Abstract
Democratic control of the military addresses one of the most pressing, relevant and broadly discussed problems in the history of social order and political organization: how can the unarmed elected representatives of the people establish, maintain and exert dominance over the military, an organization that due to its overwhelming coercive capabilities potentially is a constant threat to social order and stability. Democratic control, however, comprises more than the mere absence of a military take-over of the government. It also requires that elected decision-makers have effective authority and oversight over defense and military policy; that the mechanisms, instruments and institutions that ensure democratic control over defense and military policy work effectively; and that military subordination under democratic civilian leadership is achieved without undermining the military’s social function. This chapter provides an overview of the scholarship on these aspects of democratic control in both established and new democracies, and surveys its different analytical perspectives and recent empirical findings.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter follows Martin Edmonds’ (1988) influential definition of the military as that legally formed, bureaucratically organized and armed state agency that possesses the monopoly over weapons of war; and whose primary function is defense against external threats. Most generally, then, civilians refers to all non-military social actors and organizations (Croissant and Kuehn 2015).
- 2.
Of course, controlling the military is only one of many aspects in democratic civil-military relations (see the chapter by Rukavishnikov and Pugh in this volume).
- 3.
In the following descriptive statistics on military coups I rely on Croissant and Herre’s (2013) dataset, who define a military coup as being ‘led by a military officer and executed by the military as an institution (corporate coups) or segments of the armed forces (factional coups)’ (Croissant 2013, 266). As the dataset only includes coups until 2012, I updated it to include all coups until 2014. For the regime-type analysis that follows, I cross-referenced this dataset with the Polity variable of the Polity IV dataset on democracy/autocracy (Marshall and Jaggers 2013).
- 4.
Despite conceptual and empirical criticisms, Polity IV remains the most often used dataset due to its easy availability, the long time-span covered, and its constant updating. For the purposes of this analysis, the Polity score is, however, problematic as the occurrence of a military coup affects the democracy/autocracy score. To correct for that, I have coded cases in which the coup has led to a drop of the Polity IV score below 6 as occurring in a democracy. This was done for a total of 23 cases in the population.
- 5.
The remaining 5 coups occurred in countries for which the most recently available Polity IV dataset (2013) does not provide data, either because the countries have a population of less than 500.000 (Dominica, Sao Tome and Principe), have not yet been independent (Sudan 1955), or because the coup occurred in 2014 (Thailand).
- 6.
Remainder to 100% is due to rounding errors.
- 7.
While there is a significant body of literature on democratic control in other Western societies, the overwhelming majority of studies focuses on civil-military relations in the United States. Moreover, the literature on civil-military relations beyond North America tends to be less interested in theory development and is often more strongly policy-oriented than its American counterpart (Nelson 2002). Consequently, I will focus my review on this latter literature.
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Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges Hans Born’s contribution to the first edition of this handbook (Born 2006). The chapter was written while the author was visiting fellow of the IDCAR network at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), in Hamburg, Germany.
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Kuehn, D. (2018). Democratic Control of the Military. In: Caforio, G., Nuciari, M. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of the Military. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71602-2_9
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