Understanding Executive Shirking, Civil–Military Relations, and Democratic Backsliding

Even though the rate of military coups has declined drastically since the 1980s and scholars have moved civil–military relations past equating civilian control with the absence of coups (the so-called “fallacy of coup-ism), militaries are still studied and examined as potential threats to democracy (Croissant et al. Reference Croissant, Kuehn, Chambers and Wolf2010). Indeed, the premise of this reflection piece itself may at first glance seem contradictory because it examines the role of the military as a potential actor in democratic backsliding while moving away from the notion that militaries are only democratic saboteurs in waiting. I address this apparent contradiction early, with clear emphasis on the agency of commanders-in-chief, not the military.

It is appropriate to begin such a discourse with the work of Peter Feaver, whose Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight and Civil-Military Relations imports the principal-agent framework from economics into civil–military relations scholarship. Put succinctly, the P-A framework is a tool to analyze the relationship between two actors, one of which, the agent, is subordinate to the other, the principal. Even though the principal is in a position of authority, the agent has privileged information that the principal does not; consequently, the principal must rely on the agent for this information. Feaver argues that casting civilian governments as the principal and their militaries as the agent allows for analysis of routine interactions and conflicts between civilians (namely the executive branch) and their armed forces. He uses this framework to conceptualize and study when militaries “work” to comply to the exact letter of civilian orders or “shirk” and either outright disobey civilians or carry out their orders in a manner more in line with military preferences (Feaver Reference Feaver2003). However the military chooses to respond, Feaver argues that once civilian orders are issued, they should be obeyed because civilians have the “right to be wrong.”

What is not made clear in Armed Servants is whether the right to be wrong has any limits and what should be done if presidents are the ones who are shirking. Feaver does acknowledge that principals may shirk but provides no examples of what such behavior might look like nor prescriptions about what should be done or by whom after executives misstep. Indeed, principal shirking has been understudied, as noted by Braun and Guston (Reference Braun and Guston2003): “We should not forget the possibility of principals to ‘shirk,’ a possibility not often discussed in the literature.”

When discussing the “right to be wrong,” Feaver (Reference Feaver2003, 65) does seem to add one qualifier: that this “right” is related to questions of national security. He notes, “Civilian political leaders have the right to ask for things in the national security realm that are ultimately not conducive to good national security. The military should advise against such policies, but the military should not prevent those policies from being implemented.” However, Feaver also writes the following (66):

The caveat that civilians have a right to be wrong on security, and not democratic governance, is only implied and not explicitly stated. For Feaver, the electorate, as the supreme principal, alone has the right to punish an executive for misbehavior. In this conception, militaries are merely to act as passive agents when presidents shirk. This is a disastrous proposition in the absence of democratic checks and balances, when military acceptance of dangerous or even illegal orders could mean a greater likelihood of human rights abuses or democratic backsliding. A military illegally ordered to the streets or to interfere in elections must be ready to be an active, rather than passive, resistor.

Furthermore, although the P-A literature classically treats the electorate as the supreme principal, and elected representatives including the executive as agents (see Gailmard Reference Gailmard, Bovens, Goodin and Schillemans2014), “the electorate” is an undefined group with no single voice. It is then useful to conceptualize the constitution and the rules and norms that are part of it as the supreme principal above both the executive and their military agents. There is a need to recognize that (1) executives can in fact shirk, (2) the “right to be wrong” is not unconditional, and (3) the military itself has a responsibility to shirk in kind when presidents begin to move toward destabilizing or dismantling democracy (see Pion-Berlin and Ivey Reference Pion Berlin and Ivey2021).

One possible response to principal shirking is to surround the principal with multiple agents to reduce incentives to shirk, the logic being that when principals have multiple agents to monitor, they will need to be more vigilant and thus less likely to shirk (Gupta and Romano Reference Gupta and Romano1998). This is difficult but not impossible in the civil–military context if there are multiple, competing armed bureaucracies involved in the same sphere of operations as a nation’s armed forces (Ivey Reference Ivey2023; Reference Ivey2024a). Other scholars have posited that principals may shirk to privilege their own information from agents who rely on the principal for that information (Finkle Reference Finkle2005). Still more scholars provide a straightforward explanation for why principals might shirk: monitoring agents is costly, and principals may simply ignore their monitoring obligations to avoid the associated costs (Waterman and Meier Reference Waterman and Meier1998).

