This paper aims to answer the question of how and under what circumstances civilian control can be established in newly democratised nations. To do this, I propose a new theoretical argument that conceives of the process of institutionalising civilian control in new democracies as a series of power struggles between the democratically elected civilians and the military leadership. The outcome of these power struggles depends on the respective bargaining power of civilians and the military, which is in turn a function of (1) the willingness of civilians to challenge the military's institutional prerogatives and the military's willingness to defend them and (2) each party's ability to bear the costs of a civil-military conflict. To illustrate and assess the argument, I derive a number of propositions about the expected development of civil-military relations after the transition to democracy and the possible outcomes of civil-military power struggles, subsequently testing them via an in-depth case study of civil-military relations in post-transition South Korea.
This article argues that process tracing provides a useful, although underestimated, avenue for empirically testing deductive game theoretical arguments. In-depth case analysis allows for a systematic evaluation of the crucial assumptions underlying the models and for making internally valid measurements of the model's core concepts. Furthermore, process tracing enables the researcher to overcome the weak conceptions of processes encountered in many game theoretic arguments. After outlining the usefulness of combining deductive game theory and process tracing, as well as discussing the limits of such an approach, the article illustrates the argument with an example from substantive research on civil-military relations in new democracies. Adapted from the source document.