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Generals in the Cabinet: Military Participation in Government and International Conflict Initiation

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Generals in the Cabinet: Military Participation in Government and International Conflict Initiation Generals in the Cabinet: Military Participation in Government and International Conflict Initiation Peter B. White [email protected] [Working paper, please do not circulate or cite without contacting author] Word Count: 12,728 How does the presence of generals in a national cabinet affect a state's likelihood of international conflict? We know a great deal about how regime type affects international conflict, but there is substantial variation within regime types in the participation of military officers in the government. We know little about how this variation affects a state's conflict propensity. In this article, I examine three competing arguments for the effect of military participation in government on conflict initiation: military aggression, military conservatism, and civil-military competition. Military aggression suggests that military involvement in government will tend to guide the state towards conflict, given a military predisposition to favor the use of force. In contrast, military conservatism argues that military officers in government will lead the state to be more selective in the application of force, given their familiarity with the costs of armed conflict. Civil-military competition holds that when military officers and civilians share political power and may be in competition politically, a variety of pathologies in national security deliberation and decision-making emerge. Here, mistakes in international relations are more likely, and this leads to increased conflict propensity. I test these three propositions cross-nationally using a new dataset of the number and type of positions held by military officers in national cabinets and state councils, as well as extant data on international conflict and regime-type. I find strong support in favor of the civil-military competition argument. Conflict initiation is more likely where military officers hold positions outside the realm of national defense—indicating political power on the part of the military—and this effect is strongest when there is a strong civilian counterpart in the government—indicating shared civilian-military power. 1 Introduction How does military participation in the government affect the likelihood that a country initiates international conflict? Recent research has substantially advanced our understanding of the conflict propensity of different types of military regimes (e.g., Weeks 2012, 2014), as well as how the military background of state leaders influences their decisions to pursue international conflict (Horowitz and Stam 2014; Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis 2015). However, across regimes-types and leaders there is substantial variation in the levels of military involvement in government. The military is not absent from government in regimes that aren't military dictatorships, and leaders with military background sometimes have civilian cabinets and at other times, cabinets that are heavily staffed with military officers. We don't understand the impact of military involvement in government on international conflict outside of the background of the leader and the overall regime category. In this article, I test three different arguments for the effect of military participation in government on conflict initiation: Military Aggression, Military Conservatism, and Civil-Military Competition, and generate hypotheses from each, so that each argument can be evaluated empirically. Military Aggression argues that there are inherent attributes of military officers that make them favor military solutions to foreign policy problems. Through selection into the military, risk-attitudes, and socialization, military officers view military action more favorably and, when in government, will guide the country towards increased international conflict. This will be particularly true in non-democracies, given findings on the risk-acceptance of military officers who rise to political power in such a setting (e.g., Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis 2015). This argument suggests that as the number of military officers in the government increases, so too will that state's conflict propensity, though this effect will be most clearly evident in non-democracies. 2 In contrast, Military Conservatism suggests that, given their unique familiarity with the costs and limitations of armed conflict, military officers are especially judicious with regards to the application of force in international relations. Accordingly, as military officers have an increasing role in government, conflict propensity will decrease. This conservatism will be most evident in democracies, given that military officers who rise to political power in non-democracies tend to be more risk- acceptant. The final argument is Civil-Military Competition. Rather than focusing on inherent attributes of military officers, building on Brooks’ (2008) insights regarding civil-military relations and “strategic assessment,” Civil-Military Competition focuses on the pathologies in deliberation and decision-making that arise in governments where there is shared political power between military officers and civilian elites. In such settings ultimate decision-making authority is unclear and information sharing between the civilian and military portions of the government is poor. This increases the likelihood of mistakes in foreign affairs and international conflict. This argument suggests that where the military is involved in non-security aspects of the government—indicating shared political power and decision-making authority—conflict propensity is higher, and this effect is strongest where there is also a strong civilian elite in the regime. I test these competing arguments quantitatively using new yearly, cross-national data on the number of military officers in national cabinets and state councils and the type of role that they play —the Military Participation in Government (MPG) data. In examining the initiation of militarized disputes that rise to the level of actual violence (where there are fatalities), I find strong evidence in support of the Civil-Military Competition argument. Rather than there being a broad trend towards military conservatism or aggression, increased military officers in government correspond to the increased likelihood that a state initiates violent international conflict when the military is involved in the non-security aspects of government. And this is particularly true in regimes where there is a strong 3 civilian elite—e.g., the effect of non-security military participation in government is particularly strong in civilian one-party and civilian personalist regimes, as well as in democracies. This article makes three main contributions. First, it substantially advances our understanding of how the military influences foreign policy and conflict propensity. Second, it demonstrates significant variation in military involvement in government across different regime types, and shows that even within regimes, variation in the relative militarism or civilianization of the government is an important explanatory factor in explaining international conflict. Third, it leverages new data on military participation in government to adjudicate between three competing arguments in the literature regarding military attitudes towards conflict, suggesting that it is not inherent traits of military officers that exert an effect on conflict, but rather it is institutional arrangements in civil-military relations that matter. This article proceeds in six sections. In the first, I outline the existing literature on regime type, the military, and international conflict. In the second, I outline the three competing arguments explaining how the military influences international conflict. In the third, I introduce the new Military Participation in Government (MPG) data, and discuss its application to international conflict and the general research design. In the fourth section, I present the results of the empirical analysis. In the fifth and sixth sections, I conduct additional analyses to verify the robustness of the main results and conclude with some discussion of the scholarly and policy implications of the argument and results. Literature There is an expansive literature on the effect of regime type on international conflict. Much has been written about the rarity with which democracies fight each other (e.g., Doyle 1986; Maoz and Russet 4 1993; Schultz 1999; Huth and Allee 2002).1 Beyond democracies, there has been extensive progress in disaggregating autocracy into distinct categories. Lai and Slater (2005) have found that military regimes are more conflict prone than civilian dictatorships. Weeks (2012, 2014) has developed a four-party typology of autocracies—regimes headed by "juntas" (regimes where the military as an institution rules), "strongmen" (personalist dictators who are military officers), "bosses" (civilian personalist dictatorships), and "machines" (civilian party regimes). Weeks finds, importantly, that civilian party regimes are no more conflict-prone than democracies, while juntas, strongmen, and bosses are more conflict-prone. There has been another line of research on how the state leaders affect the conflict propensity of the state. Much of this links implicitly with the regime-type literature, focusing on how leaders' likelihood of punishment for defeat in international conflict varies across regime types and how this in turn affects leaders' conflict behavior. Leaders in mixed regimes and autocracies face a higher likelihood of punishment for defeat, and this punishment
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