Civil-Military Relations and Heterogeneity in Foreign Military Force

The relationship between domestic civil-military relations and the use of foreign military force has long been debated. Unfortunately, mixed findings in cross-national studies have added little clarity to our understanding to date. We argue that past scholarship overlooks something fundamental in the relationship and, further, we present a new theoretical lens to help to fill this gap. We contend that measures of civil-military contestation like declining civilian control or rising civil-military conflict should be expected to produce increased cross-national variance in the proclivity to use force. Four theoretical pathways often link civil-military contestation to such variance: greater military agency, diversionary incentives, counterbalancing, and contestation induced decision-making error. In autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (ARCH) estimates of 165 countries from 1946 to 2010, we find considerable empirical support for our contention. Our outcomes help to reconcile contradictory findings in the literature and they shed new light on this important relationship.