Soldiers and Autocratization. Varieties of Military Roles in Post-Cold War Asia

Abstract

This paper analyzes the military’s behavior in seventeen episodes of autocratization in Asia-Pacific since 1991. It presents a conceptualization of military roles in situations of autocratization. The inductive empirical analysis discusses seven variables of military behavior that combine two theoretical perspectives from existing strands of research: military-centric and society-centered explanations. We identify three forms of military behavior as empirically relevant in Asia. Each is characterized by the presence of a distinct combination of four causal factors: incumbent threats to the military’s core interests and a strong praetorian tradition (military-centered variables); and military veto power and a strong ruling party organization (society-centric factors). Other variables, such as a military background of political leaders, elite radicalization and polarized mass mobilization, and internal security and public order as established role of the military cannot account for varieties of military action in episodes of autocratization.

Resumen

Este artículo analiza el comportamiento de los militares en 17 episodios de autocratización que tuvieron lugar en la región de Asia-Pacífico desde 1991. El estudio presenta una conceptualización de los roles militares en situaciones de autocratización. El análisis empírico inductivo que llevamos a cabo debate siete variables del comportamiento militar que combinan dos perspectivas teóricas de las líneas de investigación existentes: por un lado, las explicaciones del comportamiento político de los militares centradas en lo militar y, por otro lado, las explicaciones del comportamiento político de los militares centradas en la sociedad. Identificamos tres formas de comportamiento militar que son empíricamente relevantes en Asia. Cada una de ellas se caracteriza por la presencia de una combinación distinta de cuatro factores causales: las amenazas a los intereses fundamentales de las fuerzas armadas y una fuerte tradición pretoriana (variables centradas en las fuerzas armadas), y el poder del veto militar y una fuerte organización por parte del partido gobernante (factores centrados en la sociedad). Otras variables, tales como el pasado militar de los líderes políticos, la radicalización de las élites y la movilización de masas polarizada, así como la seguridad interna y el orden público como papel establecido de las fuerzas armadas, no pueden explicar las variedades de acción militar que tienen lugar durante los episodios de autocratización.

Résumé

Cet article analyse le comportement militaire dans 17 épisodes d'autocratisation en Asie-Pacifique depuis 1991. L’étude présente une conceptualisation des rôles militaires dans des situations d'autocratisation. L'analyse empirique inductive traite de sept variables du comportement militaire qui combinent deux perspectives théoriques de branches existantes de la recherche: les explications du comportement politique des soldats centrées sur l'armée et celles centrées sur la société. Nous identifions trois formes de comportement militaire pertinentes sur le plan empirique en Asie. Chaque comportement se caractérise par la présence d'une combinaison distincte de quatre facteurs causaux: menaces actuelles pour les intérêts centraux de l'armée et forte tradition prétorienne (variables centrées sur l'armée); pouvoir de veto militaire et forte organisation du parti au pouvoir (facteurs centrés sur la société). D'autres variables, comme l'expérience militaire des dirigeants politiques, la radicalisation de l’élite et la polarisation de la mobilisation de masse, ainsi que la sécurité interne et l'ordre public comme rôle établi de l'armée, ne peuvent expliquer les différences dans l'action militaire lors d’épisodes d'autocratisation.

Introduction

Autocratization is a well-documented global phenomenon that has unfolded over the last several years, though the exact extent of democratic erosion is contested (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019; Little and Meng 2023). Evidently, soldiers’ actions are critical to further advance or block autocratization. In incumbent-led episodes of democratic backsliding, military support enables presidents or prime ministers to improve their odds of defying checks and balances and aggrandizing their power. In contrast, political leaders who cannot rely on unwavering military loyalty in the event of democratic unrest face greater risk and fewer chances of success in rolling back democratization and entrenching illiberal practices.

While the military was not a relevant actor in post-communist Europe, incumbents in other regions often seek the support of the military before attempting a “self-coup” The autogolpe of President Alberto Fujimori of Peru is a prototypical example (Cameron 1998). Other examples of presidents who rely on the support of the military to stay in power are President Maduro in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua (Kuehn et al. 2017). In contrast, Brazil’s President Jaime Bolsonaro quite clearly was hoping to pull off a takeover in 2022, but he failed to turn-over the election and to stop the inauguration of a new administration because he could not convince the military (or any other important actors) to support him (Stuenkel 2024). In the coup-prone countries of the Sahel Belt, the military often plays an even more dominant role in processes of autocratization.

Though the military’s importance is acknowledged, the field suffers from a three-fold research gap. First, there is a lack of comprehensive and precise conceptualization of the varieties of military roles in autocratization. Second, we lack a theory of military behavior in episodes of democratic decline and regression. Finally, we do know very little about the actual forms of military behavior during periods of autocratization in various regions of the world and, especially, in Asia.

Asia-Pacific is particularly suitable for research that explores the dynamics of civil–military relations and autocratization. It is home to a variety of different political regimes, ranging from consolidated liberal democracies such as Japan to hard dictatorships like Myanmar and North Korea. The civil–military relations of the region are also immensely diverse. The regional wave of democratization that reached the shores of the Asia-Pacific in the late 1980s had important consequences for civil–military relations as control over military and other security forces in many countries were placed in the hands of elected officials and became more transparent and institutionalized (Alagappa 2001). In recent years, however, the region joined the global democratic regression, though the extent of democratic erosion is contested (Mietzner 2021; Kasuya and Wang 2024).

The outcome of interest in this study is the military’s behavior in episodes of autocratization in Asia. By drawing on evidence from seventeen episodes in Asia-Pacific from the end of the Cold War until 2022, this medium-N comparative study makes three contributions to autocratization studies, civil–military relations research, and comparative Asian politics.

First, it presents a conceptualization of military roles in autocratization episodes. Second, it examines seven factors from two theoretical perspectives that could plausibly affect the military’s behavior in autocratization episodes: a military-centric perspective (referring to push factors) and a society-centric view (comprising pull factors). Even though military-centric and society-centered explanations are often viewed as exclusionary by scholars of civil–military relations, our study will show that the combination of both perspectives offers the most explanatory power. Third, we present the first comprehensive empirical overview of military behavior in autocratization episodes in post-Cold War Asia—and in fact, in any region during the so-called “third wave of autocratization” (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019). In doing so, this paper identifies three patterns in military behavior in cases of autocratization in Asia and elucidates three combinations of push and pull factors that can explain the identified cross-national variation in military behavior and can serve as a first step to theorizing the role of the military in autocratization processes.

