Three Essays on the Military in Politics and Public Policy

Abstract

The dissertation provides insight into very basic and fundamental questions in the determinants of public policy. The three papers answer fundamental questions of the theory of public policy. Does the military involvement in politics affect public policy? How does it affect public policy? Is the public policy run differently depending on the level of the military in politics? If so, how is it different? What is the role of democracy and corruption in the policy decision process? <br/> I argue that the range of political institutions considered in the existing literature can be expanded to explain the policy gaps by using the theory of civil-military relations as most studies use a level of democracy or democracy dummy for political institution measures. The military in politics measures the level of involvement of the military in politics and it would be a good analytic concept and framework to explain how different policies are adopted by different countries. <br/> For the empirical analysis, I first construct a panel dataset of 129 countries using various data sources including International Country Risk Guide (ICRG), Polity I, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), and World Bank. I also utilize various estimation methods such as ordinary least square (OSL), random-effect (RE), fixed-effect (FE), and system generalized method of moments (SGMM) for the empirical evidence, sensitivity analysis, and robustness check. <br/> In the first paper, I build the theory of military in politics and defense policy to understand how the military involvement in politics would affect the defense policy and test for empirical evidence. The defense expenditure and military service system are used as a proxy measure for the defense policy. The empirical result shows that the military involvement in politics increases the defense expenditure measured as a percentage of GDP and percentage of government expenditure and the countries with a high level of military involvement in politic tend to keep the conscription system for the military service system.<br/> The second paper seeks to examine the impact of the military involvement in politics on the education and health expenditure. It also examines the role played by the democracy in reducing the social policy gap. I find that the military in politics has a significantly negative relationship with the education expenditure, but it does not have a statistically significant relationship with health expenditure. Furthermore, the result indicates that the democracy plays an important role in reducing the negative impact of the military in politics on the education expenditure and health expenditure.<br/> Finally, in the third essay, I investigate the relationship between corruption and defense expenditure considering the impact of the military in politics. The result shows that the corruption has a negative moderating effect that in the countries with the same level of the military in politics, the defense expenditure is lower in more corrupted countries. The result is consistent in all estimation methods, sensitivity analysis, and the robustness check.<br/>