Many countries complete tenuous transitions to democracy and must work to prevent an authoritarian reversal, which is often at the hands of the military. One of the most important tools the new government has in dealing with the military is the amount of money allocated to the military. This leads to the question, how does government military spending in post-transition democratic countries affect the chances of democratic transition failure? The extant literature provides two answers. The first is to increase military spending to placate the military; the second is to decrease military spending to weaken the military and address social welfare needs. The article tests these two hypotheses by examining democratic transitions from 1967 to 1999 using both logit and survival analysis methods. The results of the study provide robust support for the hypothesis that decreasing military spending decreases the likelihood of a democratic transition failure.
Samuel P. Huntington , The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Felipe Aguero, ‘‘The Military and the Limits to Democratization in South America,’’ in Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective, ed. Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O’Donnell , and J. Samuel Valenzuela ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); Ibid., ‘‘Legacies of Transitions: Institutionalization, the Military and Democracy in South America,’’Mershon International Studies Review42 ( 1998): 383-404; Ibid., ‘‘Institutions, Transitions, and Bargaining: Civilians and the Military in Shaping Post-Authoritarian Regimes,’’ in Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives, ed. David Pion-Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Harold A. Trinkunas, ‘‘Crafting Civilian Control in Argentina and Venezuela,’’ in Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives, ed. David Pion-Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
2.
Huntington, The Third Wave; Adam Przeworski, ‘‘The Games of Transition,’’ in Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective, ed. Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O’Donnell, and J. Samuel Valenzuela (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).
3.
Aguero, ‘‘Military and Limits to Democratization,’’; Ibid., ‘‘Legacies of Transitions;’’ Ibid., ‘‘Institutions, Transitions, and Bargaining.’’
4.
Huntington, The Third Wave.
5.
Ibid., 252.
6.
Trinkunas, ‘‘Crafting Civilian Control.’’
7.
Gavin Cawthra, ‘‘Security Transformation in Post-Apartheid South Africa,’’ in Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional Democracies, ed. Gavin Cawthra and Robin Luckham ( London: Zed Books, 2003); Robin Luckham, ‘‘Democratic Strategies for Security in Transition and Conflict,’’ in Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional Democracies, ed. Gavin Cawthra and Robin Luckham ( London: Zed Books, 2003); Eboe Hutchful, ‘‘Pulling Back from the Brink: Ghana’s Experience,’’ in Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional Democracies, ed. Gavin Cawthra and Robin Luckham (London: Zed Books, 2003).
8.
Cawthra, ‘‘Security Transformation;’’ Luckham, ‘‘Democratic Strategies for Security.’’
9.
J. ‘Kayode Fayemi, ‘‘Governing the Security Sector in a Democratizing Polity: Nigeria,’’ in Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional Democracies, ed. Gavin Cawthra and Robin Luckham ( London: Zed Books, 2003); Kees Koonings, ‘‘Political Armies, Security Forces and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America,’’ in Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional Democracies , ed. Gavin Cawthra and Robin Luckham (London: Zed Books, 2003); David Pion-Berlin, ‘‘Civil-Military Circumvention: How Argentine State Institutions Compensate for a Weakened Chain of Command,’’ in Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives, ed. David Pion-Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
10.
Hutchful, ‘‘Pulling Back from Brink,’’; Luckham, ‘‘Democratic Strategies for Security.’’
11.
Ibid.
12.
Barry Ames, Political Survival: Politicians and Public Policy in Latin America ( Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987); Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Ibid., ‘‘The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions,’’Comparative Politics29 ( 1997): 263-83.
13.
James H. Lebovic, ‘‘Spending Priorities and Democratic Rule in Latin America,’’The Journal of Conflict Resolution45 (2001 ): 427-52.
14.
Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers., Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2002 (Dataset User’s Manual, 2002).
15.
Harvey Starr and Christina Lindborg, ‘‘Democratic Dominoes Revisited: The Hazards of Governmental Transitions, 1974-1996,’’Journal of Conflict Resolution47 ( 2003): 490-519.