There is an imminent conceptual need to address and identify executive shirking in the civil-military setting. The role of political parties, political elites, and populism in democratic backsliding has been studied (Bermeo Reference Bermeo2016; Levitsky and Ziblatt Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2018; Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2023), but not as much attention has been paid to the central role of the military in democratic backsliding. Recent and noteworthy scholarship is attempting to address this gap. Aurel Croissant and David Kuehn (Reference Croissant, Kuehn, Croissant and Tomini2024) identify four roles the military can play after an executive initiates democratic backsliding: as a perpetrator, accomplice, bystander to backsliding, or custodian of democracy. In his large-N analysis of the relationship between civil–military relations and populism, Taş (Reference Taş2024) finds that populists attempt to “civilianize” the military by creating personal links between the armed forces and civilian leadership. However, populist civilian control of the armed forces is not equivalent to democratic control but is usually part of a broader populist agenda resulting in institutional decay within democracies (Taş Reference Taş2024).

More broadly, recent scholarship has looked to how executives may accelerate and entrench democratic backsliding through manipulating federal bureaucracies, including the military. Excellent studies on Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have produced the concept of “bureaucratic militarization,” a process whereby a president may displace civil service bureaucracies with soldiers (Bauer, Lotta, and de Holanda Schmidt Reference Bauer, Lotta and de Holanda Schmidt2025). This process of illiberal politicization displaces nonpartisan federal agents with partisan-aligned soldiers, thereby expanding the power of the chief executive. Tatiana Paula da Cruz (Reference Da Cruz2024), in her study of the Bolsonaro administration, found that Bolsonaro not only promoted generals to posts for which they were not qualified but also their political extremism and insistence on militaristic hierarchy harmed the functioning of the formerly civilian bureaucracies. Furthermore, she finds that Bolsonaro’s use of the military eroded public trust in both the armed forces and democracy (Da Cruz Reference Da Cruz2024).

Although this reflection mostly treats executives as principals relative to their militaries, it is worth reaffirming that both executives themselves and the military are beholden to the constitution. Although in democracies civilian executives are responsible for issuing orders, militaries are also responsible for remaining within the confines of democracy and the rule of law. The more that executive behavior compels militaries to move away from their constitutional role as nonpartisan servants of the nation and toward loyalty to a particular partisan agenda, the more the executive’s shirking endangers democracy. Put another way, the more that executive shirking drives a wedge between the responsibility of the military to follow civilian orders and the responsibility to respect preexisting constitutional constraints, the more dangerous that shirking is to democracy.

Before continuing further with this analysis, it is worth acknowledging useful scope conditions for the concept of executive shirking. Namely, executive shirking is not a useful concept in authoritarian regimes nor in contexts where civilian control of the military has not been consolidated. In authoritarian regimes, where political power and legitimacy are concentrated in the hands of one individual, rather than a constitution or constitutional framework, questions of how executives mismanage their responsibilities to the armed forces are not as pressing as they are in democratic regimes—even though the issue of authoritarian mismanagement of the military is relevant to literatures on coup-proofing and battlefield effectiveness (Pilster and Böhmelt Reference Pilster and Böhmelt2011), as evidenced by the long disaster of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Furthermore, the concept of executive shirking is not useful in a setting where democracy is consolidating but civilian control of the military remains contested. Take, for instance, the case of Chile in 1990. Although President Patricio Aywlin (1990–94) assumed office after former military dictator Augusto Pinochet stepped down, Pinochet remained on as commander of the armed forces (see Loveman Reference Loveman1991). Nor did the Chilean constitution give the president full powers as commander-in-chief of the military. Likewise, in Pakistan, where repeated attempts to assert civilian authority have resulted in military coups, executives may be forgiven for not attempting to exercise their full authority over the armed forces (see Musharraf Reference Musharraf2006). In such circumstances, cautious executives are not shirking their responsibilities but are avoiding confrontations that could endanger democracy; they may find it more beneficial to prioritize other political goals rather than attempting to exert control over militaries still capable of exercising political vetoes. Where the institutional culture of the armed forces is still prone to praetorianism and hostility to civilian intervention, executives may understandably and rightly restrain themselves. However, the concept of executive shirking is relevant and useful for all democracies. Even though the illustrative case studies in this reflection are presidential democracies, there is little reason that executives in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems could not shirk as well. How they might do so will be discussed in the conclusion.

Although Nancy Bermeo (Reference Bermeo2022, 156–57) argues that there is much work to be done on militaries that tolerate or support democratic backsliding, she also notes the importance of understanding how “existing democratic guardrails can best be defended.” This reflection fits into an important emerging scholarship examining both democratic backsliding and civilian–military relations and focusing on backsliding driven by civilians, not by the military. It lays out the non-partisan nature of the military as an important democratic guard-rail, so that it might be defended.

