Mapping Variation in Political Control of the Military in Autocracies

• In Event: Civil-Military Relations

Abstract

How do autocrats manage civil-military relations? The dilemmas inherent in civil-military relations are particularly acute in non-democracies, given the threat that militaries can pose to the regime and the absence of many of the normative constraints on military intrusion into politics that are generally a feature of democratic civil-military relations. Prior research on autocratic civil-military relations has tended to focus on particular facets of civil-military relations or on the specific tactics that autocrats use to exert political control on their militaries. We argue that this approach is incomplete. We put forward a theory of strategies of control in which autocrats use strategies—combinations of different tactic of control—to manage the competing imperatives that they face in relations with their militaries. These are the need to at once have a military that will abstain from coups, repress effectively, defend against external enemies, and cede governing power and prerogatives to the regime. We put forward a four-party typology of strategies: Containment, Grand Bargain, Fusion, and Divide and Rule, and operationalize this typology using a range of new data sources on non-democratic civil-military relations.

Authors

• Risa A. Brooks, Marquette University

• Peter White, Auburn University