.3.1 Democracy and its partial regimes As is common in comparative politics, we define democracy in procedural terms. More specifically, we adopt Merkel’s (2004) model of “embedded democracy,” which puts forward a mid-range definition of democracy. It extends minimal definitions that equate democracy with the mere presence of contested elections with liberal franchise requirements (“electoral democracy”), and the Dahlian concept of “polyarchy” that combines inclusive and competitive elections with effective political liberties and civil rights (“polyarchy”: Dahl 1971, see also Møller and Skaaning 2011). “Embedded democracy” builds on a thicker, more substantive notion of liberal democracy (Croissant and Merkel 2019; Merkel, 2004). At its core lies the assumption that embedded liberal democracy is a set of rules and institutions that can be analytically disaggregated into five constituent “partial regimes.”⁷ Moreover, each partial regime mutually influences and balances the functions of the ⁷ The idea of democracy as akin to an institutional superstructure, being composed of highly complex yet additive partial regimes builds on Philippe Schmitter (1995).

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other partial regimes. This is what Merkel calls “internal embeddedness.” Next to the internal embedding of these five partial regimes, every democracy as a whole is embedded in an external environment (society, economy, stateness, and international politics) that encompasses, enables, and stabilizes the democratic regime. For our purposes of evaluating the impact of civil– military relations on the quality of democracy, this external embeddedness is not relevant, however. The five partial regimes of “embedded democracy” are (Croissant and Merkel 2019; Merkel 2004, 38–42): ▪ Regime A, the “electoral regime,” functions as a “primus inter pares” among the five partial regimes (Møller and Skaaning 2011, 18). It operates by filling government offices through regular, free, general, equal, and fair elections. A political system in which this partial regime is established fulfills the minimal requirements for electoral democracy. ▪ Regime B, “political participation,” facilitates the democratic right to political communication and organization by entitling citizens to free speech as well as freedom of association, demonstration, and petition. It also includes freedom of the press and citizens’ rights to freely organize in interest groups and political parties. ▪ Regime C, “civil rights,” ensures the rule of law and guarantees constitutional rights to protect the individual from state and third-party infringements on their rights. This partial regime also includes constitutional equality before the law as well as independent courts. ▪ Regime D, “horizontal accountability,” emphasizes the need for the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to engage in mutual checks and balances, without one body dominating or interfering with the constitutionally defined core sphere of the other bodies. As such, horizontal accountability buttresses constitutionalism, legality, and deliberation, and is a key ingredient of liberal democracy. ▪ Regime E, “the effective power to govern,” “stress[es] the necessity that the elected representatives are the ones which actually govern” (Merkel 2004, 41). This regime encompasses the requirement that popularly elected representatives, rather than security forces, (self-)appointed technocrats, or global investors, control the ultimate levers of power and policymaking. Of course, no political regime satisfies all these criteria perfectly. However, if any one of the partial regimes is insufficiently institutionalized, it cannot provide the necessary functions for a properly working liberal democracy. The

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result is a “defective democracy” (Croissant and Merkel 2019; Merkel 2004; Merkel and Croissant 2000).

2.3.2 Civilian control and the survival and quality of democracy For Merkel, civil–military relations and civilian control are not a partial regime of democracy sui generis, but one aspect of partial regime E (effective power to govern). Consequently, civilian control of the military, as we have defined, is not a part of “thin” conceptions of “electoral” democracy. However, a political system cannot be considered a liberal democracy unless it also ensures some minimal degree of control over the military and the state security apparatus by civilians who are, in turn, accountable to the people through elections (Diamond 2002, 35; Diamond 2008, 22; North et al. 2009, 26). Generally, we assume that civilian control might affect democracy in two distinct ways: first, weak civilian control can directly or indirectly result in the breakdown of democracy; second, weak civilian control can limit the extent to which democratic principles, norms, and procedures are realized and guaranteed in partial regimes A–D of the embedded democracy. Civilian control and the survival or breakdown of democracy. Democracies can die in many ways; one is the classical military coup d’état, that is, the “supplantment” or “displacement” (Finer 1962) of a democratic government by threat or use of military force. There is a contemporary debate whether military interventions facilitate the process of democratization, with some arguing that post-Cold War coups typically lead to democracy (Marinov and Goemans 2014; Miller 2016). Others, however, suggest that only some kinds of coups promote democratization, or that coups may positively affect democratization in the short term but are likely to result in autocracy and increased levels of state-sanctioned violence in the long term (Collier and Hoeffler 2005; Derpanopoulos et al. 2016; Derpanopoulos et al. 2017; Kuehn 2017). This debate focusses on the democratizing effect of (military-led) coups taking place in non-democracies, but our concern is with the impact of civil–military relations and, more specifically, civilian control on the survival of an already existing, post-authoritarian democracy. It is hard to deny that in this context, military participation in a putsch diminishes democratic institutions and processes, at least in the short term. As shown in Chapter 1, the military coup as a path of democratic collapse has become increasingly rare since the end of the Cold War, whereas executive takeover is the most prominent form of democratic collapse in

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the early twenty-first century (Bermeo 2016; Haggard and Kaufman 2016; Lu¨hrmann and Lindberg 2019; Svolik 2019). Moreover, contemporary coups d’état in democracies are often reactive, so-called “promissory coups” (Bermeo 2016) by alliances between civilian and military elites, who claim to defend democracy against an incumbent elected government accused of perverting democracy. One example is Bangladesh in 2006–2007, where military and civilian elites collaborated to solve the ongoing political crisis between government and opposition by forcing civilian President Iajuddin Ahmed to appoint a military-backed caretaker government. Another recent case is Bolivia, where in November 2019 nonviolent mass protest pressured President Evo Morales to resign (Hetland 2019; Lehoucq 2020). Even though a military coup d’état is the most obvious case of weak civilian control, there are other ways in which the military acts as a partner of civilian elites who aim at suspending the democratic process and enter a political bargain with the military before terminating democracy. One such alternative scenario is that weak civilian control is part of a multidimensional “weak democracy syndrome” (Haggard and Kaufman 2016), which leads to the erosion and, eventually, the death of democracy. While, in the case of democratic reversal by military supplantment or displacement, the military is the main perpetrator of crimes against democracy, the driving force of democratic backsliding in the latter scenario is not the military but a (civilian) executive leader who weakens political rights, civil freedoms, and mechanisms of vertical or horizontal accountability in order to centralize and consolidate executive powers and prolong their incumbency. In this context, the armed forces can play an important role as partner of self-aggrandizing political leaders, implementing iron-fist policies against political opponents and civil society at large and protecting the would-be autocrats against the threat of mass revolt or elite defection. This puts the military leadership in a strategically advantaged position to expand their personal and institutional privileges and carve out niches of influence, undermining democratic institutions and threatening civil liberties. Yet, the combination of weak civilian control and military autonomy in a context of executive-led backsliding puts military leaders in a strategically advantaged position to expand their personal and institutional privileges and consolidate niches of influence. In contrast, strongly established civilian control should reduce the likelihood of a military coup and strengthen democratic institutions, for instance by dissuading civilians from knocking at the barracks’ doors for political support by the military (Stepan 1988). Civilian control and the quality of democracy in partial regimes A–D of the embedded democracy. Second, we expect the strength of civilian control also to

