Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Civil-Military Bargaining, the Threat of War, and the Path to Civilian Control

军队何时退出政治并接受文官控制？这是一个至关重要的问题，因为文官对政治上被动的军队的控制是民主化的先决条件，也与国际和国内和平密切相关。该项目研究了国际和国内冲突对非民主国家和向民主过渡的国家军队在政治中的作用的影响。它认为，威胁推翻国家领导人的冲突会增加军队对政治的干预，而不构成同样风险的冲突会加剧军官队伍的分裂，并减少军队对政治的参与。虽然之前的研究使用代理措施来捕捉军民关系的不同方面，但该项目将使用一个新的跨国数据集来研究军事入侵政治和相对的民事控制。研究范围是从 1960 年至今所有非民主国家和向民主过渡的国家。因此，该项目将为中国、俄罗斯、乌克兰、阿富汗、泰国和伊拉克等国家的军民关系提供新的视角。智力优点：该项目为军民关系难题提供了答案：军事入侵对国家领导人的威胁程度至关重要。国家领导人可以利用不直接危及其统治的国内或国际威胁来加剧军队内部紧张局势并迫使军队退出政治。然而，对领导人构成更严重威胁的冲突会削弱领导人的地位，因为他们需要军事保护。这导致军事对政治的入侵和文官控制的削弱。 这一理论的检验将在很大程度上依赖于关于军队在政治中的作用的新颖的跨国数据收集。该提案中使用有限年份内国防部军事控制的现有数据进行的初步分析为该理论提供了初步支持，但该项目建议使用涵盖 1960 年至今的更广泛的数据集进行测试，并捕获国家军民关系的更深层次。这些数据不仅包括国防部的军事控制权，还包括国家内阁、情报机构领导职位和国家安全委员会中的军事代表。这些客观衡量标准比现有数据更贴近文官控制和军队政治角色的概念，因此可以对将军民关系作为因变量或自变量的理论进行更真实的检验。更广泛的影响：该项目通过两种方式对社会产生更广泛的影响：解决美国决策者面临的紧迫的国家安全困境，以及生成有助于学者解决广泛政策问题的数据集。首先，阿拉伯之春事件证明了军队作为政治行动者的重要性——军队在某些情况下为自己发挥了政治作用，但在其他情况下却退后一步，让民主化继续进行。该项目将产生并测试一种理论，为政策制定者提供一个框架，以预测军事入侵一系列国家的政治，包括那些正在经历民主转型的国家。这将使政策制定者能够更准确地评估民主在这些国家扎根的前景。此外，该项目还将对一个国家的安全环境对其军队发挥政治作用的倾向的影响产生明确的预测。因此，鉴于美国有能力通过部队部署、军事援助和军事合作协议影响其他国家的安全环境，这项研究对于有兴趣减少对受援国政治的军事入侵的美国决策者来说具有明显的相关性。 其次，该项目生成的数据将具有广泛的适用性，超出了测试本文概述的理论的范围。学者们可以利用这些数据来解决诸如军民冲突与国家卷入国际危机的倾向之间的关系，以及军民关系较差的国家的危机升级为与当前的乌克兰-俄罗斯危机等直接相关的战争问题的倾向等问题。

When do militaries withdraw from politics and submit to civilian control? This is a vital question given that civilian control of politically passive militaries is a prerequisite for democratization and is also strongly associated with international and domestic peace. This project examines the effects of international and domestic conflict on the military's role in politics in non-democracies and states transitioning to democracy. It argues that conflicts that threaten to topple a state's leader increase military intrusion into politics, while conflicts that do not pose the same risk exacerbate splits in the military's officer corps and decrease military involvement in politics. While previous studies use proxy measures to capture different aspects of civil-military relations, this project will use a new cross-national dataset on military intrusion into politics and relative civilian control. The scope of the study is all non-democracies and states transitioning to democracy from 1960 to the present. Accordingly, the project will provide new insight into the civil-military relations of such states as China, Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Iraq. Intellectual Merit: This project provides an answer to the puzzle of civil-military relations: It is the degree to which the state leader is threatened that matters it military intrusion. State leaders can leverage domestic or international threats that do not directly endanger their rule to exacerbate intra-military tensions and to compel the military to withdraw from politics. However, conflicts that pose a more severe threat to the leader weaken that leader's position, given their need for military protection. This leads to military intrusion into politics and weaker civilian control. The testing of this theory will rest heavily on novel, cross-national data collection on the role of the military in politics. Preliminary analysis in the proposal using extant data on military control of ministries of defense (MODs) for a limited number of years provides initial support for the theory, but this project proposes to conduct tests using a much-expanded dataset that covers 1960 to the present and captures much deeper aspects of states' civil-military relations. These data will include not only military control of the MOD, but also military representation in national cabinets, intelligence agency leadership positions, and national security councils. These objective measures map much more closely onto the concepts of civilian control and the military's political role than existing data and can, thus, allow for truer tests of theories that incorporate civil-military relations as either dependent or independent variables. Broader Impacts: This project provides a broader impact on society in two ways: by addressing a pressing national security dilemma for U.S. policy-makers, and by generating a dataset which will be useful to scholars addressing a wide range of policy questions. First, the events of the Arab Spring have demonstrated the importance of the military as a political actor-with the military asserting a political role for itself in some cases, but in others, stepping back and allowing democratization to proceed. This project will generate and test a theory that provides a framework for policy-makers to predict military intrusion into politics in a range of states, including those undergoing democratic transitions. This will allow policy-makers to more accurately assess the prospects for democracy to take hold in such states.Further, this project will generate clear predictions about the effect of a state's security environment on the propensity of its military to take a political role. Accordingly, given the ability of the United States to affect other countries' security environment through troop deployments, military aid, and military cooperation agreements, this study has clear relevance to U.S. policy-makers interested in reducing military intrusion into politics in recipient countries.Secondly, the data generated by this project will have broad applicability beyond testing the theory outlined here. This data could be used by scholars to address such questions as the relationship between civil-military conflict and states' tendency to get involved in international crises and the propensity for crises with states with poor civil-military relations to escalate to war-questions that directly relate, for example, to the ongoing Ukraine-Russia crisis.