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Introduction
Reforming civil-military relations and institutionalizing civilian control of the military is a crucial challenge for all post-authoritarian systems. Despite this, empirical research on civil-military relations in political regimes that find themselves in a transition from dictatorship to democracy remains rare (Bruneau and Matei, 2012). Furthermore, there is a rich literature on the causes of military intervention into politics, but little theorizing on the evolution of civilian control in consolidating democracies, and existing theories fail to specify the causal mechanisms through which the purported causal factors affect civil-military relations in new democracies.
In another contribution, we have proposed a fully specified causal model that systematically combines the 'structure' of causal factors and the 'agency' of relevant actors. According to this model, the strength of control over the armed forces in new democracies depends on the ability of civilian elites to enforce institutional change through 'control strategies' (Croissant et al., 2013). These control strategies are the mechanism through which civilian control works. However, they can only be employed successfully if civilians can draw on the required resources. This raises the question if there are certain resources, or combinations thereof, that are necessary or sufficient conditions for civilians to employ control strategies successfully.
This article proposes a first answer to this question. It proceeds in five steps. The first section presents the conceptual framework to trace the development of civil-military relations in new democracies.1The next section summarizes the theoretical argument. The third section outlines the research design and methodology of the empirical analysis. The penultimate section presents the results of a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 28 new democracies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The final section summarizes and evaluates the empirical evidence, and discusses fruitful avenues for further research.
Conceptualizing civilian control of the military in new democracies
Until recently, most of the literature equated civilian control with the absence of military coup d'états. However, this ignores that 'military or security forces today are more likely to endanger democracy by lessening its quality and depth than by threatening its outright and swift overthrow' (Agüero, 2009: 60). The de facto political power of militaries that emerges from their ability to engage in collective action or to use brute...