Conceptualizing Executive Shirking: What Are Executive Responsibilities?

What might executive shirking look like in the civil–military setting? A good place to begin this inquiry is by asking what responsibilities, if any, a commander-in-chief owes their military. Although the answer to this question is under-conceptualized, there are normative arguments and assumptions in the civil–military relations literature about what appropriate civilian conduct looks like. There appears to be wide agreement, for instance, that it is inappropriate for executives to invite the military into partisan politics (Brooks Reference Brooks2021; Diamint Reference Diamint2015). It likewise appears that scholars find it inappropriate to staff civilian bureaucracies with military officers (Bauer, Lotta, and de Holanda Schmidt Reference Bauer, Lotta and de Holanda Schmidt2025; Brooks Reference Brooks2021). Generally, there is concern about expanding the military’s authority into non-defense sectors, namely domestic law enforcement and internal security (see Jenne and Martinez Reference Jenne and Martínez2022). Although there is some debate about what internal security roles are inappropriate, Pion-Berlin’s (Reference Pion-Berlin2016) concept of the military’s “toolkit” suggests that militaries are most ready for the missions that they are most trained for: it is inappropriate to send the armed forces to do a job for which they are not equipped or trained.

From these assumptions, we can derive the first set of responsibilities executives have to their armed forces. Most scholars would agree that civilian principals have a responsibility to keep military orders “reasonable” and to keep their armed forces outside partisan politics.Footnote ¹ A “reasonable” order is an order that the military is prepared to carry out, both because of its training and because the order does not force the military to grapple with questions of constitutionality. As will be discussed later in this reflection, an “unreasonable” order is an order that may not cross the lines into clear illegality but pushes up against constitutional limits. Militaries, although subordinate to the executive, should be able to expect that executives will not order the military to do something for which they are not trained or something that would conflict with constitutional norms. Militaries are agents beholden both to the executive and constitution, and the most harmful forms of executive shirking create tensions between the military’s obligation to both. Militaries should expect that their commanders-in-chief will not ask or force them to choose between two principals that, in a healthy democracy, should be aligned.

Unfortunately, recent history is rife with examples of executives who seek to divide the military and its members along ideological lines and to subjugate their armed forces to a partisan agenda at the expense of constitutional norms and constraints. Ideological tests or criteria for promotion, as well as irregular promotions for officers based on their partisanship rather than experience, indicate that an executive is more interested in exercising personal rather than constitutional control over the armed forces. Executives who co-opt their militaries into partisan roles undermine the public’s confidence that militaries will accept a peaceful transfer of power, should their preferred partisans not win elections.

Pushing legal and partisan boundaries are the most egregious and dangerous ways in which executives can violate their responsibilities, but there are other more routine, benign ways in which executives can neglect their duties. For instance, NATO-aligned nations have routinely delegated security policy making to their militaries and have almost chronically neglected civilianizing the security sector since the end of the Cold War (Pion-Berlin, Acácio, and Ivey Reference Pion-Berlin, Acácio and Ivey2019). Although there is an argument to be made that such behavior could contribute to a decline in military expertise and readiness, it is harder to argue such chronic delegation is a threat to democracy itself.

Another routine form of executive shirking is not providing the military some level of access and the opportunity to provide briefings and offer advice. Executives do not owe their militaries any guarantee that they will follow this advice. Indeed, this is a core stipulation of the right to be wrong—civilians have the right to make bad security decisions. However, a complete lack of access to the executive not only hinders the ability of the military to give the executive critical information but damages the executive’s own abilities to command the armed forces. By avoiding their responsibilities, executives can unwittingly and slowly give away their power. These responsibilities are likely not the only ones that executives owe their military, but according to the literature and given the powers of the executive branch, they are some of the most important.

Executive Shirking: Cases and Costs

It is not enough to point out that executives can shirk, because doing so does not answer the questions “How?” and “So what?” Scholars must theorize the costs that militaries and civil society pay for a shirking executive. Table 1 offers examples of potential executive shirking behaviors; this typology is derived both from the assumptions in the civil–military relations literature analyzed earlier and the illustrative, inductive case studies presented in this section. Given that executive shirking often takes place in relatively secretive settings in the interactions between chief executives and their military leadership, these cases were selected because they are prominent and well documented. For the three most harmful types of executive shirking, I present positive cases where executive shirking contributed to democratic backsliding, as well as negative cases where executive efforts fell short of dismantling democracy.