We find that the military’s role in Asian autocratization episodes is shaped by a combination of internal and external factors that influence its motivation and opportunities. When a praetorian legacy and weak civilian oversight coincide with threats to core military interests, the military may instigate a coup, especially if the incumbent lacks strong party support. Conversely, if these triggers for independent military action are absent—meaning civilian control is robust, and military interests are unthreatened—the military tends to support the incumbent’s autocratization attempt. Finally, if both coup motives are weak and the incumbent has a solid ruling party, the military is likely to remain a passive observer in the autocratization process.

Conceptualizing Military Behavior in Episodes of Autocratization

Despite the recent surge in autocratization studies, even the most frequently used indicators of democratic setbacks often disagree about whether it occurred in each case (Little and Meng 2023). The difficulties are partly rooted in how researchers conceptualize “democracy” and, especially, in the plethora of concepts intended to capture forms of democratic decline that contribute to considerable conceptual and empirical confusion (Bogaards 2012; Riedl et al. 2023).

This study applies the concept of autocratization, which denotes a “substantial de-facto decline of core institutional requirements for electoral democracy” (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019, 1096) in both democracies and non-democracies. Autocratization can be differentiated into three forms of political change :

1. the decline in democratic quality of a given democratic regime that comes to a halt before it ceases to be a democracy (“democratic recession”);

2. the decline of democratic regime attributes that is sufficient to take a political system beyond the threshold that distinguishes democracy from autocracy (“democratic breakdown”); and

3. the erosion of democratic characteristics in autocracies (“autocratic consolidation”).

There are many ways in which democratic institutions decay or die (Linz 1978; Maeda 2010). However, recent studies emphasize that the predominant form of autocratization since the end of the Cold War is not the sudden breakdown traceable to a clear starting point as was the case with open military coups, self-coups, or revolutionary uprisings before 1990, but a gradually unfolding process of democratically elected elites chipping away at the institutional and normative underpinnings of democracy (Bermeo 2016; Haggard and Kaufman 2016; Lindstaedt 2021).

Reflecting the rise of “incumbent-led” modes of autocratization and the (relative) decline of open military coup d’états, the current literature tends to underappreciate the role of the military in autocratization. Of course, military coups remain a relevant threat in transitional societies and emerging democracies, and the number of military-led coup d’états increased again in the 2020s (Peyton et al. 2023). Yet, the roles of soldiers in autocratization can be more varied and complex than the focus on military coups would suggest. The military can be the dominant force, usually by staging a coup d'état or by using proxy parties who aim to overthrow an existing democratic regime (Nordlinger 1977; Finer 1988). But soldiers can also play crucial roles in cases of incumbent-led autocratization. For example, “self-coups” are initiated by a nation’s chief executive who is often aided and abetted by others inside or outside of the government, particularly the military and other state security forces (Pion-Berlin et al. 2023). Autocratization through executive aggrandizement or strategic manipulation of elections can incentivize military leaders to either become complicit in the erosion of democracy or to employ force to block executive leaders seeking unfettered power on invitation by the opposition courting the military. The path of military compliance allows the executive branch to erode democracy even more. The path of military resistance effectively undermines democratic civil–military relations and positions the military at the political pivot (Kuehn and Croissant 2023, chapter 6). Either scenario can have negative consequences for democracy and for civil–military relations.

This study presumes that while, in practice, the objectives of the military can be aligned with those of civilian elites, military officers are political actors with their own interests and agency, rather than willing servants of “the elite” (Hunter 1997). This study proposes to differentiate four types of military behavior in episodes of autocratization:

Perpetrator describes the classic form of military intervention in politics, directed at supplanting or displacing an incumbent government. The modal form of this type is the military coup, but there can be other variants as well. For example, observers agree that the removals of Pakistan’s embattled Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif (2018) and Imran Khan (2022) were orchestrated by the army and its proxies in parliament and judiciary (Hussain 2021; Haqqani 2022). Military contestation is typically reactive, in that militaries intervene in politics if government policies push the military into politics, or if the political opposition comes “knocking at the barracks after doors” and pulls the military into the political fray (Pérez-Liñán and Polga-Hecimovich 2017). The main indicator of this type of military behavior is the occurrence of an illegal and overt attempt by the military or other elites with support by the military to unseat the sitting executive.

Accomplice describes a situation in which soldiers become complicit in the efforts of a civilian autocratizer to entrench authoritarian practices. In contrast to the first type, military actions against democratic institutions are a result of pressure exerted by the government on the soldiers to show public support for the incumbent, curtail civil liberties and political rights of critics and members of the opposition, intimidate dissidents, control the population, or uphold power-maintaining patronage networks.

The most blatant form of military complicity with autocratization “from above” is military support for a self-coup, an incumbent-led effort to hold onto, consolidate or expand power by interfering with or shutting down another branch or branches of government (Marsteintredet and Malamud 2020). Modern examples include the declaration of martial law in the Philippines by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972, Peru’s President Fujimori in 1990, and King Gyanendra of Nepal who, less than a year after enthronization, sought to take full control of the government by suspending parliament and removing the elected Prime Minister in 2002 (Thompson 1995; Cameron 1998; Adhikari 2015).

Other common forms of military complicity include the deployment of soldiers during elections to threaten candidates, poll workers, and voters, or the mobilization of troops to disperse anti-incumbent mass protests. Main indicators of this second role of the military are intentional and systematic acts of coercion committed by the military in support of or on behalf of the civilian autocratizers, which make a substantive contribution to the autocratization of the political system. These include, but are by no means limited to, actions by the military to abusively restrict political freedoms and civil rights, the functioning of the constitutional order, the integrity of elections, or the physical integrity of peaceful critics of the incumbent.

The third type of military as bystander describes a situation in which soldiers take a passive stand. Autocratizers refrain from using the military to advance partisan goals such as marginalizing other branches of government, intimidating opposition leaders or civil society activities, overturning elections, or preventing elections from being held at all. Even though opposition elites may court the armed forces, the military tries to preserve its neutral political role and demonstrates a wait-and-see attitude, perhaps referring to an “apolitical” tradition and norms of military professionalism as a loyal servant of elected authorities. The emergency suspension of democracy using extraordinary measures by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 and her emergency rule until 1977 is a case of a military remaining idly on the sidelines of the political playing field while the democratic system slides into an autocratization crisis (Shah 2017).

Finally, custodian of democracy means that military commanders, perhaps in concert with other security leaders, civil servants, or party elites, actively resist a commander-in-chief’s attempts to force them to get involved in partisan politics and aid any autocratization efforts. For example, Pion-Berlin and co-authors argue that one crucial reason for the failure of US President Donald Trump’s attempted self-coup of January 2021 was that he could not rely on the partisan support of law enforcement and, especially, the military to back his efforts (Pion-Berlin et al. 2023). Indicators of this type of military behavior include the refusal of orders by the incumbent government, the public articulation of dissent and condemnation of government actions, the slow rolling of orders by “staying quartered,” but also, at the most extreme, joining opposition protests (Brooks and Pion-Berlin 2022).

