Epidemiology of domestic military intervention: Evaluation of contagion as an explanatory concept

Abstract

One of the most perplexing questions in politics is the effect of the international or macrosystem environment upon the activity of either regional subsystems or the basic components of the macropolitical system, the individual national political systems. One of the behavioral areas where it is crucial to detect the effect of the macrosystem is in the area of military policy, particularly the action taken by national military forces against host or governing institutional structures. This type of action, known as domestic military intervention, DMI, has come under increased scrutiny by behavioral and social scientists.This article subjects one explanation of DMI, the international contagion of similar events, to a critical examination. Contagion regards DMI as the result of macrosystemic effects upon the subsystems. Utilizing data on successful DMI events from 1948-67, tests for the interdependence of DMl events were conducted utilizing the Poisson distribution, contagious Poisson distribution, and contagious binomial and tests for autocorrelation.Some evidence for international contagion was found within various regional subsystems, but the utility of contagion of DMI as a pure macrosystemic phenomena was found to be severely constrained. F+;,HENEVER one seeks to explain the w behavior of the components of any system, two approaches for analysis are available. One is to search for macrosystemic regularities, the other is to emphasize the unique characteristics of each subsystem. The choice for strategy of analysis is in part determined by the type of problem area under investigation. The literature on organizational merger illustrates the problems of the appropriate level of analysis (Pfeffer, 1972). Do industrial mergers result from market or macrosystem effects, industry or subsystem characteristics, or firm specific or component attributes? Should macrosystem effects not be found to be present, investigation at subsystem or component levels is appropriate.Similar arguments about appropriate levels of analysis pervade discussions of political violence. Are violent actions the result of solely individual characteristics or are they the result of the influence of KEY WORDS: domestic military intervention, contagion, cross-national military contagion, Poisson process. the social environment in which the actor exists? Berkowitz (1973) speaks of the imitative effect of societal levels of violence as a determinant of individual violent activity. Bandura (cited in Berkowitz, 1973) relates the incidence of airline hijacking to the effects of the international occurrence of similar events. The same arguments concerning proper level of analysis permeate discussion of a particular form of political violence, domestic military intervention, DMI. DMI is said to have occurred when military forces choose to assume control over their host governing apparatus. Is DMI the result of intracomponent events, characteristics of military organizations, or other unique characteristics? Is DMI the result of cue taking from the macros...