Dismantling the Military Veto: Investigating the Role of Authoritarian Consolidation

Why do some civilian governments successfully dismantle entrenched military prerogatives, while others remain constrained by persistent military intervention in state politics? Existing civil-military relations literature has explained why militaries may intervene in politics, while democratization literature addresses how states with military veto institutions might transition to democracy. Yet both bodies of work treat regime type, particularly democratization, as the primary outcome, failing to address the dismantling of the military veto as an independent outcome. I argue instead that the successful dismantling of the military veto depends on three interacting mechanisms: a critical juncture that disrupts the existing civil-military equilibrium, praetorian breakdown that weakens the military's ability to defend its formal and informal prerogatives, and civilian consolidation that prevents the military from reconstituting its veto. Through a paired comparison of the Refah Partisi and the AKP in Türkiye, and a secondary study of Ba'athist Iraq, this thesis shows how the dismantling of the military veto can take place through authoritarian modes of civilian consolidation. The thesis concludes that dismantling the military veto does not necessarily indicate democratic consolidation, but may instead mark the emergence of authoritarian civilian supremacy.