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be positively related to the democratic quality of a political system. While civilian control over the military does not ensure a high level of democratic quality because deficits in democratic quality of a political system can have many different sources, weak civilian control can lead to a number of democratic defects. Ceteris paribus, then, we expect strong degrees of civilian control to be beneficial for democracy. Within the framework of “embedded democracy,” the failure to establish full civilian control, thus, constitutes a defect in partial regime E. Even though there can be other tutelary authorities, military tutelage is the most common form. In “tutelary democracies,” democratic civilian control of the military is weak and elements of what Arturo Valenzuela calls “perverse elements” in the process of institutionalizing democracy (Valenzuela 1992) are strong. There is, thus, considerable overlap between these “perverse elements” and deficits of civilian control in the area of Elite Recruitment summarized in Table 2.1. Yet, the failure to establish full civilian control can also undermine the functioning of other partial regimes of democracy, depending on which of the five decision-making areas in civil–military relations is affected and the degree to which civilians have to share decision-making power with the military in that particular area. With respect to the electoral regime or partial regime A of the embedded democracy, limited civilian control of the military undermines this key element of “embedded democracy” when the military has influence over the area of Elite Recruitment, either because a significant portion of seats in parliament or cabinet is de facto reserved for the military, because the military interferes with the electoral process (intervening in favor of or against any particular political grouping), or because the military successfully reserves the right to veto the formation of a particular government coalition. Similarly, weak democratic control of the military can undermine the effectiveness of the partial regimes of political participation (B) and civil liberties (C), if the military misuses its de facto power to harass political parties, interest groups, and/or civil society, and an independent media. When the military is involved in internal security operations or civilian politicians rely on military coercion to repress political demonstrations and protests, or to intimidate the political opposition, civilian control will not only be weakened as the military expands its power into additional decision-making powers. Civilians will also be willing to sacrifice oversight over the military in return for its political and operational support. In turn, a lack of oversight and the unwillingness to hold the military accountable is likely to lead to impingements on the political rights and civil liberties of citizens. Arguably, the more pivotal the role of the military in the political system, the more likely it is that military leaders may

DEMOCRACY AND CIVILIAN CONTROL

55

attempt to prevent media, opposition groups, and civil society activists from challenging the military’s prerogatives. The most extensive violations of political liberties and civil rights are to be expected if the military wields significant authority over the areas of Elite Recruitment, Public Policy, and Internal Security. In such a scenario, any criticism of the political authorities necessarily addresses the military and, thus, constitutes a threat to the military’s privileges. Furthermore, if the military is involved in internal security operations or civilian politicians rely on military coercion to repress political demonstrations and protests, or to intimidate political opposition, the military will certainly enjoy legal impunity and control over its own system of military courts. This, of course, could further undermine the rule of law. Finally, civilian control might also have consequences for the partial regime of horizontal accountability. Generally, civilian control can impact horizontal accountability through three paths: executive civilian control, parliamentary control, and judicial review. Control by executive civilian authorities is the first form of horizontal accountability. The adoption of laws regulating civilian supremacy in the chain of command, for example of the military command to the Ministry of Defense, the establishment of a civilian-dominated National Security Council with de jure and de facto authority to control and coordinate all armed services, and the separation of operational/organizational components from political and supervisory ones are preconditions for horizontal accountability. When they are missing and when executive civilian control remains informal, ad hoc, and dependent on the personal relationship between political and military leaders, this will have a negative impact on the partial regime of horizontal accountability. A second mechanism is parliamentary control. Parliamentary oversight of the armed forces is an essential part of parliamentary control of the executive branch of government. It requires, among other things, that budgetary control includes military expenditures and parliamentary defense committees with the formal competence and de facto capacity to perform oversight function. Third, weak civilian control will affect horizontal accountability through the mechanism of judicial review, which is about the control of the legality of operations, especially concerning respect for the human rights of ordinary citizens and members of the military alike. The formal preconditions for judicial review of the armed forces require that military courts, when they exist, have no authority over civilians, operate along the same norms and principles as the ordinary judiciary when dealing with the disciplinary transgressions of professional soldiers, and provide basic protections of military members against arbitrary or discriminatory government action.

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2.4 Conclusion In this chapter, we attempted to accomplish three tasks. First, we presented our conceptualization of civil–military relations as a multidimensional phenomenon comprising five different decision-making areas: Elite Recruitment, Public Policy, Internal Security, National Defense, and Military Organization. Building on this conceptualization, we argued that the notion of civilian control over the military is best understood as a continuum rather than a dichotomy between absent or present civilian control. Fully established civilian control is, thus, defined as civilians having exclusive authority to decide on national policies and their implementation. Under civilian control, civilians can freely choose to delegate decision-making power and the implementation of certain policies to the military while the military has no autonomous decision-making power outside those areas specifically defined by civilians. Furthermore, it is civilians alone who determine which particular policies, or policy aspects, the military implements, and civilians also define the boundaries between policymaking and policy implementation. Moreover, civilian authorities possess the means of oversight and sanctioning vis-à-vis the military. Second, this chapter presented our integrative theoretical framework to study the establishment of civilian control in new democracies. This framework integrates arguments mainly from structuralist and institutionalist theories of civil–military relations with actor-centered arguments of military reform in post-authoritarian democracies as a bargaining struggle over the distribution of decision-making power between civilian and military elites. At the core of our approach is the idea that the success of civilian efforts to establish and uphold democratic civilian control depends on the ability of political leaders to contain the military’s political authority and their ability to resist civilian supremacy through “control strategies.” The outcome of the bargaining struggle over the distribution of decision-making power between civilian and military elites is affected by three sets of factors: initial conditions, civilian bargaining power, and military bargaining power. Overall, we identify two initial conditions, three factors which determine civilian bargaining power, and six factors which affect military bargaining power. In doing so, our argument emphasizes the relationship between features of the socio-political context and civilian agency as crucially important for explaining successes and failures of institutional change in civil–military relations. Third, we build on the concept of “embedded democracy,” introduced by Merkel and co-authors, and identify two ways in which civilian control can

CONCLUSION

57

have profound effects on the quality of post-authoritarian democracy. The first is the military’s role in the breakdown of democracy. Here we distinguish between a military coup, which, if successful, leads to democratic breakdown, and weak civilian control of the military as one element in a broader syndrome of “weak” or “low quality democracy.” Second, civilian control can affect the level of democracy in the four partial regimes of the embedded democracy (electoral regime, political participation, civil liberties and rule of law, and horizontal accountability). In sum, we assume that civilian control is one, but not the only relevant factor affecting the chances for survival or breakdown of a newly democratized political regime, as well as the level of democratic quality of the political institutions, processes, and norms in the political regime—overall and in regard to different partial regimes. Moreover, we expect that, ceteris paribus, new democracies may find it easier to institutionalize civilian control over Elite Recruitment and Public Policy than National Defense or Military Organization, resulting in slower expansion of civilian control into core spheres of military interest and different levels of civilian control across different areas. Moreover, implications of weak civilian control differ across those areas: weak civilian control over Military Organization or National Defense may pose less of a risk for democracy than if civilian control is not firmly institutionalized over Elite Recruitment or Public Policy. Equipped with the multidimensional concept of civilian control and its operationalization, the following Chapters 3 and 4 will measure the extent to which new democracies have been able to institutionalize civilian control over the armed forces in each of the five different decision-making areas of civil–military relations and how the specific outcome can be explained. The following Chapters 5 and 6 will then analyze the relationship between the strength (or weakness) of civilian control and the survival or quality of democracy in the 66 countries and 71 democracy spells that make up our universe of cases.

3 Mapping and explaining civilian control in third wave democracies This chapter describes and explains the post-authoritarian developments and empirical patterns of civil–military relations in 66 third wave democracies. The first section provides an overview of the universe of cases that constitutes the population of our analyses. The following section presents a comprehensive descriptive analysis of intra- and cross-regional patterns, problems, and developments over time in civil–military relations. In this, we first shed light on the status and development of civilian control in the five individual decisionmaking areas of civilian control. We then present descriptive evidence on the aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI). Drawing on the theoretical model presented in Chapter 2, the third section presents the results of statistical analyses to identify the determinants of civilian control in new democracies. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of our core findings and their relevance for the theoretical arguments.

