Exploring Structural Factors for Civilian Control over the Military

Sammanfattning: Many scholars have been arguing with possible driving factors for civilian control over the military for decades, however there has been no consensus as to concrete factors. So far, only empirical analysis has been dominant in this field of study, and no study has ever tested their validity from a global perspective through statistics. In this paper, the four external factors which would influence on the level of civilian control over the military from the literature review of civil-military relations are identified, namely; professionalism of the military, external/internal threat, the social modernization and military entrepreneurship. Ordered logit regression analysis has been carried out by 4325 samples consisting of 135 countries between 1950-1990. The data revealed that the hypotheses of professionalism of military and military entrepreneurship are strongly approved by the statistical analysis, while the hypothesis of social modernization was only weakly supported with less statistical significance. The hypothesis of external/internal threat was rejected because external threat is found to be a negative factor for the level of civilian control over the military while the hypothesis assumes that it is a positive factor. Also, the analysis on each region, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific shows that some variables get opposite effects from what the hypotheses expect or lose statistical significance. This result implies the limitation of generalization of the hypotheses.