In delineating these four roles, we draw and expand on our previous conceptual work (Croissant and Kuehn 2024). Related conceptual ideas have been proposed by authors working on a budding research program on “military dissent,” such as Hundman (2021)and Brooks and Pion-Berlin (2022). Our concept differs from these contributions in three ways. First, our concept is limited to military roles in episodes of autocratization. This contrasts with the “military dissent” literature, which aims to capture military resistance in much broader political circumstances. Second, while Hundman and Brooks and Pion-Berlin focus on instances of civil–military conflicts of interest, our concept captures the whole range of civil–military relations from covert or open military resistance vis-à-vis civilians to military complicity with civilians. Finally, the “military dissent” literature focuses on the specific “tactics” and discrete actions employed by the military to express their dissent. In contrast, the “roles” in our concept are much broader and encompass the aggregate of multiple individual military actions and their impact on autocratization episodes. Individual actions of dissent or support are thus best understood as indicators of military behavior at a single point in time that in aggregate and over the longer time period of an autocratization episode combine to a “role” as defined here. This narrower focus on autocratization episodes allows us to trace how military roles evolve specifically in response to shifts in authoritarian dynamics, providing a more targeted understanding of military behavior under escalating autocratic pressure. Moreover, it is important to note that the contributions discussed above contribute to concept-building but do not offer systematic descriptive or explanatory empirical analyses of the origins or consequences of “military dissent” for democratization or autocratization. In contrast, this study has a two-fold research interest, as mentioned: first, the introduction of a comprehensive typology of four potential types of military roles in episodes of autocratization; second, a first step toward theorizing these different roles through an inductive empirical analysis of the combinations of factors underlying military behavior in autocratization episodes in post-Cold War Asia.

Explaining Military Behavior in Autocratization Episodes

Theorizing on military roles in autocratization episodes is still in its infancy. There is no coherent theoretical model that specifies the micro-foundations and underlying mechanisms, nor is there agreement on the effect and interplay of individual factors on military roles in these episodes. Following methodological advice for theory development under these conditions (Elman 2009; Swedberg 2014), we propose to combine deductive and inductive logic to identify the factors that drive military behavior in autocratization spells. First, we deduce from existing literature a list of potential explanatory factors that can be plausibly expected to affect military behavior. Second, we confront these theoretical expectations with empirical data to identify inductively whether any of the factors (and their combination) covary with certain military roles. Third, we formulate these insights into a more general theoretical statement, which can be further developed and empirically tested in future research.

For the first step, we draw on two strands of civil–military relations research. The first one addresses civilian control over the military in democratic transitions and post-authoritarian democracies (Barany 2012; Pion-Berlin and Martinéz 2017; Kuehn and Croissant 2023). The second is the extensive literature on military coups and military reactions to autocratic regime crises (Nordlinger 1977; Sundhausen 1982; Finer 1988; Marinov and Goemans 2014; Barany 2016; Kim and Krueger 2019; Koehler and Albrecht 2021).

These literatures have not developed comprehensive and empirically tested explanations of military behavior in episodes of autocratization, but they give useful insights into why and how militaries become politicized, why militaries intervene in politics, and what this means for the survival of democracies and autocracies. For example, it is precisely the existence of consolidated civilian control over the military that enables unfettered executive action in backsliding democracies (Trinkunas 2005). The incentive structure that emerges within the civil–military relations of backsliding democracies potentially carries the risk of a pernicious cycle of de-professionalization and politicization of the armed forces so that they either become even more loyal to the chief executive of the state or take matters into their own hands and attempt to stop an incumbent (Barracca 2007). Recent studies show that many contemporary military coup leaders declare their actions a “democratic coup,” justifying them as the last resort to protect democracy against self-destruction by the incumbent executive and rampant mass mobilization (Grewal and Kureshi 2019; Yukawa et al 2020).

Surveying these literatures, we identify seven factors from two theoretical perspectives that could plausibly affect military behavior in autocratization episodes. The first, society-centric perspective treats military participation in the rollback of democracy as an adaptation to civilian desires and the wider structural context of autocratization. These military-external factors shape the opportunity for military action and pull the military into civilian politics. The second set of factors takes a military-centric perspective, which explains military action as the result of specific characteristics endogenous to military organizations. These variables shape the disposition and motive of the military to act in a particular way in autocratization processes and operate as push factors for the military. When political conflict and autocratization intensify, push and pull factors draw the armed forces into domestic politics, sometimes to the detriment of the incumbent and sometimes to their support.

Society-Centered Factors

The civil–military relations literature discusses a great number of structural and institutional factors that can pull the military into civilian politics and potentially explain military behavior in autocratization episodes. The list of pull factors includes variables such as economic development, inequality, and crisis (Londregan and Poole 1990; Svolik 2012); threat environment (Desch 1998); the political culture of a nation (Finer 1988); and the level of political polarization, elite radicalization, and mass mobilization in a society. Importantly, the literature on the latter argues that when political order decays, the military is the only group that has the resources and capability to control the state (Huntington 1968; Svolik 2012; Pérez-Liñán and Polga-Hecimovich 2017; Riedl et al. 2023). This puts the military leadership in a strategically advantaged position to expand their privileges and carve out niches of influence, undermining democratic institutions and threatening civil liberties (Svolik 2012). Research about the military in situations of anti-incumbent mass protests finds that mass uprisings make it more likely that political leaders will rely on the military’s coercive power and expand the risk of a military coup (Casper and Tyson 2014; Lee 2014; Pion-Berlin, Esparza, and Grisham (2014); Koehler and Albrecht 2021). Thus, this would imply that in autocratization episodes where the incumbent faces polarized mass protest military leaders will be motivated to move against the incumbent government or to extort concessions from the incumbent in exchange for their support.

Second, current research on populism and the military suggests that political alliances between incumbent and the military are more common if former military officers re-emerge as civilian leaders because they share a special affinity for the military, a common political identity, and mutual values and beliefs (Angerbrandt and Themnér 2021; Baykan et al. 2021; Hunter and Vega 2022). Drawing on shared ideological beliefs or formed pragmatically for mutual benefit, such alliances enable incumbents to seek the political legitimacy, coercive capacity, and organizational strength of the armed forces. Soldiers, in turn, are rewarded for their support with greater operational autonomy, protection from civil persecution for human rights violations, and better influence over policies. Thus, political leaders with a military background are thought to be more likely to cultivate military support for autocratization.

