New regimes often face intense power consolidation challenges. This article examines how US military aid influences this dynamic, using instrumental variables for aid levels and proxies measuring regime vulnerability.
An instrument for U.S. military aid is combined with measures of regime fragility to analyze effects across different political systems.
Military support increases anti-regime violence in unstable new democracies AND personalist autocracies, but has no impact on established non-personalist states.
The findings reveal a crucial mechanism: aid creates moral hazard that encourages exclusionary power consolidation. This fundamentally reshapes our understanding of external military intervention's domestic consequences.
| Military Aid, Regime Vulnerability and the Escalation of Political Violence was authored by Andrew Boutton. It was published by Cambridge in BJPS in 2021. |
