Abstract
The question of loyalty in autocratic regimes has drawn a sustained scholarly interest, especially as autocratic leaders need to secure the support of their militaries to survive in office and to minimize the risk of a coup. Among the commonly employed mechanisms in this regard is the extension of extra-budgetary financial rewards, including “Military-Owned Businesses (MOBs)”. Nevertheless, under the increasingly significant threat of an uprising from below, military defection remains the key for the success of the revolution. The question then becomes: under what conditions would a military defect from an autocratic ruling alliance? This paper presents one novel answer to this question, which is: militaries are “defection-proofed” in the face of mass uprisings when they develop financial dependency on the regime. This hypothesis is tested comparatively against the cases of mass protests in China (1989), Indonesia (1998), Thailand (2006), and Iran (2009).
Highlights
This paper engages the question of why it did not take militaries that have shown little signs of protest in their relationship with a durable autocrat, as in Suharto’s Indonesia, long before they decided to defect when the regime was faced with mass protests
Vol 8, No 4, 2021 financial independence of the military on its political behavior during political crises? While a growing body of literature has engaged the question of military defection, very few studies tackled the issue of financial independence of the military
Delving into the question of financial autonomy of the military in authoritarian regimes, this paper aims to initiate a discussion on the different types of financial resources, other than the budgetary ones, and how they are controlled by the military and/or the regime
Summary
This paper engages the question of why it did not take militaries that have shown little signs of protest in their relationship with a durable autocrat, as in Suharto’s Indonesia, long before they decided to defect when the regime was faced with mass protests. The paper engages the question of “how” by differentiating between two different modes of military control over this particular resource: regime-dependent and regime-independent MOBs. The argument proposed here is that the chances for military’s defection from an authoritarian regime faced with a mass protest are much higher when it controls its own extra-budgetary resources, i.e., MOBs, independent from the regime. Two of the four cases, China in 1989 and Iran in 2009, followed the regime-dependent, and eventually repression, causal mechanism; while the remaining cases represent the regime-independent, and eventually defection, path of the hypothesis While these cases have been investigated much in the literature, their treatment excluded a systematic examination of the impact of the degree of financial autonomy on the military’s decision during the crisis
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