Military expenditure and regime type : an empirical investigation into civil military relations

Brauner, Jennifer Lisa Noon (2015) Military expenditure and regime type : an empirical investigation into civil military relations. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis investigates empirical issues in civil military relations. It is comprised of one qualitative chapter (chapter 2), one chapter describing the data (chapter 3) and four empirical chapters (chapters 4-7). Chapter 2 gives an overview of coup-proofing strategies available to dictators, before analysing how various dictators of the MENA region utilised these strategies to varying degrees. Chapter 2 is a qualitative study. The purpose of this chapter is to provide context and depth to the empirical chapters that follow. Chapter 4 explores the role of the military in democratisation. It tests the hypothesis that countries in which the military was politically powerful before democratic transition occurs are less likely to consolidate democracy. It represents one of the first empirical applications of Acemoglu et al.’s (2010) paper “A Theory of Military Dictatorships”. One of the main challenges encountered in this chapter is problem of quantifying the political power of the military. While this chapter considers a number of possible measures, the main measure used for empirical analysis is military burden. Chapter 4 effectively explores the impact of military spending on democracy, using a panel of 102 countries over the period 1960-2000. In chapter 5, this relationship is reversed. Chapter 5 examines whether democracies spend less on the military that autocracies. While papers on the determinants of military spending generally include democracy as a control variable, with a few exceptions, it is not the focus of their enquiry. This chapter addresses resulting problems in the existing literature concerning data quality and the appropriate measurement of key variables. In particular, it addresses the question of causality between military spending and democracy, a question which arises but is not resolved in chapter 4. Chapter 6 delves further into the relationship between military spending and regime type, unpacking the category of autocracy into military regimes, single-party states and personalist regimes. I develop a theory of authoritarian survival that explains why certain types of dictatorships are likely to allocate more resources to the military than others. I test this theory empirically using an unbalanced panel 64 countries over the period 1960-2000.Chapter 7 uses new data on military spending in the MENA region to explore the relationship between military expenditures and natural resource rents. While there is abundant anecdotal evidence on the connection between these two variables, this relationship has not been systematically tested empirically. I do so using a panel of 16 MENA countries covering the period 1960-2010.

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