3.1 The universe of third wave democracies This chapter draws on the original dataset that includes detailed qualitative information on the degree of civilian control in 66 countries with a population of at least one million (as of 2010) that have made at least one transition to democracy between 1974 and 2010. We consider a regime as a democracy if it displays a polity value of +6 or higher according to the Polity IV dataset (Marshall and Jaggers 2018). We use Polity instead of other regime datasets for three reasons. First, it is a continuous indicator ranging from −10 to +10, which allows the identification of more fine-grained differences between regime types than dichotomous alternatives. This is particularly relevant for the third wave era, as many former autocracies introduced elements of democracy such as multiparty elections and elected legislatures without ever crossing the threshold to become a democracy (Levitsky and Way 2010; Schedler 2013). Routes to Reform. David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant, Oxford University Press. © David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198803362.003.0003

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Second, the Polity scale is based on a complex multidimensional conceptual framework that includes several institutional characteristics relating to all relevant “partial regimes” (Schmitter 1995) of democratic polities. Beyond the existence of reasonably free and fair multiparty elections, which are at the center of most alternative measures (e.g., Boix et al. 2013; Cheibub et al. 2010; Coppedge et al. 2020; Dahl 1971; Møller and Skaaning 2011; Przeworski et al. 2000), the Polity index includes horizontal accountability, civil liberties, and political rights. This means that it provides a more demanding and conservative measure of democracy than alternative sources (see also Haggard and Kaufman 2016, 7). Third, in contrast to, for example the Freedom House Index,¹ the Polity index does not include a measure of civil–military relations as a constituent indicator to define the difference between democracy and autocracy. It therefore does not predetermine the main dependent variable of our analysis, the degree of civilian control. One of the component variables, the XRREG indicator measuring “whether there are any established modes at all by which chief executives are selected” (Marshall et al. 2018, 20), includes military coups as instances of irregular changes in the chief executive. However, a military coup, as any other irregular form of executive power transfer, would result in a decline of the Polity value below the 6+ democracy threshold, and thus, the respective country would drop out of the dataset. Consequently, the use of Polity as the foundation of our data collection efforts, should not bias our results.² To identify the time of the transition to democracy, we chose the first year in which the Polity value was +6 or higher during the 1974–2010 period. We excluded periods of transition (coded −88 in the Polity data) and removed all non-democratic country-years for countries that experienced a breakdown of democracy in the period under review. For example, Polity codes Russia democratic from 2000 to 2006, and therefore we excluded the years before 2000 and after 2006. The Dominican Republic experienced an autocratic reversal in 1994 and 1995; thus, we included only the country-years with a Polity score of 6 or higher (1978 to 1993, and 1996 to 2010). We also excluded Panama and ¹ Freedom House‘s Political Rights scale includes sub-question B3 which asks, “Are the people’s political choices free from domination by the military, foreign powers, religious hierarchies, economic oligarchies, or any other powerful group that is not democratically accountable?” ² In addition, the problem of irregular leader changes would be the same if we used any other available dataset on regime types and democratic transitions. The choice of operationalization necessarily affects the sample. The online appendix discusses how the selection of different datasets affect the composition of our case sample. Overall, however, there is a very strong correlation between Polity IV and other datasets, especially if one compares regime types instead of levels of democracy. Therefore, we believe that selecting Polity IV for sampling does not predetermine or substantially affect the findings.

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Haiti, which disbanded the military in 1989 and 1995, respectively, as well as Timor Leste, where international actors coordinated and steered democratization and the institutionalization of civil–military relations (Croissant and Abu-Sharkh 2020). Finally, we included only democracies lasting three or more years. The purpose of the three-year threshold is to distinguish regimes from periods of interrupted autocracy and short-lived democratic interregnums (Geddes 2003, 70; Weeks 2008).³ Finally, we did not code Zambia’s post-2008 democratic spell because of a lack of accessible data. These selection rules produce 71 democratic spells in 66 countries that are included in the analysis, totaling 1,112 country-years.⁴ The map in Figure 3.1 shows the countries that are included in the dataset. It shows that the third wave of democratization was particularly prominent in Latin America and post-communist Europe (Schmitter and Schneider 2004). Northwest Europe and North America had been democratized during the first

Third wave democracy

yes

no

Figure 3.1 Third Wave democracies included in the dataset, 1974–2010 ³ This removed five countries from the sample: Belarus, Fiji, East Germany, Kyrgyzstan, and Malaysia. ⁴ For a complete list of included cases and country years, see Table 3.5 in the chapter appendix.

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wave of democratization and, in some cases, re-democratized after World War II (Coppedge et al. 2020; Huntington 1991). The variety of regime types is greater in other world regions. The 1990s were a decade of democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa, but many African countries remained autocratic or transitioned from single-party to multiparty authoritarianism (Bratton and van de Walle 1997; Morse 2018). In contrast, the Middle East and Northern Africa remained predominantly autocratic, with the exception of Turkey and Lebanon, which democratized during the third wave, and Israel which had been democratic since 1949. Similarly, consolidated democracies are still the exception in the Asia-Pacific region, though India and Japan had established electoral democracies in the late 1940s to 1950s, and some autocracies such as Indonesia, Thailand, and South Korea made the transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. In total, the dataset includes 20 new democracies in postcommunist Europe and the former Soviet Union, 18 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, 14 in Latin America and the Caribbean, nine in Asia-Pacific, three in Southern Europe, and two in the Middle East and Northern Africa. There are 18 countries in our data that experienced a breakdown of democracy, of which eight re-democratized within the period under review. One country (Niger) suffered a second breakdown. In 2010, the final year of our analysis, 54 of the 66 countries in our dataset still had a democratic government. According to the most recent Polity data, another five democracies reverted to autocracy after 2010: Mali (2012), Thailand (2014), Turkey (2014), Ukraine (2014), and Burundi (2015) (Marshall and Jaggers, 2018).

3.2 Civilian control in third wave democracies This section provides descriptive evidence on the state and development of civilian control in third wave democracies. To evaluate the degree of civilian control in each country at a certain point in time during the 1974–2010 period, we followed the coding procedure described in Chapter 2. Since both civilian control in new democracies as well as the determinants of civilian control vary over time, we undertake our descriptive and explanatory analyses on the country-year level of analysis with a total n of 1,112 observations. In this, we first survey the degrees of civilian control across the five political decision-making areas introduced in Chapter 2: Elite Recruitment, Public Policy, Internal Security, National Defense and Military Organization. We then discuss temporal and spatial descriptive analyses of civilian control in third wave democracies based on the aggregated Civilian Control Index (CCI) that is created from these individual areas.

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3.2.1 The five decision-making areas Civilian control over the military in new democracies differs across time and space, but also across the five political decision-making areas in which militaries and civilians might vie for influence. Table 3.1 provides summary statistics of the degree of civilian control across all five decision-making areas. To illustrate these summary data, the following figures present density plots that graph the distribution of civilian control scores in the five decisionmaking areas across all 1,112 observations in our data. In addition to the overall distributions, we highlight the location of select country-years to provide some intuitive illustrations. For each decision-making area, we show one representative case with minimal and maximal values, one case whose degree of civilian control is at or close to the mean, and one case each situated at or close to civilian control scores of 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75. In all plots, the vertical axis shows the density of the distribution, while the horizontal axis shows the degree of civilian control in the respective decision-making areas from 0 denoting no civilian control to 1 denoting fully established civilian control. The distribution-mean is marked with a dashed vertical line. Figure 3.2 presents this information for the degree of civilian control in Elite Recruitment and Public Policy. The panels show that, overall, third wave democracies have been relatively successful in ensuring civilian control over the processes and outcomes of elite recruitment and the making of public policy. Both density plots are strongly left-skewed: 69.8 percent of all observations in Elite Recruitment and 63.6 percent of the observations in Public Policy populate the area above 0.75. Observations with a control score below 0.25 account for less than one percent of all country-years in the data. This includes three countries: First, Nigeria in the first two years of the so-called Second Republic (1979–1983), which succeeded a period of military rule after

Table 3.1 Summary statistics of civilian control over the five decision-making areas Area

Obs.

