Dynamic Pathways of Military Behaviour Within Episodes of Democratic Backsliding

This paper investigates how and why military behavior changes within democratic backsliding episodes since the end of the Cold War. Building on the premise that militaries act as strategic actors navigating between professional norms, institutional interests, and regime incentives, we conceptualize four roles, perpetrator, accomplice, bystander and custodian, and three types of behavioral change: (1) escalation, describing a shift toward greater involvement in repressive politics, for instance from bystander to accomplice; (2) de-escalation, capturing the exact opposite trend; and (3) role oscillation, describing alternating movement between roles without a clear directional trend. Preliminary results from a small-n pilot study indicate that several backsliding episodes display such within-episode changes. Using a mixed-methods approach, we first explore descriptive associations between the three pathways and explanatory variables, including elections and episodes of mass mobilization. In a second step, we apply process tracing to three illustrative case studies representing each pathway type to uncover the mechanisms that drive those shifts. We operationalize such changes through observable indicators such as participation in coercive politics, compliance with civilian directives, and degrees of organizational autonomy. This contributes to understanding how militaries adapt their behavior during backsliding and under which conditions they sustain, resist, or restore democratic order.