How can a civilian government exert control over the army?
RESEARCH QUESTION
This paper studies a central question in state formation: How can a civilian government exert control over the army?
PROJECT
The question of who guards the guards is intimately connected with broader questions of state capacity and the establishment of a monopoly of violence in society, something which is often viewed as the defining feature of the modern state. But to establish such a monopoly, civilian rulers need not only to build an effective military, but also to control it. In this paper we study how governments may solve this problem when they recognize that their decisions to build a strong army may have ramifications for subsequent coups.
The influence of the military has been greatly neglected by economists, moreover they have barely studied the establishment of the monopoly of violence as part of this. Yet in some sense this is the sine qua non for other aspects of state capacity.
We have developed a simple model of the interaction between government and the military when there is the possibility of the military choosing to seize power in a military coup. The main focus is on how the level of resources devoted to the military is determined and what forces lead different societies to choose different outcomes.