Third, civilian control requires the creation of institutions that define the distribution of decision-making and oversight authority in favor of political leaders and enable civilians to discipline the military through nonmilitary means. Presidents (and other actors) routinely try to build out institutions to control and regulate military actors, usually for the specific purpose of assuring appropriate behavior from the military and of making military shirking more difficult (Feaver 2003). On the other hand, military veto power and weak civilian control create plenty of opportunities for civil–military conflict and leave the government vulnerable to military intervention (Barany 2012; Pion-Berlin and Martinéz 2017). Thus, military veto power and weak institutions of civilian control are conducive to a military’s role as perpetrator of autocratization.

Finally, political leaders have a stronger incentive to seek military support if they lack a well-institutionalized and coherent political organization. Political parties provide institutional mechanisms to contain elite conflict, distribute patronage to elites and social groups, and mobilize the masses in support of the incumbent, and are the main mechanism for recruiting political personnel and elites (Magaloni and Kricheli 2010; Kavasoglu 2022). Therefore, autocratizers should rather try to cultivate military support if they cannot rely on a strong party organization. Moreover, a well-institutionalized ruling party can also deter the military from threatening to supplant or displace the incumbent government, as the military must expect better-organized anti-coup resistance.

Military-Centric Factors

Military-centric accounts of political-military relations argue that the military is goal-oriented, weighing the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action to maximize its material and organizational well-being. Soldiers desire autonomy, budget, and cohesion and respond when those interests are threatened (Thompson 1973; Nordlinger 1977; Hunter 1997; Feaver 2003). Declining defense expenditure and financial spoils or a loss of business opportunities often lead to deteriorating salaries and income, career opportunities, and arms procurement abilities. These, in turn, translate into declining influence, prestige, and power (Nordlinger 1977; Beeson 2008). Similarly, attempts by the incumbent to weaken military autonomy or to divide the officer corps into winners and losers with unequal access to career chances can be perceived by the military as threats to its core institutional interests, unity, and integrity (Lee 2014). For example, in explaining the (non-)occurrence of military contestation against recent Latin American populist presidents, most studies see the military as a reactive force that will consider challenging civilian policies only if they threaten or actually violate the military’s institutional interests (Kuehn et al. 2017). Thus, this literature suggests that militaries that see their institutional interests threatened by the incumbent will harbor feelings of resentment toward the political leadership. Under those conditions, soldiers will have little reason to support the incumbent. Militaries with secured institutional privileges, on the other hand, who have reason to believe that the incumbent respects the interests of the military should be more inclined to support a would-be autocrat.

Finally, all military institutions share ideas, norms, and values through which soldiers perceive their own role in state and society (Huntington 1957). A professional military will have internalized the norm of civilian supremacy, continually reinforced via professional socialization processes, that acts as an internal barrier to military termination of democracy (Finer 1988). Similarly, the revolutionary military “manifests a strong propensity to succumb to political influence” (Perlmutter 1977, 13), and its self-perception is that of a servant of the party. In contrast, praetorian soldiers manifest a strong propensity to intervene in the government frequently, acting either as arbitrator or actual ruler. Accordingly, previous studies show that a history of military praetorianism increases the risk of democratic backsliding and breakdown (Svolik 2015; Haggard and Kaufman 2016). In contrast, a military without a history of political intervention is probably a military that would hesitate to act on its own against a democratic government. Thus, militaries with a praetorian tradition should be more inclined to terminate democracy or to support incumbent-led autocratization.

Moreover, as Pion-Berlin et al. (2014)argue, militaries might resist missions that they deem incompatible with their raison d’être. This is often the case with internal public order operations, where soldiers are asked to assist or substitute for civilian institutions. Soldiers who, through repeated historical practice and legal authorizations, have come to accept internal security operations will be more willing to support civilian autocratizers. Laws that sanction military force to maintain internal order, to fill civilian offices, or to replace civilian institutions with military structures can reinforce perceptions of role appropriateness. The literature on civil–military relations, hence, suggests that soldiers will more easily fulfill orders that effectively support autocratization where internal security and public order operations are considered appropriate missions. Conversely, where laws prohibit internal order missions, soldiers are reluctant to support or collude with election manipulations, harassment of civil society, executive aggrandizement, and self-coups.

Table 1 summarizes the seven variables and the expected impact on military behavior. In the above discussion, we outlined the individual, “ceteris paribus” impact of each variable on military roles in autocratization episodes. This facilitates the presentation of the theoretical expectations and aligns with our iterative, deductive–inductive approach, which aims at identifying the concrete explanatory relevance of the factors through empirical analysis. However, at least some of the variables are likely to interact with each other in systematic ways. It is, for instance, plausible to expect that the military’s interests and praetorian legacies are likely to be particularly relevant when civilian control is relatively weak. Our analysis therefore aims at finding empirical evidence of the impact of individual variables as well as their potential interactions. However, in order to save space and in line with the deductive–inductive approach, we do not attempt to speculate on all potential conjunctions of the individual variables, but rely on the inductive part of our research design to identify relevant configurations empirically.

Research Design and Methodology

This study focuses on causal configurations of multiple variables at a relatively high level of aggregation and on observable implications at the “meso” level in a medium number of cases (see also Haggard and Kaufman 2012). We limit the empirical analysis to the political-geographic region of the Asia-Pacific and the period since the end of the Cold War (1990) to 2023. The decision to set the temporal threshold to the post-Cold War era allows us to hold constant three new political realities after 1990, which are likely to confound the individual and combined impact of the seven variables. First, the post-1990 period in Asia-Pacific saw a significant decline in the number and intensity of domestic armed conflict, which in the 1950s–1970s had contributed to the rise of military praetorianism, the breakdown of democratic institutions, and the establishment of authoritarian regimes (Aspinall, Jeffrey, and Regan 2013). Second, the regional wave of democratization tripled the number of electoral democracies in Asia-Pacific from three in 1980 to nine in 2005. Before 1991, the vast majority of autocratization episodes in Asia and worldwide took place within existing autocracies. Since 1991, more than two-thirds of all autocratization instances in Asia and worldwide started in democracies (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019; Nord et al. 2024). Including the large number of pre-1991 episodes within autocracies might skew the results of our inductive theorizing approach. Third, changes in the regional and international environment such as the end of block confrontation between the communist USSR and the liberal democratic United States and the global and region-wide diffusion of norms of democratic rule and civilian supremacy created new barriers to open military insubordination in many regions, including Asia (Kuehn and Croissant 2023, chapter 3). Of course, geographically and temporally constraining the sample limits the generalizability of our findings. We return to this in the “Discussion” section of this paper.

