Militarization: A Witch's War Brew? : How military power affects authoritarian regimes' behavior

The effect of regime type on conflict onset is a well-studied phenomenon, and various studies have found that variance in regime type, and within regime types, affects conflict onset. For instance, militarization in autocracies seems to be linked with increased risk of initiating conflict. However, even in the studies that disaggregate types of autocracies, the categorizations are relatively shallow. This thesis aims to create a definition of military dictatorships which captures their complexity more fully, to determine whether militarization truly does increase the risk of conflict onset. Military dictatorships are here defined as a state that achieves and maintains power through threat or actual use of force, is outwardly or effectively controlled by military officers, and places high value on maintaining a powerful armed force to protect constitutional and territorial integrity. The method used is a logistic regression, where the independent variable is military dictatorship, and the dependent variable is directed dyads. The results show that when a state is a military dictatorship, the log odds of it initiating conflict is 0.73; military dictatorships are indeed more likely to initiate conflict than autocracies in general