16.
Marshall and Jaggers, Polity IV Project.
17.
U.S. State Department, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (various years).
18.
Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, MD: John Hop-kins University Press, 1996), particularly chapters 5 and 13.
19.
Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 6.2, Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of Pennsylvania (2006).
20.
Kelly M. Kadera, Mark J. C. Crescenzi, and Megan L. Shannon, ‘‘Democratic Survival, Peace and War in the International System,’’American Journal of Political Science47 ( 2003): 234-47; Adam Przeworski et al., ‘‘What Makes Democracies Endure?’’Journal of Democracy7 (1996): 39-55; Benjamin Smith, ‘‘Oil Wealth and Regime Survival in the Developing World,’’American Journal of Political Science48 (2004): 232-46.
21.
Heston, Summers, and Aten, Penn World Table.
22.
Haggard and Kaufmann, ‘‘Political Economy of Democratic Transitions.’’
23.
Nils Petter Gleditsch et al., ‘‘Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A New Dataset,’’Journal of Peace Research39 (2002): 615-37.
24.
J. David Singer, Stuart Bremer, and John Stuckey, ‘‘Capability Distribution, Uncertainty, and Major Power War, 1820-1965,’’ in Peace, War, and Numbers, ed. Bruce Russett (Beverly Hills : Sage, 1972); J. David Singer, ‘‘Reconstructing the Correlates of War Dataset on Material Capabilities of States, 1816-1985,’’International Interactions14 (1987): 115-32.
25.
James D. Fearon and David Laitin, ‘‘Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War,’’American Journal of Political Science97 (2003): 75-90.
26.
Smith, ‘‘Oil Wealth.’’
27.
Marshall and Jaggers, Polity IV Project.
28.
Daniel Brink and Michael Coppedge, ‘‘Diffusion is no Illusion: Neighbor Emulation in the Third Wave of Democracy,’’Comparative Political Studies39 ( 2006): 463-89; Starr and Lindborg, ‘‘Democratic Dominoes Revisited.’’
29.
Faten Ghosn, Glenn Palmer, and Stuart Bremer, ‘‘The MID3 Data Set, 1993-2001: Procedures, Coding Rules, and Description,’’Conflict Management and Peace Science21 (2004): 133-54.
30.
Michael Colaresi and William R. Thompson, ‘‘The Economic Development-Democratization Relationship: Does the Outside World matter?’’Comparative Political Studies36 ( 2003): 381-403; Starr and Lindborg, ‘‘Democratic Dominoes Revisited.’’
31.
Kadera, Crescenzi, and Shannon, ‘‘Democratic Survival,’’; Smith, ‘‘Oil Wealth;’’ Starr and Lindborg, ‘‘Democratic Dominoes Revisited.’’
32.
Lawrence C. Hamilton, Statistics with STATA: Updated for Version 8 (Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole-Thomson Learning, 2004 ).
33.
Kadera, Crescenzi, and Shannon, ‘‘Democratic Survival,’’ 241.
34.
Ibid.
35.
Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg , ‘‘Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation,’’American Journal of Political Science44 ( 2000): 347-61; Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenberg, and Gary King, ‘‘CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results. Version 2.0’’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2000) June 1, http://gking.harvard.edu.
36.
Uk Heo , ‘‘Modeling the Defense-Growth Relationship around the Globe,’’The Journal of Conflict Resolution42 (1998): 637-57; Uk Heo and Robert J. Eger III, ‘‘Paying for Security: The Security-Prosperity Dilemma in the United States,’’The Journal of Conflict Resolution49 (2005): 792-817; Alex Mintz and Chi Huang, ‘‘Guns versus Butter: The Indirect Link,’’American Journal of Political Science35 (1991): 738-57.
37.
Vivienne Walt , ‘‘Russia Rearms,’’Time, April 16, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1891681,00.html ; Vidya Ram , ‘‘Russia’s Big Military Spending Plans,’’Forbes, March 17, 2009 , http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/17/russia-military-spending-markets-equity-defense.html .
