The Military: A ‘Strangelovian’ Arm of the State?

The goal of my thesis is to analyze the military in a game theoretical framework as an independent interest group. The military is a fundamental institution of the state because it maintains internal law and order, and protects the state from external threats. But, it also has its own interests, which sometimes motivate it to intervene in political processes. Pakistan is a classical example of military interventionism. In the 59 years since the formation of Pakistan, the military has overthrown democratic governments three times. On each occasion, the act was motivated by an infringement of the military’s institutional interests. I model intra-state power dynamics on the basis of the work of Acemoglu and Robinson (2006, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy). While the above authors consider only two interest groups, the poor and the rich, I add the military as a third player. The poor and the rich have taxable incomes, while the military is paid from tax revenue. Players compete over the tax rate and the military rent. Democracy is the rule of the poor, while nondemocratic regimes are governed by the rich and the military. In both cases, disenfranchised populations are occasionally able to solve their collective action problems and threaten the existing regime. Since regime change is costly, however, it occurs in these ’high threat’ states only when the costs involved are sufficiently low that the expected value from the new regime to disenfranchised groups exceeds their expected payoff stream under the current arrangement. I thus describe the range of parameters over which coups and revolutions are feasible against democratic and nondemocratic governments, respectively. Finally, I detail the applicability of my model to my case-study. The military has played a vital role in the major political events in Pakistani history. These events are associated with shifts in the parameters of my model, as well as circumstances that made collective action possible. As such, I demonstrate that a game theoretical model of military behavior enriches the historical narrative, and also places its specificities in a widely applicable, systematic framework.