We speak of empirical episodes of autocratization to capture periods with a definitive start and end date during which substantial and sustained declines in the quality of democracy take place. To identify empirical episodes of backsliding, we use data from the Episodes of Regime Transformation dataset (Edgell et al. 2023). A democratic backsliding episode is defined as a drop of 0.1 or more on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)’s Electoral Democracy Index (EDI) and Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) as alternative measurements of democracy (Coppedge et al. 2023). The EDI captures to which extent regimes adhere to the core institutional requirements of a “Polyarchy.” The LDI takes into account additional features that are commonly associated with liberal democracy: legislative constraints on the executive, judicial constraints on the executive, and respect for civil liberties. The two indices range between 0 and 1 on a continuous scale with higher values indicating a greater completion of democratic principles.

To avoid identifying trends of alleged autocratization, which actually are short-term events in the dynamic sequences of episodic instability and recovery of democracy without much lasting significance, autocratization episodes begin with an initial 0.03 decrease on the chosen democracy index (LDI or EDI), and a total decrease of at least 0.10 throughout the episode. The period ends when there is a temporary stagnation on the respective democracy index with no further decline of 0.01 points in 4 years or when the democracy index increases by 0.02 points. The high threshold of a 10 percent reduction delivers a conservative estimation of autocratization that reduces the risk of identifying false positives. Finally, the confidence intervals for the indices must not overlap between the year before autocratization onset and the final year in the episode. Using the confidence intervals of the V-Dem measurement model ensures that such episodes are not results of measurement noise (Nord et al. 2024).

Based on this approach, we identify a total of seventeen episodes of autocratization in eleven different countries (Table 2). Applying the LDI-based measurement produces negative findings for four cases, which suggests that autocratization in these episodes centered on processes, rules, and rights closely linked to electoral competition and contestation. In contrast, using the EDI fails to identify autocratization under Presidents Rodrigo Duterte (2016–2022) in the Philippines and Gotabaya Rajapaksa (2019–2022) in Sri Lanka, who are both considered the storybook case of executive aggrandizement and authoritarian populism (de Votta 2021; Thompson 2021).

Scholars of Asian (de-)democratization will note that one potential backsliding episode is missing from Table 2. This is Indonesia under President Joko Widodo (a.k.a. Jokowi). Indonesia from 2014 to 2022 is a borderline case in terms of democratic backsliding. The case-specific literature supports the assessment that Indonesia experienced Islamist agitation and militant or accommodative government responses in the period from 2014 to 2022, which were threatening the functionality of democratic institutions and procedures, including the deterioration of civil liberties, reduced space for opposition, and the weakening of watchdog institutions like the national anti-corruption commission (Aspinall et al. 2020; Mietzner 2021; Fossati 2023). While the overall decline in the EDI and the LDI of −0.11, respectively, barely meets the selection condition of an overall strength of the decline in democratic quality, the confidence intervals for the two indices overlap between the year before autocratization onset and the last year in the episode. Moreover, Indonesia fails to meet the criterion of an initial 0.03 decrease on the chosen democracy index at the beginning of the autocratization episode.

The data collection process involved extensive surveys of more than 400 sources, including media reports and reports from national and transnational NGOs, policy-related documents and briefs, along with academic publications. For each episode, we prepared a synopsis of events (“case description”) and assessments of the military roles in the autocratization episode, which we reproduce in the Online Appendix. All seven explanatory variables were coded based on the available qualitative evidence on a dichotomous scale, indicating the presence (“yes”) or absence of the factor (“no”) during a given autocratization episode. The coding rules for the variables are outlined in Online Appendix Table A1. While space constraints do not allow for detailed case descriptions in this text, the Online Appendix includes comprehensive descriptions and justification of the coding decisions for the outcome and each variable in all seventeen episodes, as well as narratives of each autocratization episode.

Autocratization and Military Behavior in Post-Cold War Asia

Autocratization affected different kinds of political regimes in Asia, but most episodes took place in electoral democracies (eleven) and in electoral autocracies (five). South Korea is the only liberal democracy in Asia that experienced substantial autocratization. Ten episodes ended with (temporary) democratic breakdown, two periods ended before democracy broke down (“democratic recession”), and five episodes resulted in hardened authoritarian regime (“autocratic consolidation”). Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Thailand went through more than one episode, which suggests that once a democracy enters a period of substantial decline, the chance is high that it might remain vulnerable.

Evidence for the seventeen cases demonstrates that soldiers played the role of perpetrator in six episodes. In Thailand (1991), Pakistan, and Myanmar, the military displaced an electoral autocracy and its incumbent government. In Bangladesh (2007) and Thailand in 2006 and 2014, military putsches supplanted the government of electoral democracies. Reflecting the dynamic character of post-Cold War autocratization, five of the six military coups (with Thailand in 1991 as exception) were reactive, occurring not at the onset but toward the end of a period of democratic erosion as both executive aggrandizement and mass mobilization made the military a pivotal actor in the strategic calculus of incumbent and opposition. The 2006 coup against Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the de facto coup of January 2007 that replaced the Caretaker Government (CTG) in Bangladesh, and the coup d’état against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan were each preceded by an extensive period of executive aggrandizement. In all three cases, the military intervened when the elected chief executives started encroaching onto the military’s self-defined sphere of internal autonomy (Barracca 2007; Croissant et al. 2013; Panduprasert 2019).

In another six episodes, the military supported civilian incumbents in harassing political dissidents, restricting activities of the mass media and civil society, rigging electoral results, or suspending the constitutional order. Cambodia is a case in point for such military-supported incumbent-led autocratization in an autocracy. Reports detail how Prime Minister Hun Sen (1985–2023) used his control over the judiciary, the security forces, and armed forces to first harass the opposition and, next, to abolish electoral autocracy in favor of personalist and dynastic rule (Morgenbesser 2019).

Militaries acted as accomplices of incumbent-led autocratization in five cases. This includes the royal coup against parliament and elected government by King Gyanendra of Nepal in 2002, and the weakening of rights, freedoms, and accountability mechanisms by President Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005–2009) in Sri Lanka. The Nepalese case confirms the argument that for a self-coup to succeed, a civilian incumbent typically needs to secure the support of the armed forces. Without the royalist-military alliance, King Gyanendra would not have been able to stage his self-coup (Adhikari 2015). Sri Lanka experienced a democratic comeback when Mahinda Rajapaksa was defeated in the 2015 presidential election by Maithripala Sirisena, a challenger from his inner circle. Yet, a new episode of autocratization began when Mahinda’s brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was a former minister of defense and prior to that a military officer, became president in 2019. The new president drastically enhanced the role of the military within his administration by appointing retired and serving military officers to lead new committees and task forces (Fonseka et al. 2021). In April 2022, a primarily unarmed mass uprising (“Aragalaya movement”) broke out, triggered by a dramatic economic crisis in the country. In July of the same year, when protests in the streets overwhelmed police and paramilitary security forces, the president and his entourage left the country for self-chosen exile (Riaz 2022).