Mean

sd

Elite Recruitment Public Policy Internal Security National Defense Military Organization

1,112 1,112 1,112 1,112 1,112

0.86 0.83 0.71 0.47 0.46

0.21 0.24 0.33 0.40 0.38

Median Min 1 1 0.88 0.50 0.50

0 0 0 0 0

Max 1 1 1 1 1

CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

URY 1990

IDN 1999

GHA 2001

3

SLV 1984

4

4

NGA 1979

CZE 1990

KOR 1987

CHL 1989

ESP 1978

Public Policy

BRA 1985

NGA 1979

Elite Recruitment

63

2 2 1

0

0 0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

Degree of civilian control

0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

1.00

Degree of civilian control

Figure 3.2 Density plots of the degree of civilian control in Elite Recruitment and Public Policy Note: Distribution means marked by dashed line.

the end of the First Republic in 1966 and which the military overthrew in 1983 (Diamond 1988). Second, Madagascar from 2006 until 2008. Here, Lieutenant General Charles Rabemananjara had held the office of Director of the Military Cabinet of the Presidency since 2004, served as Minister of Interior and Administrative Reform in 2005, and was appointed Prime Minister in 2007, while remaining Minister of the Interior (CIA 2007, 62; Jeune Afrique 2007). This, and the appointment of military personnel to other key government ministries, weakened civilian control over Elite recruitment and Public policy, and strengthened the military’s autonomous role in Internal Security, since the Ministry of the Interior exercises control over the national police force. It also allowed the armed forces to block a presidential initiative for security sector reform, which the military “interpreted … as a severe threat to its cozy nepotism (which it was)” (Ju¨tersonke and Kartas 2010, 68; see also Chapter 4). The third country is Portugal from 1976 to 1981. This was a period in which the rules of the game in civil–military relations still reflected the historical and political circumstances of the downfall of the Estado Nuevo, which was characterized by a strong presence of the military in the country’s political life (Linz and Stepan 1996). However, constitutional amendments in 1982 replaced the militarized Revolutionary Council with the State Council and a Constitutional Court (Bruneau and MacLeod 1986, 122). The existing agreement between the armed forces and the civilian political parties to fill the office of president with a representative of the armed forces also became obsolete. With the passage of the 1979 election law (Lei Eleitoral da Assembleia da República),

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active members of the military lost the right to run in elections for the national parliament (Portugal-Comissão Nacional de Eleições 2011). Similarly, civilian control over the military in the area of Public Policy is well established in many countries. Only 3.2 percent of all country-years exhibit civilian control scores below 0.25: Honduras (1980–1984, 1989–1998), Nigeria (1979–1980), and Peru from 1978 to 1991 and, again, between 2001 and 2010. With the exception of Peru after 2000, all cases with such low degrees of civilian control over Elite Recruitment and Public Policy are former military regimes, in which the armed forces have managed to hold on to considerable political power even after the transition to democracy. The same is true for the Peruvian military, which played a key role in the collapse of President Alberto Fujimori’s personalist rule in 2000 (Crabtree 2001; see also Chapter 6). Nevertheless, the panels also show that former military-dominated regimes are not necessarily destined to suffer from military influence in these areas. For example, post-praetorian democracies such as South Korea in the late 1990s, Ghana in the 2000s, and Uruguay in the 1990s were also able to ensure high degrees of civilian control in Elite Recruitment and/or Public Policy. Shifting to other areas of civil–military relations, our findings suggest that the establishment of civilian control over militaries’ roles in Internal Security and, especially, National Defense and Military Organization is much harder to achieve. This confirms our expectation that the closer a partial area of civilian control is to the armed forces’ key organizational sphere, the harder it is (or the more time it takes) to reform this partial area. Yet, this observation does not tell us whether this is so because the military will be more resistant of civilian intrusions into its key sphere of interests, or because civilians, who perceive this area as distant from the heart of the democratic process, are less motivated to initiate reforms in these two issue areas and, hence postpone reforms (sometimes indefinitely), or both. The density plot in Figure 3.3 depicts an overall positive finding concerning the degree of civilian control over Internal Security, though the average level of control is markedly lower than in Elite Recruitment and Public Policy. Again, the distribution is left-skewed, with 50.9 percent of all country-years exhibiting relatively high degrees of civilian control over this key area of civil– military relations. The average degree of civilian control in this area is 0.7 (sd = 0.3). Yet, 9.4 percent of all observations, clustering in 12 countries, exhibit a control score of less than 0.25. This concerns El Salvador (1979–91), Madagascar, Indonesia (1999–2000), Portugal (1976–1981), and Turkey before the

CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

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Internal Security

0.50

0.75

TWN 1992

0.25

RUS 2000

0.00

ARG 1983

GNB 2005

2.0

SLV 1984

2.5

1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 1.00

Degree of civilian control

Figure 3.3 Density plot of the degree of civilian control in Internal Security Note: Distribution mean marked by dashed line.

rise of the AKP government. From 1983 until 2001, the Turkish armed forces controlled domestic security, including counter-insurgency operations against various Kurdish insurgent groups, and civilian law enforcement, whereas democratic oversight of the military’s role in internal security was minimal. In Indonesia, a major step towards diminishing the hegemony of the military over internal security was the separation of national police (POLRI) and the armed forces (TNI)—a measure announced in April 1999 and formally completed in July 2000 (Mietzner 2009). Another example is Portugal before the adoption of a new National Security Act (Lei da Defesa Nacional e das Forças Armadas), which excluded the armed forces from any domestic security responsibilities (Bruneau and MacLeod 1986, 17). In Argentina, first steps toward the civilianization of internal security had quickly been taken such that the country had established some limited degree of civilian control in this policy-making area after the transition from military government in 1983 (Huser 2002, 53–91). In Taiwan, the military had shed its vast internal security role when martial law was abolished in 1987, such that civilian control over internal security decision-making had been firmly entrenched when the country completed its transition to democracy five years later (Kuehn 2008; see also Chapter 6). In Russia, as in most other post-Soviet republics, finally, the military was (and still is) not involved in day-to-day repression and law-enforcement operations

66

CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES National Defense

Military Organization

MNG 1992

PRI 1982

CHL 2005

MWI 1994

1.0

ARM1991

ROU 2002

MLI 1998

POL 1991

GRC 1977

1.0

BDI 2005

1.5

0.5

0.5

0.0

0.0 0.00

0.25 0.50 0.75 Degree of civilian control

1.00

0.00

0.25 0.50 0.75 Degree of civilian control

1.00

Figure 3.4 Density plots of the degree of civilian control in National Defense and Military Organization Note: Distribution means marked by dashed line.

