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The Guardianship Dilemma: Regime Security through and from the Armed Forces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2015

R. BLAKE MCMAHON  and
BRANISLAV L. SLANTCHEV
R. BLAKE MCMAHON*
Affiliation:
University of California–San Diego
BRANISLAV L. SLANTCHEV*
Affiliation:
University of California–San Diego
*
R. Blake McMahon is Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of California–San Diego, CA 92093-0521 (rmcmahon@ucsd.edu).
Branislav L. Slantchev is Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California–San Diego, CA 92093-0521 (slantchev@ucsd.edu).
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Abstract

Armed forces strong enough to protect the state also pose a threat to the state. We develop a model that distills this “Guardianship Dilemma” to its barest essentials, and show that the seemingly ironclad logic underlying our existing understanding of civil-military relations is flawed. Militaries contemplating disloyalty must worry about both successfully overthrowing the government and defeating the state’s opponent. This twin challenge induces loyalty as the state faces increasingly strong external threats, and can be managed effectively by rulers using a number of policy levers. Disloyalty can still occur when political and military elites hold divergent beliefs about the threat environment facing the state, since militaries will sometimes have less incentive to remain loyal than the ruler suspects. Consequently, it is not the need to respond to external threats that raises the risk of disloyalty—as conventional wisdom suggests—but rather uncertainty about the severity of these threats.

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Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 109 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 297 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2015 

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