The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) also directly participated in democratic backsliding when, in January 2001, it withdrew its support from President Estrada, an elected president who was constitutionally the military’s commander-in-chief. This followed a year-long impeachment trial in which Estrada was charged with corruption, and the Senate eventually acted as an impeachment court (Landé 2001). Estrada’s successor, his former Vice President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, also faced down impeachment attempts motivated by charges of fraud in the 2004 presidential election, and was accused of corruption as well. In 2006, she declared a state of emergency to prevent a rumored coup attempt. Like Sri Lanka, the short-lived democratic comeback under her successor, Benigno Aquino Jr. (2010–2016), gave way to another autocratization sequence under populist President Rodrigo Duterte. Within weeks of his inauguration, the new president began his war on drugs and ran roughshod over human rights, his political opponents, and the country’s democratic institutions. While not the driving force behind the autocratization push, the AFP became complicit with Duterte’s debasing of democracy. Duterte named many retired officers to government posts, put civilian institutions temporarily under military control (which is unconstitutional), and heavily involved the AFP in the war on drugs and a heavily militarized COVID-19 governance (Hall 2022).

Finally, in five episodes, the military did not actively partake in autocratization. In South Korea, democratic backsliding began under conservative President Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) and included illegal government surveillance of opposition and journalists, the use of state power in broadcasting to control the media, and the illegal interference of the National Intelligence Service in the 2012 election (Kim and Kim 2018). Executive aggrandizement became more blatant under his successor, President Park Geun-hye. Under both administrations, however, military participation in the erosion of democracy was minimal (Kim 2021). Similarly, in India and Nepal in the 2010s, the military also remained on the sidelines and apparently behaved professionally (Mukherjee 2022; Upreti 2023). Finally, in the Maldives, the “police coup” against President Nasheed in 2012 saw some soldiers joining the mutinying police force and anti-government protestors. However, the bulk of the Maldives National Defense Force (MNDF), including its leadership, did not join the rebellion, while the president sheltered inside military headquarters. President Abdulla Yameen (2013–2018) abused his authority to deploy soldiers to restrict the opposition, parliament, and the courts. However, the available reports suggest the police were Yameen’s paramount repressive agent (Suhas and Banerjee 2020). In Bangladesh, under the electoral authoritarian regime of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League (since 2009), the Parliament passed the fifteenth amendment to the constitution in 2011, which scrapped certain constitutional constraints and the CTG formula for general elections in the future, in addition to eroding accountability mechanisms due to election manipulation and delegative practices. Major opposition leaders were banned from politics or jailed, and general elections have been marred by violence, claims of vote rigging, and opposition boycotts (Riaz 2021). In recent years, the armed forces increased their role in civilian affairs, were repeatedly called upon to prevent civil unrest, and were instrumental in the government’s efforts to manipulate elections. But generally, the police are the main provider of state coercion rather than the military (Kamel 2022).

There is no case in Asia where the military acted as active guardian of democracy. Yet, the case description in the Online Appendix details how the MNDF remained a passive bystander to autocratization under Maldivian President Yameen for a long time, but ultimately made the decision not to defend Yameen who had lost the 2018 election (Bhim 2020). In Sri Lanka, military commanders who had previously aided President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s executive aggrandizement ultimately refused to support an emergency declaration by the defeated incumbent, effectively taking the self-coup off the table after the election in January 2015 (Daily Financial Times 2015; de Votta 2016). Similarly, the Sri Lankan military also stayed quartered in 2022, when, first, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled mass protests, and then the new Prime Minister ordered the military to do “whatever it takes” to execute a state of emergency (Riaz 2022).

Explaining Cross-National Differences

What then explains these different outcomes? As Table 3 shows, each of the three sets of outcomes is related to a specific and consistent combination of four military-centered and society-centered factors: threats to the military’s interests, legacies of military praetorianism, the degree of civilian control and extent of the military’s political veto power, and the strength of the incumbent’s party. The other three factors discussed above do not systematically covary with military roles and, thus, cannot explain military behavior in post-Cold War Asian autocratization. Finally, whether the incumbent is backed by a strong political party marks the critical difference between cases in which the military was complicit in the incumbent's crimes against democracy and cases where the incumbent did not instrumentalize military support for democratic backsliding or autocratic consolidation.

Military as perpetrator: The three democracies and three autocracies in this group provide strong evidence that military coups during post-Cold War autocratization in Asia are a consequence of the combination of acute threats to military interests by the incumbent and virulent traditions of military praetorianism on the one hand, and the absence of strong civilian control and strong incumbent parties on the other hand.

Organizational interests and traditions explain the military’s “disposition” to displace the government, whereas the weakness of civilian political institutions provided the low-cost opportunity to realize a coup d’état. Soldiers usually sought to justify their actions as a means to protect democracy and pledged to hold new elections once the situation was again peaceful and stable. Yet, the empirical evidence detailed in the Online Appendix suggests that in all six cases, alternative motives carried more weight and were usually related to organizational well-being and self-preservation of the military or institutions closely aligned to it and the individual interests of its commanding officers. In all six cases, the incumbent had slashed defense expenditures or otherwise threatened the military's access to economic and financial benefits, reduced military autonomy, or endangered military unity by pulling military officers into the incumbent’s ruling coalition. For example, the empirical information suggests that military leaders were worried that a rigged election would result in a bloodbath between supporters of the two main political party alliances, the ruling Bangladesh National Party (BNP) and the Awami League (AL). This would have also threatened the integrity of the Army, whose ranks were divided between AL, BNP, and Islamist supporters (ICG 2008). In Myanmar, the National League for Democracy (NLD) was widely expected to push forward with its reform agenda after the 2020 elections, aiming at abolishing military veto powers and extending its effective power to govern. In Thailand and Pakistan, elected Prime Ministers also clearly threatened the autonomy and deeply entrenched powers of the military, thereby creating a strong motive for military intervention (Pathmanand 2008; Buente 2014; Hussain 2021).

In all six cases, this combined with strong traditions of military praetorianism and histories of significant political influence exerted by the military. Pakistan is a case in point (Shah 2014). The same is true for Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Thailand. This engrained in military leaders the perception of the armed forces as the supreme guardian of the nation, which legitimizes military intervention into politics if these values seem threatened. The long history of political involvement also established the self-confidence to successfully realize a coup d’état against an elected government (Alagappa 2001; Croissant et al 2013; Mietzner 2013).