(Fridman 2019). Yet, the Putin administration did not exercise oversight of the army’s war in Chechnya, weakening otherwise firm civilian control over the area of internal security (see also Chapter 4). Finally, summary statistics and the density plots in Figure 3.4 show that, on average, constraints on civilian decision-making authority are the strongest and, hence, civilian control is most fragile in the areas of National Defense and Military Organization, which constitute the realm of professional expertise and core interest of the military. There are often only a few civilian decisionmaking or oversight mechanisms, and the establishment of a civilian defense bureaucracy and, especially, a civilian-led Ministry of Defense with capacity to control the armed forces lags behind the development of other political or administrative institutions, whereas the armed forces continue to play a disproportionate role in national defense and enjoy organizational autonomy. With a mean civilian control score of 0.47 (sd = 0.4), the average degree of civilian control in both decision-making areas is low. The density plots show tri-modal distributions in both areas, with most observations (63.3 and 66.2 percent, respectively) clustering below the 0.5 mark and the largest peak being situated around the origin. In fact, 31.4 percent of all observations in National Defense and 28.9 percent in Military Organization have a civilian control score of 0, marking the total absence of meaningful civilian control over these areas. This suggests that, in general, many militaries in third wave democracies have been able to preserve significant autonomies in their core areas of organizational interest. These include mainly former military regimes immediately

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after the transition to democracy, such as Burundi in 2005, Chile 1989, Greece 1974, and Peru 1978; former military–civilian coalition regimes such as the Philippines in 1986, Spain 1978, and Nepal 1999; or countries such as Armenia in 1991, where civilian control over the military had to be established from the ground up. For example, in Spain, active service military officers completely dominated national defense and military organization and controlled the National Defense Board until the appointment of a civilian as minister of defense in 1979 and the passage of Organic Law 6 in 1980, which stipulated legislative oversight of administrative actions of the military. Reforms of the military justice system agreed upon in the so-called Moncloa Pacts took effect in 1980 and in 1984, and the national parliament gained the powers to discuss general defense lines; to approve defense laws and budgets; to declare war or to make peace; and to authorize international military treaties (Agu¨ero 1995, 153; Arranz Bueso and Caneiro 2012, 88; Zaverucha 1993, 290–91; see also Chapter 4). By contrast, key areas of the relationship between state, society, and military remained unregulated in Armenia until the early 2000s. With the exception of the constitution, there were simply no relevant laws, for example, on military jurisdiction, military service, the organization of the armed forces, the establishment of a Ministry of Defense, etc. However, the cases of Poland in 1991 and Chile in 2005, with civilian control scores of 0.5 in National Defense and Military Organization respectively, show that neither civilian control over the military during the authoritarian regime, nor praetorian legacies determine the degree of civilian or military control over these decision-making areas. In Poland, effective oversight over national defense policy was considered of little political interest to elected civilians during and immediately after the transition. In contrast, outgoing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet strengthened the financial autonomy of the military and put legal safeguards in place which limited the ability of future (civilian) presidents or the legislature to adopt major cuts to the military budget (Weeks 2002, 402). In 1989, his government passed the leyes de amarre to protect the institutional autonomy of the armed forces from civilian oversight and regulation by democratic institutions. Moreover, General Pinochet continued to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army until 1998 and the armed forces held half the seats on the National Security Council (Rojas 2001, 156–158). Consequently, despite the transition from military rule to democratic government, the armed forces “enjoyed near total autonomy in their internal affairs and in the conduct of the counterinsurgency” (Fitch 1998, 148). Still, civilians were able to make significant inroads into the former exclusive domain of Military Organization. For example, the government of Eduardo Frei (1994–2000)

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implemented reforms that gave the president the right to appoint, dismiss, and transfer military officers (Hunter 1998, 313). Since 2005, the president also has had the power to dismiss high-ranking military officers. Previously, only the Chief of Staff had this right (BTI 2008). In 2008, a bill was introduced in Congress which provided for the reform of the Ministry of National Defense (Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, MDN) (Ulrich 2008). When passed in 2010, the law transferred the responsibility for military planning and strategy from the armed forces to civilians at the MDN. Finally, Romania and Mongolia are among the many cases in which civilian dominance over the military’s core institutional interests were established firmly and early on. Building on this aggregate descriptive evidence, we now turn to investigating temporal variation of civilian control over the five decision-making areas over time. The following figures compare the civilian control scores in the first year to the last year a country is in the dataset. The points mark the individual countries or groups of countries. Across all decision-making areas, the trend of civilian control has been positive in many countries, with the majority of cases having seen increases in the degrees of civilian control over time. For illustrative purposes, we have labeled cases if a country has made particularly large gains in its degree of civilian control in the respective area, that is, if its civilian control score increased by at least 1.5 standard deviations, or if, contrary to the overall trend, the degree of control has declined. Figure 3.5 shows that many new democracies enjoyed rather robust civilian control over Elite Recruitment and Public Policy, with an average civilian Elite Recruitment PRT

1.00

Public Policy

PRY

CHL

1.00

IDN TUR

TUR

0.75

SLV

0.50

KOR

PRT

MLI

BRA NGA

Last year in dataset

Last year in dataset

0.75

NGA

PHL

0.25

BRA

NIC

SLV

0.50

MEX

HND

PHL

MDG

NER

0.25

MDG

0.00

0.00 0.00

0.25

0.75 0.50 First year in dataset

1.00

0.00

0.25

0.75 0.50 First year in dataset

1.00

Figure 3.5 Changes in civilian control over Elite Recruitment and Public Policy, first to last year

CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

69

control score of 0.8 in the first year after the transition to democracy in both areas. Given the relatively high start level it is no surprise that over time, gains in civilian control over these areas tended to be relatively small, with an average increase of 0.09 points in Elite Recruitment and 0.06 points in Public Policy. Nonetheless, in cases where, initially, the armed forces were able to preserve privileged access to political office and informal and formal veto power over policy decisions, that role for the military diminished significantly over time. This was the case in many Latin American countries, in South Korea, Nigeria, and Turkey, as well as in Indonesia and Portugal. For example, the Indonesian military saw its formal representation in the national parliament reduced in 1999 and fully abolished only before the 2004 elections (Croissant et al. 2013). However, it is important to note that some countries experienced a decline in civilian control, including Mali in the area of Elite Recruitment; Mexico, Niger, and Nicaragua in Public Policy; and Madagascar and the Philippines in both areas. As noted, particularly in Madagascar the military was able to challenge civilian control over Elite Recruitment in the 2000s, with a decline of 0.5 points between 1992 and 2009. The island nation saw an even more pronounced decline of 0.68 points in its civilian control score in the area of Internal Security (see Figure 3.6). Overall, however, Figure 3.6 shows that civilians in new democracies have been relatively successful in strengthening control over domestic order missions (including law enforcement and internal security), even though large Internal Security 1.00

CHL

ESP

ARG

PRT

IDN

Last year in dataset

0.75

NGA BRA MWI

BOL

0.50

0.25 MDG

0.00 0.00

0.25

0.50 First year in dataset

0.75

1.00

Figure 3.6 Changes in civilian control over Internal Security, first to last year

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CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

changes over the course of time remain rare. The first-year average across all new democracies in the sample was 0.63, which rose by 0.1 points to 0.73 in the last year the countries were in the dataset. The greatest strides towards demilitarizing Internal Security were, again, made in former military regimes such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Nigeria, but also in Portugal and Spain, where the military’s role in domestic law enforcement was rigorously curtailed after the transition. Next to Madagascar, the only third wave democracies that saw a worsening of civilian control over the course of time were Bolivia and Malawi. The lack of military prerogatives in Internal Security in most post-communist countries even in the early years of democratic consolidation reflects the subordinate role of the communist armies in public security. In most communist regimes this was the main mission of other security forces, subordinated to the interior ministries and intelligence agencies of the respective countries. Until the 1980s, most of Latin America’s militaries were largely devoted to border protection and internal control, which often included the violent silencing of civilian dissent (Ross 2004). One of the new, non-traditional roles of Latin American militaries that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s is assisting civilian law enforcement. Beginning in the late 1990s, Central American governments, for example, sent soldiers to fight gangs. In Mexico, successive governments since 2006 have steadily increased the armed forces’ role in the country’s war on drugs (Ordorica 2011). The shift from regime security to public security has been described as “constabularization” of the military (Flores-Macı´as and Zarkin 2019). The Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico have all constabularized their military, whereas Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru are examples of semi-constabularized militaries (Flores-Macı´as and Zarkin 2019). In many of these countries, governments regularly employ the army in support of civil law enforcement and sometimes also to repress peaceful protests.⁵ The constabularization of the military causes fundamental concerns about the respect for human rights, the lack of civilian oversight, and the erosion of the rule of law in Latin America, though it is important to note that it is usually authorized by the civilian authorities (Kurtenbach and Scharpf 2018; Pion-Berlin and Carreras 2017). In contrast, in Chile and Argentina, participation in this class of activities is either zero (Chile) or limited (Argentina). By law, the Argentinean

⁵ For example, the Mexican Army has historically played an important role in public security. According to the Organic Law of the Mexican Army and Air Force, internal security is one of the military’s core functions, and more than 67,000 troops have participated in policing operations since 2006 (Ordorica 2011).

