International Studies Diploma Thesis
Islands of democracy: Land borders and military regimes PDF
Wilchinski, M. (2022).
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel theory of how structural geographic factors such as insularity and the absence of land borders affect the probability of developing military regimes. According to it, island countries are less likely to have military regimes because, having little or no land contiguity, they have fewer external threats in general, and even fewer external land threats, so they not only have incentives to invest less than the mainland countries in their Armed Forces in general, but even less in that key branch for internal involvement, the Army. Thus, their Armed Forces are in a much weaker position to establish and sustain military regimes when incentives to do so arise. To empirically support this theory, logistic regression models are developed that show, with a confidence level of 99.9%, that the probability of having a military dictatorship is lower if one is an island country and if one has no land borders than in the opposite cases. Likewise, the research shows descriptive evidence that is consistent with the causal mechanism it defends. This paper innovates not only by incorporating the influence of the ultimate factor of geography in the causes of the establishment and survival of military regimes, but also by disaggregating the Armed Forces actor, which is usually taken as monolithic in the specialized literature.