In five of the six cases, the military was able to veto important policy decisions of the incumbent. After all, it was the government’s attempt to limit the military’s veto power that caused additional civil–military frictions and triggered the coups in Pakistan, Thailand (1991, 2006), and Myanmar. Finally, only in Bangladesh and Myanmar could incumbents rely on a strong ruling party organization with stable and formalized sets of rules that guide the distribution of power among regime elites together with entrenched linkages to constituencies. Even though the NLD was highly personalized, its rootedness in society was strong, and the party was unified in its anti-military sentiment and deference for the State Councilor Suu Kyi (Stokke et al. 2015; Ladd 2022). In both countries, this did not prevent the coup, but made it potentially more costly, which explains why the Bangladesh Armed Forces (BAF) acted only after much hesitation and only to utilize the format of a nonpartisan CTG, with the military intelligence agency as the “driving force” behind the CTG (ICG 2008). However, the military failed to marginalize the BNP of toppled Prime Minister Khaled Zia and the Awami League of opposition leader, Sheikh Hasina. Similarly, the Burmese military was unable to shatter the NLD, which, consequently, became the focal point of a broad anti-coup resistance movement against the Tatmadaw’s claim to power.

Military as accomplice: The set of six cases in which soldiers were complicit in the incumbent’s autocratization strategy exhibits a strikingly different and uniform combination of explanatory factors. In all six cases, the relationship between incumbent and military was largely free of friction, the condition of a praetorian tradition in civil–military relations was not present, and the military held no veto power. At the same time, incumbents lacked a strong political party organization and hence were more dependent on military support than incumbents who did not seek military support for their autocratization project.

In all cases, the armed forces were a central pillar of support for the ruling coalition, and as such they received from the incumbent financial and political privileges, guaranteed institutional autonomy, and the prospect of attractive future career options within, but especially outside, the army. Especially military officers in the Philippines and Sri Lanka benefitted greatly from the fact that presidents sought to militarize state, economy, and society (Fuglerud 2021; Arugay 2021). The military was also a mainstay of autocratic power in Cambodia and royalist Nepal. The relationship between strongman Hun Sen and the Cambodian armed forces involved strong elements of clientelism, coercion, and corruption (Chambers 2015), whereas the Royal Nepal Army had a strong institutional tradition as loyal servant to the Palace, though not necessarily to the government (Adhikari 2015, 39–40).

Finally, this second set of cases contains almost exclusively ruling party organizations in which elite-level institutionalization and cohesion were low and subnational presence and affiliated mass-mobilizing structures that support party operations with material resources and personnel were underdeveloped, weak, or simply not present. When ruling parties were weak, so were the counterbalancing forces in government and politics, and the incumbent’s ability to rule without military support or to implement autocratization measures against political resistance from civil society. We did find evidence suggesting a strong party organization only in Cambodia. The Cambodian People’s Party, founded in 1951, had ruled Cambodia since 1979 and exhibits many features of a socialist state party. In addition, higher-ranking members of the military, police, judiciary, and the bureaucracy are all co-opted into the party apparatus to such a degree that makes it almost impossible to differentiate between state and party. Since the 2000s, the party increasingly came into the hands of Hun Sen Loyalists, suppressing factional tendencies and consolidating Hun Sen’s control of organization and cadre (Peou 2015; Morgenbesser 2019).

Military as bystander: The four democracies (India, South Korea, Maldives, and Nepal in 2012) and one autocracy (Bangladesh) in this third set have in common a particular combination of military-centric and society-centered factors that prevented the military from developing a more proactive role in the autocratization process. In no case did the incumbent threaten military interests or did the military have veto power. Only in Bangladesh did the military have a praetorian legacy, as was shown once again in the promissory coup of 2007. While the BAF had directly intervened in 2007 amid unrest when the two major political parties were battling over who would come to power, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been heading both the Armed Forces Division, which is the principal administrative organization to formulate and execute military policy, and the Ministry of Defense since 2009, allowing her to neutralize the veto power of the military and to consolidate her personal authority over the BAF. With the military now seemingly loyal, it was the mandate, strength, and political function of the police that had prominence in domestic politics (Jackman and Maitrot 2022).

This finding seems at odds with the troubled history of civil–military relations in South Korea during the authoritarian era from 1961 to 1988. However, praetorian traditions of the South Korean armed forces had clearly lost significance since the transition to democracy in 1988 (Kim 2021). What the five cases have in common, and what distinguishes them from the six accomplice cases, is the presence of a strong ruling party under the control of the incumbent who could rely for the mobilization of political support and control of their elite coalitions on their party organization. This is important to understand why incumbents in these five countries did not instrumentalize the coercive power of the military. However, as detailed in the Online Appendix, there is no empirical evidence that the existence of a strong ruling party deterred the military from taking action against the incumbent because the military elites feared organized anti-coup resistance.

It is also important to emphasize that neither the military’s internal security role nor military background of the incumbent or polarized mass mobilization discriminates between cases with different outcomes. One important reason is, of course, that there is little variation across cases concerning the first two factors. Only in three of the seventeen episodes was a retired military officer the incumbent leader at the time of the autocratization episode. Even within this small group of cases, there is no clear relationship between this variable and how the military acted during autocratization. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who had retired from the armed forces at the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1992, and Cambodia’s Hun Sen, who had fought as deputy commander of a Khmer Rouge regiment in the 1970s but had fled regime purges to Vietnam in 1977, sought and found military support. In contrast, Thailand’s Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhaven (1988–1991) was a former cavalry general-turned politician, who had already left the army in 1958. It is not just the large time gap between military and public office, but the case also does not display the causal process observations that would be required to confirm the assumed causal role of this factor (Christensen 1991).

Moreover, in all cases, except for South Korea, existing laws sanction military forces to maintain domestic order. There is no case-based evidence to assume that this would plausibly explain why some militaries participated as perpetrators or accomplices in autocratization, while others stayed quartered.

There is more cross-case variation in terms of polarized mass mobilization. Seven of the seventeen cases experienced anti-incumbent mass protests, sometimes, as in Thailand in 2013–2014 coupled with pro-incumbent counter-mobilization. In Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Thailand (twice), military authorities instrumentalized protests and acts of civil disobedience to legitimize the removal of the elected incumbent (Landé 2001; Panduprasert 2019). However, the mass protests in the Maldives took place at the beginning of autocratization, whereas in all other cases, they occurred more toward the end of the episode. Mass protests triggered the resignation of President Nasheed but did not spark a military response and had no discernable effect on the following autocratization under President Yameen (Bhim 2020). There were also polarized mass protests in South Korea and in Nepal. While King Gyanendra deployed military troops against the peaceful Jana Andolan II protests in 2006 (Adhikari 2015, 263–4), President Park Geun-hye did not order soldiers into the streets when confronting the Candlelight vigils of 2016. Ironically, it was a task force within the DSC—the same military agency tasked with the surveillance and suppression of opposition activities under the authoritarian rule of Park Geun-hye’s father, General Park Chung-hee (1961–1979)—that drafted an obscure plan to declare a state of emergency using military force if the court rejected the motion to impeach President Park, triggering large protests in response (Kim 2021). In sum, the examples of Bangladesh, Thailand, and the Philippines support the assumption that political polarization, elite radicalization, and mass mobilization elevate the political influence of military leaders, move them into a pivotal position, and justify military intervention—although political unrest is more of a pretext than a cause for military intervention. In contrast, in Nepal and Sri Lanka, mass demonstrations motivated the incumbent to rely on the military’s coercive power.