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armed forces can only provide logistical support and information on issues such as the fight against drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and border control. In Chile, the separation of the armed forces from public security functions has been subject to a broad legal and political consensus, preserving those roles for non-military agencies. The armed forces of Brazil have a historical, subsidiary role in relation to matters of law and order enforcement. Under the 1988 Constitution, the military’s public order role is authorized expressly and directly by the President, only on an exceptional basis, and is limited in time and space (Donadio and Kussrow 2016). Finally, Figure 3.7 shows that National Defense and Military Organization exhibit a generally lower degree of civilian control than the other areas of civil–military relations. Yet, they are also the areas with the largest average improvement. In the year after the transition to democracy the military was firmly in charge of these decision-making areas in many countries, with average civilian control scores of 0.33 in National Defense and 0.34 in Military Organization, respectively. Over time, however, civilians managed to make inroads into these former military exclusive domains, extending their influence over defense policymaking and civilian oversight: on average, the civilian control scores across all cases increased 0.17 points in National Defense and 0.18 in Military Organization. In addition, no third wave democracy saw a worsening of civilian control over these areas, but many have seen drastic improvements in the degree of civilian control over defense and military policy. This includes, for example, former military dictatorships and military strongman regimes such as Greece, Spain, and Chile, but also post-communist countries like Hungary, Latvia, and Poland.

National Defense PRT

1.00

Military Organization POL

CHL

HUN

ARG

LVA

TWN

TWN

ESP

1.00

KOR

PRT

ARG HUN

POL

ESP GRC

KOR

0.75

Last year in dataset

Last year in dataset

0.75

NPL

0.50

TUR

PHL

BRA IDN

0.25

0.00

NPL GRC HND

0.50

IDN BRA CHL

TUR

0.25

0.00 0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

First year in dataset

1.00

0.00

0.25

0.50

0.75

First year in dataset

Figure 3.7 Changes in civilian control over National Defense and Military Organization, first to last year

1.00

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CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

3.2.2 The overall strength of civilian control Departing from the disaggregated view on the five decision-making areas, the remainder of the chapter focuses on the Civilian Control Index (CCI), which combines the civilian control scores of the five areas into a single, continuous variable ranging from 0 to 1, with 0 depicting the absence of civilian control and 1 representing fully established civilian control. We constructed the CCI based on the multi-dimensional conceptual framework introduced in Chapter 2 (see Table 2.1). The concept consists of three analytical levels: at the most basic level are the 14 indicators (e.g., the degree of civilian oversight over military defense activities), on which we measure the degree of civilian control on an ordinal, qualitative scale of low, medium, or high. The next higher analytical level are the dimensions (e.g., the degree of civilian control over political participation), each of which consists of one or two indicators. The highest conceptual level are the five decision-making areas (Elite Recruitment, Public Policy, Internal Security, National Defense, and Military Organization). Each decision-making area consists of two dimensions (e.g., in Public Policy the dimensions are civilian control over Policymaking and Policy implementation). The transformation of the qualitative information on the indicator level into numerical scores for the decision-making areas as well as the aggregate Civilian Control Index followed a four-step approach. First, each ordinal indicator expression was transformed into a numerical score, coding 0 for low civilian control, 0.5 for medium, and 1 for high civilian control, respectively. Second, we aggregated the numerical indicator values that belong to a given dimension into numerical scores for each of the dimensions. To do so, we took the arithmetic mean of the indicators within a given dimension. Third, again taking the arithmetic mean, we aggregated the dimensions into a civilian control score for each of the five decision-making areas. Finally, to combine the five individual civilian control scores of the decision-making areas into the aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI), we created a weighted average of the individual area scores. Following established literature on the creation of complex composite indicators (Nardo et al. 2005; OECD 2008), we drew on exploratory principal component analysis to identify how to weigh the individual areas to construct the overall index.⁶ The following flowchart in Figure 3.8 summarizes the aggregation process in an intuitive way. ⁶ The technical procedures of the weighing based on principal component analysis are detailed in the online appendix.

CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

Qualitative indicators

Transformation into ordinal numerical variable

Ordinal indicators

Aggregation based on mean

Dimensions

Aggregation based on mean

Decisionmaking areas

Aggregation based on PCA weights

73

Civilian Control Index (CCI)

Figure 3.8 Flowchart of the aggregation process

Figure 3.9 illustrates the distribution of the CCI across all 1,112 observations in our dataset in a density plot, again highlighting the location of representative country-years at the minimal and maximal values, at or close to the mean, and at or close to CCI scores of 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75. The vertical axis shows the density of the distribution, while the horizontal axis shows the degree of civilian control in the respective decision-making areas from 0 denoting no civilian control to 1 denoting fully established civilian control. The distribution-mean is marked with a dashed vertical line. Civilian Control Index (CCI)

PRT 1994

0.75

1.00

LKA 2006

0.25

KEN 2002

0.00

DOM 1996

IDN 1999

1.5

NGA 1979

2.0

1.0

0.5

0.0 0.50 Degree of civilian control

Figure 3.9 Density plot of the aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI) Note: Distribution mean marked by dashed line.

The distribution reiterates the overall positive trend identified in the descriptive analyses of the individual decision-making areas. The mean CCI across all country-years is 0.7 (sd = 0.26), which corresponds to the degree of civilian control in Sri Lanka between 2006 and 2009. Relatively high degrees of civilian control with a CCI of 0.75 or higher are noted in 48.7 of all observations. A total of 16 cases, including Argentina since 2003, the Baltic countries, Poland since 1996, Portugal since 1994, and South Korea since 2004, achieved

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CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

a maximum CCI of 1. Another 24 percent of all observations have a CCI between 0.5 and 0.75, including Armenia, Kenya since 2002, Thailand from 1992 to 2000, and Turkey since 2004. However, a quarter of all country-year values show low degrees of overall civilian control: 21.7 percent of all observations have a CCI between 0.25 and 0, while the CCI of 5.6 percent of all observations is below 0.25. Figure 3.10 maps the CCI in the first year after a country has become democratic against its CCI in the final year in the dataset. Thirty countries (45.5 percent) are above the diagonal, indicating an improvement in the degree of civilian control. Of those, nine cases have seen considerable improvements in their CCI of at least 1.5 standard deviations of the average increase or more; and four countries stand out as having seen the largest improvements in civilian control after starting out from relatively low initial degrees: Brazil, Chile, Nigeria, and Portugal. Another 31 countries (47 percent) are situated on the diagonal, which indicates neither substantial losses nor gains in the degree of civilian control. This includes mostly cases such as Bulgaria and CCI PRT

