Binding Contestation: How Party-Military Relations Influence Democratization Darin Sanders Self Cornell University
[email protected] December 7, 2020 Abstract From setting restrictions on popular sovereignty and open contestation, tocite yielding entirely to civilians, there is substantial variation in how militaries behave in transi- tions from military rule. I argue that the extent to which a military sets parameters on electoral and political institutions during a regime transition, what I call bounded democratization, is a function of a military's confidence that partiesnot will protect the military's corporate interests following the transition. A military's confidence in polit- ical parties is influenced by the degree of trust between the parties and the military, the institutionalization of the incumbent party, as welldo as the electoral and political strength of the incumbent party. When these factors- are high, the military's confidence increases and it becomes more willing to yield to civilian parties. Using comparative historical analysis on a paired comparison of Indonesia and Paraguay I test the causal mechanisms and then use quantitative models to show that the mechanisms are gen- eralizable. paper Working Job market paper for AY 2020-2021. Do not circulate without author's per- mission. When considering democratization, a key dilemma for the military is securing credible com- mitments that their institutional interests will be secured following a transition. Democrati- zation, when it returns civilians to power, reduces a military's control over its own interests and may re-expose it to the same issues that enticed it out of the barracks in the first place.