Table 1

Types of Executive Shirking Behaviors

It should be noted that these forms of shirking are not mutually exclusive behaviors. It is quite likely that executives exhibiting one form of shirking behavior are also exhibiting others. Likewise, some forms of shirking could aggregate or precede each other.

I begin with a discussion of the most harmful types of executive shirking: issuing illegal orders, issuing “unreasonable” orders, and partisan courtship. Illegal orders force the military to consider their loyalty to two principals—the civilian executive and the nation’s constitution—that are in competition. In normal circumstances, robust democratic constitutions demand that militaries follow the orders of a lawfully elected civilian, who in turn is held responsible for not asking the military to violate any obligations it has to the constitutional framework. However, when an executive issues an illegal order, it forces a constitutional crisis that militaries must resolve: Do they adhere to the constitutional order, or do they follow the command of a civilian executive and violate constitutional norms?

Depending on the military’s response, the issuance of illegal orders can either mean the end of democracy or be democracy’s most acute civil–military crisis. When illegal orders are issued and obeyed, democracy is very much undermined. This was the case in Peru in 1992, when President Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) ordered the armed forces to shutter the congress. President Fujimori did so for two reasons: (1) to circumvent a congress that had previously opposed new security policies and (2) to allow the appointment of a new, compliant congress that would in turn allow the president and his allies to create a new constitution (Kenney Reference Kenney2004). This moment, now often treated as the archetypical “self-coup” (see Pion-Berlin, Bruneau, and Goetze Reference Pion-Berlin, Bruneau and Goetze2023), is illustrative of the more destructive types of executive shirking.

However, noncompliance or even partial compliance with an illegal order can save democracy from a shirking executive. This is illustrated best in the recent case of South Korea’s martial law crisis. When former President Yoon Suk Yeol (2022–25) declared martial law near midnight on December 3, 2024, the military mobilized to shut down the legislative branch by forcefully blocking legislators and their staffers from entering the building (Sang-Hun and Yu Young Reference Sang-Hun and Young2024). Although Yoon’s motives are, as of yet, not fully understood, analysts have noted his increasing tension with the legislature, frustration over impeachment attempts, and scandals involving his wife as likely considerations (Sang-Hun Reference Sang-Hun2024). According to some reports, however, Yoon ordered the military to storm the congress and “break the door down right now and get in there and drag out the people inside” (Sang-Hun and Yu Young Reference Sang-Hun and Young2024). This order would have placed the military at direct odds with the constitution, for although presidents in South Korea are empowered to declare martial law, Article 77 of the South Korean constitution states that congress must approve this declaration.Footnote ² If military officers had chosen to forcefully remove legislators and the legislators had not acted swiftly and bravely, executive shirking in this instance would have posed a perilous threat to democracy in South Korea.Footnote ³

But executives may still abuse their authority over the military and stop just short of violating constitutional limits. Just as Finer (Reference Finer and Thompson2018) rightly stated that not all military intervention into politics is violent or illegal, some executive shirking puts “pressure” on the armed forces by issuing commands that push the limits of constitutional norms and understandings. I describe orders that may be legal but are potentially at odds with legal norms as “unreasonable” orders. Such orders place the military in uncomfortable legal spaces and stretch the authority of the executive branch at the expense of previous democratic constraints. Take, for instance, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1877, which states that the US military cannot operate internally inside the United States. However, during the second administration of Donald Trump, the military was routinely sent to the southern border, testing the legal boundaries of previously established legal limits (Brooks Reference Brooks2025). Indeed, a Presidential Memorandum issued on April 11, 2025, transformed a 60-foot-wide stretch of land spanning three states into a military zone, giving the military policing jurisdictions in migrant-crossing zones.Footnote ⁴ This order expands the president’s power by expanding military jurisdiction. President Trump’s ordering the National Guard to Los Angeles is another unreasonable order. Although the president does indeed have the constitutional authority to deploy the National Guard, it has been the historic norm that it has only been deployed at the invitation of the state’s governor. As of this writing, President Trump and Governor Newsom of California are still in a legal dispute over the Guard’s deployment, placing its members in an inherently partisan space (Fernandez Reference Fernandez2025).