1.00

ESP

KOR CHL

0.75 TUR

Last year in dataset

BRA

BOL MWI

IDN

NGA

0.50

NIC

HND

MEX

MDG

0.25

0.00 0.00

0.25

0.50 First year in dataset

0.75

1.00

Figure 3.10 Changes in the aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI), first to last year

CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

75

Mongolia, which already started out with robust civilian control, but also countries such as Peru, which failed to improve weak civilian control. Only Bolivia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mexico, and Nicaragua have seen a net decline in the CCI. This shows that increases of civilian control over time are the rule in new democracies in our data, and overall declines of civilian control are the exception. The average CCI in the first year of democracy is 0.63 (sd 0.27). However, post-authoritarian democracies had inherited very different degrees of civilian control from their predecessor regimes, ranging from a minimum CCI in the first year of democracy of 0 in Nigeria to a maximum of 1 in seven post-communist countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Overall, 24 democracies (36.4 percent) started out with a CCI of 0.75 or more, and 21 countries (31.8 percent) had a CCI between 0.5 and 0.75 in the first democratic year. The remaining 21 new democracies began life with a CCI of less than 0.5, with 8 countries (12.1 percent of the total) exhibiting very low levels of civilian control with a CCI smaller than 0.25. In the last year (either 2010 or the year a country dropped out of the dataset), the average CCI across all democracies is 0.73 (sd 0.23). Moreover, in their final year of democracy, no country had a CCI lower than Peru (0.23 in 2010), but 15 countries had a CCI of 1. The vast majority had achieved a CCI of at least 0.5, with only 14 countries exhibiting civilian control scores below that threshold. The only two cases with CCIs below 0.25 in the last year in the data are Madagascar (2009) and Peru (2010). We also see considerable variation across the different regions of the world. The bar plot in Figure 3.11 shows that Latin American democracies had the most difficult initial conditions in terms of civilian control: the average CCI in the first year of democracy was 0.38. The third wave democracies in Southern Europe also inherited weak institutions of civilian control, with a regional average CCI of 0.42. Most new democracies in these regions carried authoritarian legacies of military-dominated politics. The Asia-Pacific region and Sub-Sahara Africa included a more balanced mix of militarized and civilian dictatorships. This also shows in their regional averages of 0.56 for Asia-Pacific and 0.60 in Sub-Sahara Africa, respectively. Finally, the former communistparty regimes of Eastern Europe and Eurasia had the strongest tradition of civilian control, with a regional average CCI in the first democratic year of 0.9. Figure 3.11 shows an increase in the average level of civilian control for all regions, though to a different extent. Since they started from already high levels, countries in post-communist Europe and Eurasia did see little substantial

76

CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES 1.00 0.97 0.9

0.92

0.75 Average CCI Score

0.72

0.50

0.6

0.56

0.63

0.56

0.42

0.38 0.25

0.00 Asia

Latin America

Post-communist Europe first year

Southern Europe

Sub-Sahara Africa

last year

Figure 3.11 Bar plot of regional averages of CCI: first and last year Note: For regional averages, we excluded the Middle East and North Africa because Lebanon and Turkey are the only cases from this region in our country-sample.

increase. The same is true for Sub-Sahara Africa, which, however, stagnated on a much lower average. The regional average for Asia increased by 0.15 points, and the one for Latin America by 0.18 points, respectively. Despite robust changes, including the removal of the armed forces from positions of overt political power and the reduction of their informal and formal veto power over policy decisions in many countries, Latin America is still the region with the lowest average degree of civilian control. In contrast, Southern Europe experienced the greatest change and achieved the highest average degree of civilian control in 2010. In sum, then, the descriptive discussions of the aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI) have shown that third wave democracies, overall, have been relatively successful in establishing civilian control over their military organizations. While the initial conditions were very diverse, civilians in many regions and nations succeeded in pushing the military out of positions of political power and establishing some degree of oversight, or maintaining control already established before or during the transition to democracy. The degree

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of civilian control declined only in a small number of new democracies. In the following, we turn to identifying the reasons for these developments and the determinants for the success or failure of establishing civilian control in third wave democracies.

3.3 Determinants of civilian control in third wave democracies In the remainder of this chapter, we employ statistical analyses to identify the determinants that lead to the success and failure of civilian control in third wave democracies. For this, we first discuss the operationalization of the explanatory variables introduced in Chapter 2, then report the results of multivariate statistical analyses.

3.3.1 Operationalization of independent variables In Chapter 2, we introduced three sets of covariates that we expect to affect civilians’ chances to establish and strengthen civilian control of the military in new democracies: (1) initial conditions that define the historical legacies of civilian control before and during the transition to democracy; (2) factors that affect civilians’ bargaining power; (3) factors that affect the military’s bargaining power and their ability to resist attempts to strengthen civilian control.⁷ 3.3.1.1 Initial conditions The first category of initial conditions includes two conditions. First, the preceding type of authoritarian regime. Second, the extent to which the military is able to control the process and outcome of the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. These factors are of particular importance for the difficulty of establishing and exercising civilian control after the transition to democracy as well as the chances for a further strengthening and maintenance of civilian control. We conceptualize the type of the authoritarian predecessor regime based on the GWF dataset (Geddes et al. 2014). We code authoritarian predecessor regimes as a dummy variable based on the value “gwf_prior” variable for a given democratic country-year. If the GWF data defines the predecessor regime as “military,” “milpersonal,” “spmilitary,” or “indirect military,” we code ⁷ The online appendix includes descriptions of alternative operationalizations of some of the variables and presents the results of the main statistical models as robustness checks. These, for the most part, do not substantively change the model results.

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CIVILIAN CONTROL IN THIRD WAVE DEMOCRACIES

it as “military-dominated” and assign it a value of 1. For all other autocracies (personalist, party-based, monarchy), we code the country as civilian (value 0). For the military control of transition variable, we qualitatively evaluated the role of the military in each of the 73 transition episodes in our dataset based on a review of the relevant secondary literature. We coded cases as “dominant” military influence, when military regimes decided on the timing, scope, and speed of the transition process (e.g., Brazil, Chile, or Nigeria), or when the military began the transition after deposing a dictator through a military coup (e.g., Mali, Sudan, or Portugal). If the military exercised influence in the transition process but was not able to unilaterally control the process or outcome, we coded the variable as “some” military influence. This was mostly the case in military regimes where the outgoing military leaders chose to organize democratic elections but were able to maintain some degree of political control such as Peru and South Korea, but also in some personalist dictatorships such as Romania or Spain. In all other cases, we coded the variable as “no.” Examples include mostly civilian-dominated former single-party regimes such as the Czech Republic, Mexico, or Taiwan, where civilian elites initialized and managed the transition towards democracy. But also a few military regimes such as Greece and Niger fall into this category. Here, military rule disintegrated under military-internal, domestic, and international pressure. Finally, we transformed these degrees into an ordinal variable with 0, 0.5, and 1 denoting no influence, some influence, and a dominant role on the democratic transition, respectively.⁸ 3.3.1.2 Civilian bargaining strength The second set of covariates defines the civilian bargaining strength vis-àvis the military; it includes three variables: the degree of institutionalization of the democratic system, the strength of civil society, and international support. To operationalize the institutionalization of the democratic system, we rely on the Polity2 measure that aggregates information on executive recruitment, institutional checks-and-balances on the executive, and the degree of political competition (Marshall et al., 2018). We rescale the variable to a 0 to 1 interval to facilitate interpretation, with 0 denoting low and 1 denoting high democratic institutionalization. We measure the strength of civil society based on the V-Dem Core Civil Society Index (“v2xcs_ccsi,” CCSI). The CCSI gauges the robustness of civil society on a 0 (low robustness) to 1 ⁸ See the online appendix for brief descriptions and coding of the military’s role in all 73 transitions.

