Are Military Regimes Really Belligerent?

Does military rule make a state more belligerent internationally? Several studies have recently established that military autocracies are more likely than civilian autocracies to deploy and use military force in pursuit of foreign policy objectives. I argue that military regimes are more likely to resort to military force because they are located in more hostile security environments, and not because they are inherently aggressive. First, I show that rule by military institution is more likely to emerge and exist in states facing external territorial threats. Second, by examining the relationship between military autocracies and conflict initiation, I find that once I control for states’ territorial threats, the statistical association between military regimes and conflict initiation disappears. Additionally, more evidence suggests that civilian dictatorships are more conflict-prone than their military counterparts when I account for unobserved dyad heterogeneity. The results are consistent across different measures of international conflict and authoritarian regimes. ∗An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2016 MPSA Annual Conference. †Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, namkyu@unl.edu. Since Geddes’s (2003) notable statement that authoritarian regimes differ from each other as much as they differ from democracies, a growing body of literature has paid attention to the institutional heterogeneity among autocracies to explain various outcomes. An increasing number of studies on international conflict have examined how dictatorships differ from each other in their propensity to engage in belligerent international behavior. Particularly, three seminal studies (Lai and Slater 2006, Debs and Goemans 2010, Weeks 2012) have recently established that military autocracies are more likely than civilian autocracies to deploy and use military force in pursuit of foreign policy objectives. These studies attribute military regimes’ relative conflict proneness to various sources: their lack of institutional power leading to regime’s insecurity (Lai and Slater 2006), to the harsh, post-exit punishments military rulers face (Debs and Goemans 2010), or to ruling elites’ military backgrounds (Weeks 2012, 2014). This research is indicative of a growing scholarly interest in examining the linkage between domestic politics and international affairs. While recognizing the contributions of these studies, I argue that the “military belligerence hypothesis” must be subjected to further critical scrutiny. These previous studies pay little attention to the fact that political regimes are not randomly assigned across countries and over time. Drawing on the the peace-to-democracy and territorial peace literatures (Gibler 2012, Hintze 1975, Rasler and Thompson 2004, Thompson 1996), I argue that military regimes are more likely to emerge and exist in states facing sustained territorial threats. Salient territorial threats produce high levels of militarization, which expands and politically empowers the military. Thus, the military’s capacity to intervene in politics increases when the country is exposed to salient external threats. If this is the case, territorial threats from neighboring countries may be causally responsible for generating both military regimes and militaristic behavior. That is, military regimes may be more likely to resort to military force or threat of military force because they are located in more hostile security environments, not because they are either institutionally fragile or predisposed toward using force. if as the I interchangeably use the terms autocracy, authoritarian regime, and dictatorship.