Furthermore, testing the limits of legality to determine whether a military will comply or shirk in response to an illegal order allows executives to see how far the military will follow them in eroding democracy. Unreasonable orders that test constitutional limits may, over time, prime the military to obey expressly illegal orders. In this way, executive shirking is another form of gradual democratic backsliding, a sort of “frog in a boiling pot of water” scenario in which democracy is eroded gradually and even legally (see Przeworski Reference Przeworski2019). Indeed, Adam Przeworski highlights the partisan co-optation of security agencies and bureaucracies as one of the slow, legally permissible mechanisms by which duly elected civilians may undermine democracy. Orders that do not cross but instead run up against legal constraints place military leaders and personnel in a situation where their loyalty is divided between a commander-in-chief and long-standing political norms. The closer soldiers come to violating these norms, the more likely they might be to eventually violate them outright.

Short of issuing illegal orders, executives can use their powers of the military to erode its nonpartisan institutional culture. This type of shirking behavior, which I describe as “partisan courtship,” is undertaken to increase military loyalty to the executive over that of the constitution. This courtship takes place through a variety of mechanisms, including irregular promotions based on ideological loyalty, expanding the military presence in government to nondefense posts, and rewarding militaries with new sources of revenue that are dependent on the whims of the chief executive.Footnote ⁵ In most democracies, this behavior is legal but is incredibly dangerous when the interests of the military’s patron executive are at odds with those of the constitution. It is quite likely that partisan courtship must be carried out successfully to ensure that militaries will carry out illegal orders.

An illustrative case study in understanding the importance and danger of partisan courtship is that of Venezuela under Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) and then Nicolas Maduro (2013–present). Chávez’s successful attempt to turn the Venezuelan armed forces into a force with a “Bolivarian” institutional culture, dedicated to Chávez’s ideological principles (and those of his successor Maduro), unfolded over the better part of a decade. He began by offering irregular promotions, promoting officers based on their partisanship and perceived loyalty to his political agenda, and relegating nonpartisan or critical officers to desk jobs, rather than command positions (Nelson Reference Nelson2009). He simultaneously engaged in a strategy of rewarding promoted military loyalists with access to revenues from the national oil industry and—evidence suggests—from the cocaine trade (Carroll Reference Carroll2014; Nelson Reference Nelson2009). Finally, Chávez successfully reoriented the military’s ideology and training to be a socialist force, ensuring that the military would remain more committed to the “revolution” than any constitutional framework (Carroll Reference Carroll2014). Indeed, when the Maduro regime was at its most vulnerable as massive protest broke out across Caracas in 2019, Maduro’s generals tweeted out their support of the incumbent president (Berlinger Reference Berlinger2019). Partisan courtship, initiated by Chávez and accelerated under Maduro (see Corrales Reference Corrales2023), has assured the continuing survival of the Maduro dictatorship even in the face of economic decline, international isolation, and widespread domestic resistance.

Although partisan courtship is a troubling phenomenon, it is not always successful in dismantling democracy. Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro attempted to replicate the Chávez playbook, stacking his cabinet with military officers and increasing the military’s political presence in government (Hunter and Vega Reference Hunter and Vega2022). The Brazilian armed forces enjoyed new privileges and powers granted to it by Mr. Bolsonaro, deepening an alliance between partisan officers and an illiberal, populist executive (Bauer, Lotta, and de Holanda Schmidt Reference Bauer, Lotta and de Holanda Schmidt2025; Novaes and Arguelhes Reference Novaes and Arguelhes2024). In particular, the military enjoyed new authorities over the Amazon, effectively taking over the Brazilian National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) and the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) during the Bolsonaro presidency (Bauer, Lotta, and de Holanda Schmidt Reference Bauer, Lotta and de Holanda Schmidt2025). Mr. Bolsonaro staffed his cabinet with an alarming number of military cabinet members. By the end of 2020, the military controlled 10 ministries (Hunter and Vega Reference Hunter and Vega2022), leading critics and advisers to wonder whether the military would accept a Bolsonaro loss in the 2022 elections.

Indeed, after their candidate lost, supporters of Jair Bolsonaro stormed the congress on January 8, 2023, in an attempt to call on the military to carry out a coup and reinstall him as president. Although the unsuccessful coup attempt is still being investigated, Mauro Cid, an army colonel who served at the right hand of the former president, has been implicated in the plot against current president Lula da Silva (Novaes and Arguelhes Reference Novaes and Arguelhes2024). In 2025 Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered five military leaders who served in high positions in the Bolsonaro administration to stand trial for their role in the coup (Kahn Reference Kahn2025). Yet, not all the military leaders were ready to follow Bolsonaro into authoritarian waters, despite the degree to which their interests aligned with his government.

