Institutionalizing civilian control of the military is a particularly relevant and pressing problem for newly democratized nations, which are often confronted with ‘historical legacies’ of military autonomy and political influence stemming back to the military’s role of a pillar of the previous authoritarian regime. In this Paper, we attempt to answer the question why some third wave democracies succeeded in establishing firm and lasting civilian control over their militaries while others failed or achieved only limited success?
We theorize that the institutionalization of civilian control in new democracies 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 and reduce the armed forces’ ‘disposition and opportunity’ to resist the establishment of the new institutions. We test this theory through a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of an original dataset of civil-military relations in 66 countries that have made the transition to democracy since 1974. fsQCA is the ideal tool to test our argument as our theory suggests that there is no single necessary or sufficient condition for the success or failure of the institutionalization of civilian control in new democracies, but that civilians’ ability to employ efficacious control strategies is ruled by complex multi-causal and equifinal combinations of factors.
Next to the substantive contribution to research on civil-military relations in new democracies, the paper is the first systematic application of fsQCA to the study of civil-military relations in a large number of emerging, consolidating or eroding new democracies. It, thus, not only underscores the broad applicability of fsQCA, but also shows how fsQCA enriches previous research findings through providing insights into alternative causal paths.
