Previous Military Rule and Democratic Survival

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200272095706
Author(s):  
Nam Kyu Kim

Existing scholarship shows that a history of military rule increases the risk of democratic breakdown. However, scholars overlook the fact that military rule takes two distinct forms: collegial and personalist military rule. I argue that the two types of military rule provide different structural settings for post-authoritarian contexts. Collegial military rule hands over more cohesive and hierarchical militaries to their subsequent democracies than personalist military rule. These militaries remain organized, politicized, and powerful in emerging democracies, which increases the risk of military intervention and coups. I hypothesize that collegial military rule poses a greater threat to the survival of the ensuing democracies than personalist military rule. Empirical analysis reveals that democracies after collegial military rule are more likely to collapse than other democracies, including those emerging from personalist military rule. This shows that the previous finding on the detrimental effect of military rule is largely driven by collegial military rule.

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 859-880 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER LEE

AbstractOver the past three decades Jean Bethke Elshtain has used her critique and application of just war as a means of engaging with multiple overlapping aspects of identity. Though Elshtain ostensibly writes about war and the justice, or lack of justice, therein, she also uses just war a site of analysis within which different strands of subjectivity are investigated and articulated as part of her broader political theory. This article explores the proposition that Elshtain's most important contribution to the just war tradition is not be found in her provision of codes or her analysis of ad bellum or in bello criteria, conformity to which adjudges war or military intervention to be just or otherwise. Rather, that she enriches just war debate because of the unique and sometimes provocative perspective she brings as political theorist and International Relations scholar who adopts, adapts, and deploys familiar but, for some, uncomfortable discursive artefacts from the history of the Christian West: suffused with her own Christian faith and theology. In so doing she continually reminds us that human lives, with all their attendant political, social, and religious complexities, should be the focus when military force is used, or even proposed, for political ends.


2017 ◽  
Vol 111 (4) ◽  
pp. 686-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN A.T. GRAHAM ◽  
MICHAEL K. MILLER ◽  
KAARE W. STRØM

Democracy is often fragile, especially in states recovering from civil conflict. To protect emerging democracies, many scholars and practitioners recommend political powersharing institutions, which aim to safeguard minority group interests. Yet there is little empirical research on whether powersharing promotes democratic survival, and some concern that it limits electoral accountability. To fill this gap, we differentiate between inclusive, dispersive, and constraining powersharing institutions and analyze their effects on democratic survival from 1975 to 2015 using a global dataset. We find sharp distinctions across types of powersharing and political context. Inclusive powersharing, such as ethnic quotas, promotes democratic survival only in post-conflict settings. In contrast, dispersive institutions such as federalism tend to destabilize post-conflict democracies. Only constraining powersharing consistently facilitates democratic survival regardless of recent conflict. Institution-builders and international organizations should therefore prioritize institutions that constrain leaders, including independent judiciaries, civilian control of the armed forces, and constitutional protections of individual and group rights.


Author(s):  
Paul E. Lenze, Jr.

Algeria is a state in the Maghreb that has been dominated by military rule for the majority of its existence. The National People’s Army (ANP) used nationalism to justify its intervention into politics while ensuring that withdrawal would occur only if national identity were protected. Algeria, similar to other Middle Eastern states, underwent historical trajectories influenced by colonialism, the Cold War, and post-9/11 politics; briefly experimented with democracy; and as a result, experienced the military as the dominant institution in the state. The resignation of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika after 20 years of rule in April 2019, following six weeks of popular protest, has raised questions as to whether democratization is possible. Algeria’s history of military involvement in politics, the strength of the military as an institution, and its cooperative links with domestic elites and international actors portend the endurance of authoritarianism for the foreseeable future.


Author(s):  
James Loxton

This chapter examines ARENA in El Salvador and argues that, like the UDI in Chile, its success was the product of authoritarian inheritance and counterrevolutionary struggle. The first section discusses El Salvador’s long history of right-wing military rule. The second section examines the October 1979 coup and the resulting establishment of a left-wing Revolutionary Governing Junta. The third section discusses the intense counterrevolutionary response that the junta triggered. This included large-scale death squad violence, with future ARENA founder Roberto D’Aubuisson playing a key role. The fourth section examines the formation of ARENA in response to an impending transition to competitive elections. The fifth section shows how D’Aubuisson’s role as a high-level official in the pre-1979 military regime endowed ARENA with several valuable resources. The final section discusses how ARENA’s origins in counterrevolutionary struggle served as a powerful source of cohesion.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (04) ◽  
pp. 1850017
Author(s):  
RODOLFO ANGELO MAGTANGGOL III DE GUZMAN ◽  
MIKE K. P. SO

This paper proposes the use of threshold heteroskedastic models which integrate threshold nonlinearity [Tong, H (1978). On a Threshold Model, pp. 575–586. Netherlands: Sijthoff & Noordhoff; Tong, H and KS Lim (1980). Threshold autoregression, limit cycles and cyclical data. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), 3, 245–292.] and GARCH-type conditional variance for modeling Bitcoin returns to provide an understanding on the huge volatility that Bitcoin has been famous for. Specifically, the model attempts to identify different regimes throughout the history of Bitcoin using the different available Bitcoin network characteristics, such as cost per transaction, number of transactions per block, number of active addresses and number of transactions. Estimation and diagnostic checks are performed using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. In the empirical analysis, we show that our model is able to identify periods of crashes as one of these regimes, which is also a period of declining returns and declining number of active users. We also find that the number of users and the number of transactions determine the magnitude or persistence of a crash period.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-435
Author(s):  
Aaron Erlich

What factors shape citizens’ willingness to engage in vote selling? This paper argues that providing voters with information about the detrimental effect of vote selling (public service predation) or telling them that their community members will look down on them if they engage in the practice (social sanctioning) can shape vote-selling attitudes in emerging democracies. Using a nationwide randomized survey experiment carried out between May and June of 2012 in Kenya, this study primes voters with theory-based informational messages for voters to test whether such messages can potentially curtail vote-selling attitudes. The paper finds that both public service predation and social sanctioning messages can reduce stated vote-selling preferences as much as legal campaigns that have been tested previously. The study has important implications for researchers and policy-makers because it suggests alternative methods to change vote-selling attitudes and even behavior in the short- to medium-term.


2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ho Wai-Chung

AbstractThis article considers the relationship between popular music and the power of the state through an analysis of the history of Taiwan and the settings within which popular music was constructed and transformed by contentious political and social groups in the twentieth century. The historical formation of Taiwanese society falls into three distinct stages: Japanese colonization between 1895 and 1945; the Kuomintang's (KMT) military rule between 1947 and 1987; and the period from the end of martial law in 1987 to the resurgence of Taiwanese consciousness in the early 2000s. The evolution of Taiwan's popular music has always been connected with the state's production of new ideologies in line with changing socio-political and economic conditions, and this music still embodies a functional social content.


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