According to testimony from the former chiefs of the army and air force, some top commanders made clear to Bolsonaro that he would not have their support in any authoritarian power-grab (Viapiana Reference Viapiana2024). Allegedly, the former chief of the army, General Marco Antônio Freire Gomes, even threatened to arrest Bolsonaro if he went forward with the coup attempt. Thus, it seems that even though Bolsonaro did manage to move loyalists to the highest ranks of the military, he did not overwhelmingly change the institutional culture of the armed forces. Therefore, his efforts to shirk through partisan courtship were only partially successful at most. Even though Bolsonaro’s attempt to create a partisan military was only a partial success, it put Brazil’s democracy in doubt. Had Mr. Bolsonaro been in office for as many years as Hugo Chávez, there is a strong possibility that Brazil would have followed Venezuela’s path in democratic backsliding, resulting in the dictatorship of an executive who had created an army more loyal to himself than to the constitution.

However, most executive shirking presents very little harm, and it is important for scholars and policy makers to recognize this so they avoid hyperbolic warnings and threats. Indeed, as Feaver (Reference Feaver2024) has noted recently, civilian leaders may violate civil–military norms simply because they are not aware of them. One worrying, though perhaps not catastrophic, behavior, is when executives delegate their authority away to their armed forces. When executives give away their own decision-making and supervision powers, they risk institutionalizing a wider civil–military information gap and weakening future civilian authority. But not all forms of delegation result in institutional changes to the civil–military balance. For this reason, I differentiate between “informal” and “formal” delegation. Informal delegation is temporary, context-specific, and not codified in the passage of new laws, whereas formal delegation is designed to be long-term, nebulous, and codified in new laws. Informal delegation occurs, for instance, when a president orders military commanders to “follow their best judgment” after being thoroughly briefed on the nature of a security operation.

Not all types of delegation are directly harmful to democracy. In developing democracies, for instance, delegating governing functions to the military is far more harmful than delegating the role of making security policy. Indeed, in developing democracies where civilian control of the military is not consolidated, delegating security policy to establish full non-military control of governance may be a very prudent decision. However, it is not inconceivable that informal delegation can aggregate into a new pattern. If executives repeatedly delegate to their armed forces, they could establish a new civil–military norm. Repeated informal delegation could result in weaker operational oversight that would be neither temporary nor context-specific; it could also pave the way for executives to legally enshrine their delegation through the creation of new laws. Once codified into law, this formal delegation is more problematic than informal delegation and could result in the long-term loss of civilian oversight and the nebulous expansion of military autonomy and authority. I describe formal delegation as a “medium-risk” behavior, because even though it may limit civilian oversight, delegating new authorities over economic enterprises or resources may harm civilian oversight but not democracy. However, when formal delegation gives the military new authorities over the daily lives of citizens, this shirking behavior becomes more dangerous.

Mexican presidents, for instance, have routinely created new civilian offices to assume the role of the president in receiving military intelligence and briefings (Ivey Reference Ivey2023). Although this would not be as problematic if there were a robust civilian defense apparatus, this has given wide, legally enshrined autonomy for Mexico’s armed forces in the absence of a civilian defense ministry. Most recently, former Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador (2018–2024) eliminated the Federal Police and replaced it with a military-controlled National Guard, granting the military new arrest powers and a monopoly over federal law enforcement (Ivey Reference Ivey2023). It is worth noting, however, that López Obrador’s move was preceded by decades of Mexican presidents deploying the military for policing missions, even though Article 129 of the Mexican constitution states that the Mexican military cannot participate in non-military affairs in peacetime.Footnote ⁶ Thus, decades of more informal delegation have paved the way for formal delegation in Mexico. Though in theory such chronic executive delegation could be slowed or checked by a proactive legislature with considerable oversight powers, the Mexican legislature has been historically lax in exercising its constitutional authorities regarding the military (Díez Reference Díez2008).

Although delegation can be harmful for democracy, I offer two types of shirking behavior that, even though they are not ideal, could be more benign and routine forms of shirking. The first, which I describe as “avoidance,” seems to be the least harmful. It occurs when executives do not fulfill their responsibilities as commanders-in-chief either by not participating in meetings with the military, not allowing the military to present intelligence and offer potential strategies to the executive, and delaying critical nominations in military and defense leadership. An executive who is ignorant of or uninformed about security policy is not necessarily alarming, because during peacetime, presidents may be largely unconcerned with military matters if civilian oversight is assumed by a robust Ministry of Defense or equivalent civilian body. More problematic, though not catastrophically so, is an executive who avoids making nominations or appointments for critical leadership, thereby damaging military readiness. However, this harm is not necessarily permanent, and avoidance presents no immediate dangers to democracy itself.