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(high robustness) scale based on the degree of government control over the entry and exit of civil society organizations, the degree of repression of civil society, and the overall participatory environment for non-government organizations (Coppedge et al. 2020). We operationalize international support as a dummy variable that measures membership in the European Union (EU). As mentioned in Chapter 2, the empirical evidence for a positive impact of membership in international organizations on democratic civilian control is mixed and not uniform across the research period (Meyerrose 2020; Pion-Berlin et al. 2019). Of all international organizations, however, it is the EU alone that operates comprehensive procedures that ensure new members are only admitted when they fulfill certain criteria, including civilian control over their armed forces (e.g., Barany 2016). Since we expect that the conditionality effects on reforming civil–military relations already unfold in the process of a candidate member’s accession to these organizations, we treat the five years before the accession as membership. Data for EU membership was drawn from the Correlates of War 3 International Governmental Organizations Data Set, Version 3.0 (Pevehouse et al. 2019).

3.3.1.3 Military bargaining strength The third set of covariates includes the six variables that define the military’s bargaining power vis-à-vis the civilians due to the prevalence of conflict in society: external and internal security threats, economic development, socioeconomic inequality, elite conflict, and mass discontent. We operationalize the level of external and internal security threats based on the CONIAS dataset (Schwank 2019). This dataset includes country-year data on international and domestic conflicts for all cases in our dataset, differentiating five intensities of conflict, from 1 (non-violent latent conflict) to 5 (civil war). It is preferable to other measures of international and domestic conflict as it includes information on a range of conflict intensities below the level of violent conflict, which might affect the role and political weight of the military in different ways. To operationalize economic development, which we expect to have a pacifying effect on social conflicts, we draw on data on logged GDP per capita included in the V-Dem 10 dataset, originally sourced from the Maddison Project (Coppedge et al. 2020). We measure socioeconomic inequality through the Gini coefficient, which ranges from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality, one person/household possesses all income), and log this data. We collect this data from the Standardized World Income Inequality Database

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(SWIID) 8.2 (Solt 2019). Since the data has a large amount of missings (9.2 percent of our dataset), we interpolated missing data.⁹ Finally, we include two variables measuring the extent of intra-elite conflict and mass discontent in a society, which can affect the relevance of the military’s coercive power to political elites. Robust and valid data on elite polarization and conflict in a large number of third wave democracies is unavailable. Hence, we follow Mitchell, Morrison, and Paden (1989), and Pickering and Kisangani (2005) who operationalize elite conflicts through two indicators in the Banks Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive (Banks and Wilson 2013): major government crises (domestic4) and government purges (domestic5). The former captures “[a]ny rapidly developing situation that threatens to bring the downfall of the present regime—excluding situations of revolt aimed at such overthrow,” while purges include “[a]ny systematic elimination by jailing or execution of political opposition within the ranks of the regime or the opposition.” We create a combined elite conflict variable by summing these two count variables. To operationalize mass discontent, we construct a dummy variable that indicates whether a country has seen large-scale anti-government protests within a given year. This rests on the assumption that strong public signals of public dissatisfaction with the incumbent democratic regime, its lack of political legitimacy, and its alienation of key social groups can provide a window of opportunity for military officers to reinsert the armed forces into the political process (Croissant et al. 2013; Frantz and Ezrow 2011, 63–64; Przeworski 2019). Data for this variable is taken from the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) 1.3 dataset (Chenoweth and Shay 2020). Except praetorian legacies, military control over the transition and international support, which either already include a time-structure or are timeinsensitive, we lag all variables for one year to ensure temporal precedence. We also do not lag the Polity2 variable as this would measure the institutionalization of the authoritarian regime. The lagging explains the nine missing observations for variables such as external and internal threats, as a number of countries were not in existence in the year before the country was considered a democracy according to Polity, or did not yet have independent militaries (e.g., Armenia, the Baltic States, Czech and Slovak Republics, or

⁹ The interpolation procedure was based on Kalman smoothing (Moritz and Bartz-Beielstein 2017). As a robustness test, the main models were re-calculated without the imputed Gini data without substantive differences in the regression results (see online appendix).

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Table 3.2 Determinants of civilian control: Descriptive statistics Statistic

Type

N

Mean

SD

Min

Initial conditions Praetorian legacies Mil controlled transition

Binary Ordinal

1,112 1,112

0.335 0.392

0.472 0.383

0 0

1 1

Civilian bargaining strength Polity Continuous Civil society Continuous EU Binary

1,112 1,103 1,112

0.502 0.802 0.165

0.348 0.160 0.371

0.000 0.025 0

1.000 0.978 1

Military bargaining strength External threat Domestic threat GDP p.c. (log) Income inequality (log) Elite conflict Mass discontent

1,103 1,103 1,103 1,102 1,097 1,103

1.253 1.673 8.733 3.662 0.220 0.087

1.024 1.582 0.937 0.233 0.550 0.282

0.000 0.000 6.407 2.970 0.000 0.000

5.000 5.000 10.540 4.197 4.000 1.000

Ordinal Ordinal Continuous Continuous Count Binary

Max

the former Yugoslav Republics). Table 3.2 presents descriptive statistics for all determinant variables included in the analyses.¹⁰

3.3.2 Multiple regression analyses To evaluate the impact of the three sets of determinants of civilian control, we run a number of multivariate OLS regressions. To account for the panel structure of the data and control for correlation of standard errors within individual countries, we report robust standard errors clustered by country. Table 3.3 presents the results of four model specifications regressing different configurations of determinants on the aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI). The first three models test the effect of the variables of the three sets of covariates on civilian control, including only the determinants that define the initial conditions (Model 1), civilian bargaining power (Model 2), and military bargaining power (Model 3), respectively. The fourth model includes all 11 independent

¹⁰ The online appendix presents a correlation analysis to evaluate the degree of correlation between the independent variables.

Table 3.3 Determinants of civilian control in third wave democracies, aggregate Civilian Control Index (CCI) Model 1 Predictors

Estimates

std. Error

Praetorian legacies

−0.06* (−0.12–−0.00) −0.08 (−0.20–0.04)

0.03

Mil. controlled transition Polity Civil society EU membership External threat Domestic threat GDP p.c. (log) Income inequality (log) Elite conflict Mass discontent Country fixed effects Observations Clusters R2 /R2 adjusted

Model 2 Estimates

Model 3 Estimates

std. Error

0.06 0.10 (−0.02–0.22) 0.30*** (0.15–0.44) 0.09 (−0.01–0.19)

✓ 1112 66 0.981/0.979

std. Error

✓ 1103 66 0.985/0.984

0.06 0.07 0.05 −0.01 (−0.03–0.01) −0.01 (−0.03–0.01) 0.21*** (0.13–0.29) −0.15 (−0.52–0.23) −0.02 (−0.06–0.02) −0.00 (−0.05–0.05) ✓ 1096 66 0.985/0.984

0.01 0.01 0.04 0.19 0.02 0.02

Model 4 Estimates

std. Error

0.01 (−0.06–0.09)

0.04

0.00 (−0.08–0.09) 0.06 (−0.05–0.17) 0.23* (0.05–0.40) 0.05 (−0.04–0.14) −0.01 (−0.03–0.01) −0.01 (−0.03–0.02) 0.13*** (0.06–0.21) −0.29 (−0.74–0.16) −0.02 (−0.05–0.01) 0.03 (−0.02–0.07) ✓ 1096 66 0.986/0.985

0.04 0.06 0.09 0.04 0.01 0.01 0.04 0.23 0.02 0.02

Note: Dependent variable: Civilian Control Index (CCI). All time-sensitive independent variables are lagged by one year. Coefficients are reported with robust std. errors, clustered on countries. * p