Conceptualizing the Civil-Military Gap: A Research Note

The authors suggest that scholars mean very different things when they refer to the civil-military gap. To illustrate the point, the authors conceptualize the gap in terms of four distinct ideal types and show that scholars have referred to each variant as the civil-military gap at different times. Though the authors recognize that the four ideal types-cultural, demographic, policy preference, and institutional-are not always mutually exclusive, the authors suggest that they are divergent enough to warrant consideration as distinct variants and that their specification can enhance the civil-military relations literature by helping scholars identify and untangle the causes and effects of the gap.