This brings us to another problematic, though not catastrophic, behavior: scapegoating. Responsible commanders-in-chief will follow former president Harry Truman’s political maxim, “the buck stops here,” and assume political responsibility for their strategies and commands. Irresponsible commanders-in-chief will offload blame to their armed forces, at the expense of the military’s morale and public reputation. For instance, when President Trump blamed generals for the loss of a service member in Yemen, he passed the buck to his subordinates who were following his orders (Gilsinan Reference Gilsinan2019). This behavior only erodes military morale, not democracy itself. However, there is a possibility that once scapegoating takes on ideological dimensions, such as the recent decrying of the US military as “woke,” civilians will incentivize factionalism within the armed forces. Scapegoating based on ideology may bleed into the partisan co-optation of the armed forces, which is harmful to both military professionalism and democracy. Ideological scapegoating can undermine mutual trust between the military and civilian leaders, which may translate to military leaders being increasingly unwilling to share information with their civilian counterparts and incentivizing greater shirking on part of the armed forces. Furthermore, this sort of ideological scapegoating is something that actors outside the executive can take active part in. Actors who participate in it, whether they be commanders-in-chief, legislators, or even voters, risk undermining military confidence in civilian leadership.

Conclusion: Reasons and Reponses to Executive Shirking

Why do commanders-in-chief neglect their responsibilities? When is executive shirking more likely and when can it be prevented? Although hypothesis construction and testing will be the subject of future research, the nature of the elected executive itself is as good a starting point as any to begin answering this question. I previously argued that executives have responsibilities to their armed forces, but now any sensible scholar must also acknowledge that they also have responsibilities to the nation at large. Executives are elected by voters concerned with a variety of social, economic, and national security issues. The military is not a relevant tool for solving every problem. Executives shirk routinely, because the military and security politics are not their priorities. Where there is a robust civilian defense apparatus, this is hardly a threat to democracy.

Bringing the military into partisan politics, cultivating personal loyalties, and undercutting loyalty to a constitutional framework are distinct behaviors that are motivated by the same cause: an executive’s personal and political priorities. Preliminary evidence from illustrative case studies suggests that executives shirk to extend their own power at the expense of constitutional checks, seeing the military as a vehicle to (perhaps violently) circumvent constraints on their powers. Although every executive has an opportunity to shirk, they may be more likely to shirk when they have allies in the legislature who enable their agenda; therefore, they may not facilitate democratic backsliding through mismanagement of the armed forces. Future research will explore how and when legislatures might prevent executive shirking.

This leads to another question: When executives shirk, what is the most appropriate and effective response? Although Feaver argues that it is not the role of the military to monitor or punish their presidents for shirking, the nature of executive shirking will necessitate a response. When presidents have compelled their militaries to participate in operations that could endanger human rights, the armed forces have responded by shirking themselves (Pion-Berlin and Acácio Reference Pion-Berlin and Igor2020; Pion-Berlin and Ivey Reference Pion Berlin and Ivey2021). Militaries across Latin America, facing an executive mandate to go to “war” against widespread protests, have made public statements that de-escalated rhetoric used by their commanders-in-chief and slow-rolled orders to minimize contact between soldiers and the citizenry. Indeed, militaries can use many forms of democratic dissent to shirk in kind and prevent civilian-compelled democratic backsliding (Brooks and Pion-Berlin Reference Brooks and Pion-Berlin2022). And should a dangerous or illegal order potentially cause a large-scale human rights catastrophe, militaries can refuse to obey, in what Johnson (Reference Johnson2024) calls “virtuous shirking.” Such behavior falls well short of the provocative notion that militaries could justifiably oust a commander-in-chief (Kehlenbach Reference Kehlenbach2022).

Ideally, militaries turn to other principals, such as the legislature or society itself when executive shirking imperils democracy. Where legislatures have the power to stop militarized democratic backsliding, they must do so. Where constitutional provisions do not exist for the legislature to check the executive’s authority over the military, legislatures should seek to amend their constitutions. A robust, proactive legislature with extensive defense oversight and an interest in maintaining military professionalism would be the most effective counter-principal to a shirking executive.