Discussion

This paper studied seventeen autocratization episodes in post-Cold War Asia. Our qualitative comparative study found three distinct empirical forms of military behavior. In six cases of military as “perpetrator,” civilian elected leaders were displaced by their own militaries, who either used democratic backsliding as a window of opportunity to advance their institutional goals or, as in Thailand, to harness power and influence exerted by the civil–military alliance that continues to control a nation’s politics. In another six cases, civilian leaders made the military complicit in their efforts to preserve and extend their authority and to advance controversial policies. Here, the military acted as an “accomplice” of incumbent-driven autocratization. Finally, in five cases soldiers remained sidelined or stayed quartered while democracy was degraded (“bystander”).

This study found little evidence that militaries in Asia were active defenders of democracy against incumbent-led autocratization. However, as already mentioned, in the two episodes of autocratization in Sri Lanka, under President Mahinda Rajapaksa and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, we have evidence that the military elite, which had previously been loyal to the incumbent and benefited in many ways from his support for democratic backsliding, withdrew its support from the ruler precisely when it came to the open breach of the constitutional order and the country’s slide into open autocracy. This, as well as the anecdotal evidence from other regions mentioned at the beginning of the paper, suggests that the type of the military as the guardian of democracy is useful, although it has not yet appeared in full form in post-Cold War Asia.

As a first step toward developing a theory of military roles in autocratization episodes, we identified seven factors from the existing literature that plausibly could affect the military’s motive and opportunity to act in certain ways in autocratization spells. We evaluated the effect of these variables and their potential interaction through a comparative empirical assessment based on extensive surveys of the case literature, summarized in the Online Appendix. Our findings suggest that each of the three empirically relevant military roles in our sample covaries with a distinct combination of military-internal and society-related factors. These factors should, thus, not be seen as single-cause explanations but operate in interaction.

With regard to the role of the military as “perpetrator,” the evidence from the eighteen cases suggests that praetorian legacies and perceived threats to the military’s interests create the disposition to intervene and push the military into politics. If these military-internal motivational factors combine with few or weak civilian institutions to control and regulate military actors and the incumbent lacks a well-organized and cohesive political party to act as a political counterweight to the military’s power, military elites are likely to interfere in politics and stage a coup d'état. Moreover, these three variables typically appear in conjunction and are typically not present individually: The literature on military regimes and new democracies shows that militaries often are able to secure extensive political and institutional privileges beyond the transition to civilian rule. These include, inter alia, guaranteed representation in government, reserved political domains in defense and security policy, budgetary benefits, and institutional autonomy from effective civilian oversight. In autocratization processes in post-transitional settings, civilians have incentives to reduce these military legacies to extend their own decision-making power and free up political and material resources to reward their constituencies and cronies, thus threatening the military’s privileged position. Since in new democracies this typically occurs under conditions of weakly institutionalized civilian control (Kuehn and Croissant 2023), such attempts make military intervention—and the military’s perpetrator role—likely. This pattern is shown in all perpetrator cases in the sample: all six cases are examples of post-transition attempts of civilians to reduce military privileges in former military regimes, which motivate the military to intervene and secure their privileges.

Conversely, autocratization episodes in which the military acts either as accomplice or as bystander of incumbent-led autocratization are typically characterized by a combination of more robust civilian control, the absence of military praetorianism, and the lack of imminent threats to the military’s core interests. In these situations, the military had neither the motive nor the opportunity to intervene. Almost all cases of accomplice and bystander militaries, with the exception of Bangladesh, took place in countries without lasting legacies of military praetorianism, extensive military veto power, and weakly institutionalized civilian control. These variables interacted in their effect on making military interventionism less likely: The absence of threats to the military’s core interests—resulting from a considerably more limited extent of military privileges threatened by the civilian incumbent—reduced the military’s motive to intervene, while comparatively stronger institutions of civilian oversight posed a barrier to military adventurism.

The key difference between the bystander and the accomplice cases is the presence of a strong ruling party organization: In all five bystander cases, the incumbent could rely on a strong party organization to organize parliamentary compliance, contain elite conflict, distribute patronage to elites and social groups, and organize mass support. Military involvement was, thus, simply not necessary for the incumbent to advance autocratization and reach their partisan goals. In contrast, in five out of the six cases of military complicity in autocratization, the incumbent did not have a strong ruling party to rely on. Weak political organization, sometimes combined with ongoing elite conflict and mass mobilization, incentivized incumbents to seek military support. The only exception is the case of Cambodia, where Hun Sen used military support to reduce the constraints imposed on his personal power by the ruling party itself. In addition, most cases in which the military staged a coup d’état were also characterized by the absence of a strong ruling party. This also highlights the key role of political party organizations as a deterrent to militarized autocratization.

In sum, our deductive–inductive exploration yields the following preliminary theoretical propositions: The roles militaries play in autocratization episodes are affected by the interplay of four military-internal and military-external variables that mold the military’s motivation and opportunity structures. First, when legacies of praetorianism and weak civilian control combine with a threat to the military’s core interests, the military is likely to attempt to stage a coup, thus becoming the perpetrator of autocratization, especially if the incumbent cannot rely on the political support of a strong ruling party. Second, militaries are likely to become accomplices to the incumbent’s autocratization moves if these motives and opportunities for independent military action are absent, that is, if the incumbent does not threaten military interests, there is no history of military praetorianism, and institutions for civilian control are relatively robust, and if the chief executive requires military support because of the absence of a powerful ruling party. Third, where motive and opportunity for a coup are absent and the incumbent can draw upon a strong ruling party, the military is likely to remain a bystander of civilian-led autocratization.

The next step in the development of a theory of military behavior during autocratization episodes would be to test these findings by contrasting them against evidence from other regions experiencing autocratization, e.g., Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. This would allow corroborating (or challenging) the impact of the four variables found theoretically relevant for Asia and testing whether internal security missions of the military, the military background of political leaders, or the role of anti-incumbent mass protests might play a role for military behavior in autocratization episodes elsewhere. Finally, this would also allow researchers to take a closer look at the fourth type of military as custodian of constitutional democracy for which we were unable to find a real-world case in Asia.

References