However, when other branches of government enable executive shirking, counting on such democratic checks is not a viable option (Pion-Berlin, Bruneau, and Goetze Reference Pion-Berlin, Bruneau and Goetze2023). If an executive’s partisan, antidemocratic agenda has co-opted the other branches of government and the public itself, there is very little to be done. Unfortunately, this presents the upper limit on feasible responses to executive shirking. When significant numbers of civilian principals (legislatures, political parties, etc.) enable or encourage executive shirking, the final responsibility will fall to voters themselves, who will unfortunately need to wait for the next election for a chance to reverse democratic decline. This raises two darker questions: What if a significant portion or even majority of voters support executive shirking and partisan co-optation of the armed forces? And what if democratic backsliding proceeds so quickly as to make subsequent elections unfree or unfair? It would be dangerous to advise any military to undermine the will of voters, but civil–military scholars in particular must develop rigorous conceptual work on the responsibilities that militaries loyal to democracies have to voters who prefer more authoritarian commanders in-chief.

There is ample opportunity for future scholarship to study executive shirking. First, more qualitative research into new cases will reveal more instances of executive shirking and perhaps new types of shirking behavior. Such work will help us determine whether a particular sequence of shirking behavior is more common or more detrimental to democracy. Although initial findings from these illustrative case studies included in this study suggest there are a variety of paths an executive might take to use their militaries to break democracy, further in-depth qualitative work will be necessary to unpack causal mechanisms and processes.

Future scholarship should also look at the conditions in which the most extreme forms of executive shirking did not result in democratic backsliding. For instance, it could examine the steps that civilians outside the executive branch can take to strengthen military nonpartisanship in the face of executive pressure. A study of civil–military coalitions developed in response to executive shirking will give much needed insight as to what more can be done to protect democracy from antidemocratic elected officials.

In addition, future studies should examine what types of executive shirking occur in parliamentary or semi-presidential regimes, or both. For instance, evidence suggests that the Israeli government (including the prime minister and parliament) has chronically delegated security policy-making decisions to the military (Pion-Berlin, Acácio, and Ivey Reference Pion-Berlin, Acácio and Ivey2019). This has led not only to troubling feuds between the Netanyahu government and its military over Israel’s own potential democratic backsliding but also to the military’s implementation of security decisions without consulting with the prime minister (Bateman Reference Bateman2023; Boxerman Reference Boxerman2024). It could very well be the case that both the Israeli legislature and executive branch have shirked simultaneously. Future studies should examine the conditions under which multiple civilian branches of government shirk or how one branch might counterbalance the other’s shirking.

Similarly, France as a semi-presidential democracy has continuously renewed “Operation Sentinelle,” an internal deployment of the armed forces supposedly to deter terrorism but that is more along the lines of military domestic policing (Ivey Reference Ivey, Croissant, Kuehn and Pion-Berlin2024b). Delegation, formal and informal, along with avoidance, seem to be the types of shirking behavior enabling this type of deployment in democracies. Research should investigate parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies that have experienced democratic backsliding, such as Hungary under the second premiership of Victor Orbán (2010–present) and Poland under the Law and Justice Party (2015–23). Such studies will yield insight into how partisan courtship and the issuance of unreasonable or illegal orders might operate in different types of democratic regimes.

Likewise, it should be noted that executives are not the only principals and that they are not the only ones who shirk in their civil–military obligations. In the United States, for instance, Senator Tommy Tuberville delayed more than 400 military promotions for four months to protest military personnel’s access to abortion (Snell and Myer Reference Snell and Myre2023). Although the full extent of the harm that this delay has caused is unknown, it left key appointments empty for months and quite conceivably harmed both the military’s expertise and readiness. Legislatures, particularly when they are controlled by the partisan allies of an aspiring authoritarian, may enable and abet partisan co-optation through the creation of new laws and the promotion of discourse to undermine the military’s loyalty to the constitution. Future scholarship should conceptualize what legislative shirking looks like in the civil–military realm. Evidence suggests that politicians in the legislature can slow down promotions, neglect their oversight capacities, and, as mentioned earlier, ideologically scapegoat the armed forces.

This reflection has presented the novel concept of executive shirking to provide a tool and framework for scholars and policy makers. At the time of writing, the need to study executive shirking as a conceptual tool is unfortunately quite apparent. In the United States, President Trump appears to be attempting partisan courtship of the armed forces, as evidenced by a partisan speech to soldiers in Fort Bragg who were “screened” for their partisan preferences (Toropin and Beynon Reference Toropin and Beynon2025). Likewise, Trump’s decision to order a military parade through Washington, DC, supposedly to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US Army but coincidentally coinciding with his birthday, suggests active efforts to court the military into partisan politics (Montague Reference Montague2025). At a moment where democratic backsliding is increasingly prevalent, it is critical to remember that militaries are the largest armed bureaucracies of the state and that antidemocratic executives may use them to subvert democracy.