Role Model or Role Expansion? Popular Perceptions of the Military in Tunisia

• DOI: 10.1177/10659129211001451
• Author: Kevin Koehler,Holger Albrecht,Michael Bufano
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 75(2) 321 –337

Article

https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211001451

Political Research Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211001451

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This article analyzes popular attitudes toward the mili-

tary’s role in politics. Prior survey research has shown

that the vast majority of people, across a wide variety of

political and socioeconomic contexts, have very positive

perceptions of the armed forces. Empirical evidence can

be found across the globe, including countries in the West

and the Global South, and also across different political

regime types, including democracies and authoritarian

regimes. Yet, beyond generally positive attitudes, we

know very little about people’s preferences for the role

that the military should play in politics and society. This

prompts us to pose a broad question: who wants the mili-

tary to adopt which role in society and politics? More pre-

cisely, we remain interested in why some individuals

prioritize the military to primarily serve in its traditional

role of providing security from external and domestic

threats while others prioritize role expansion, which is an

expanded role for the armed forces in politics, society,

and the economy.

This puzzle is important not only for scholars of civil–

military relations but also for students of democratic tran-

sitions. Understanding who wants the military to do what

in the context of such transitions will allow us to disag-

gregate the highly abstract notion of trust in the armed

forces. Moreover, in the context of an unfolding demo-

cratic transition, military intervention in politics remains a

major alternative to the uncertainties associated with the

democratic process. Unpacking support for military role

expansion will therefore generate insights into the drivers

of anti-system attitudes. Our study of popular perceptions

toward military role expansion promises to contribute to

the literature on civil–military relations and the research

program on democratic consolidation.

In this article, we explore politics in Tunisia, a country

experiencing a volatile transition process since the oust-

ing of longtime dictator Zine El-Abedine Ben Ali in 2011.

We uncover which political cleavages drive variation in

support of role expansion, which we conceptualize as the

military’s increased engagement in politics. Our investi-

gation focuses on two contrasting cleavages in contempo-

rary Tunisian politics: first, a cleavage going back to the

authoritarian past and pitting the losers of the recent dem-

ocratic transition against elites who rose to influence as a

result of the revolution; and second, an insider/outsider

cleavage between supporters of the post-authoritarian

1001451PRQXXX10.1177/10659129211001451Political Research QuarterlyAlbrecht et al.

research-article2021

1The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA

2Leiden University, The Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Holger Albrecht, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-

0166, USA.

Email: halbrecht@ua.edu

Role Model or Role Expansion? Popular

Perceptions of the Military in Tunisia

Holger Albrecht1, Michael Bufano1, and Kevin Koehler2

Abstract

This article introduces a theory on military role expansion in emerging democracies and poses a broad question: who

wants the military to adopt which role in society and politics? Drawing on an original, nationally representative survey

conducted in Tunisia, the article explores people’s preferences for the military to remain a security provider or serve

in government and contribute to policing protests. Findings reveal that public support for military role expansion is

substantial and varies across political cleavages. We test hypotheses to account for cleavages driven by the country’s

authoritarian past versus partisan divides during Tunisia’s transition to democracy. Findings indicate that popular

support for military role expansion is driven by anti-system sentiments prevalent in contemporary Tunisian politics:

while voters prefer the military as a role model for security provision, non-voters support its enhanced role in politics.

These observations have ample implications for the research programs on civil–military relations and the dynamics of

democratic consolidation. Tunisia’s experience warrants greater attention to anti-system attitudes caused by people’s

disillusionment with democratic procedures. In turn, authoritarian legacies do not appear to play a prominent role

during such challenging transitions toward democratic consolidation.

Keywords

military, Tunisia, role expansion, opinion poll, democratic consolidation

322 Political Research Quarterly 75(2)

2 Political Research Quarterly 00(0)

elite compromise that led to the current democratic sys-

tem, on the one hand, and constituencies who might not

feel adequately represented in democratic Tunisia, on the

other hand. Based on these general premises, we consider

two rivaling hypotheses on attitudes regarding military

role expansion in post-authoritarian Tunisia. First, the

authoritarian holdover hypothesis suggests that support

for, or opposition against, role expansion is driven by

preferences based on the pre-revolutionary constellation

of political forces—in particular, on opposition against

the rise of a new set of political elites and resistance to

transitional justice. Second, the anti-system hypothesis

holds that a lack of trust in new democratic political insti-

tutions drives expectations for the military to take on a

more prominent role in politics.

Drawing on an original nationally representative sur-

vey (2017) as well as on the most recent wave of the

Afrobarometer survey, we report two main findings.

First, popular support for military role expansion is sub-

stantial with close to 50 percent of Tunisians calling on

the military to assume a more prominent role in policing

protests and serving in government. Second, this support

is primarily driven by an insider/outsider cleavage and

not by differences deriving from the authoritarian past.

From a larger perspective, the challenges of consolidation

faced by post-authoritarian Tunisia bear greater similari-

ties to the challenges of populism in other parts of the

world than to issues of post-authoritarian civil–military

relations more narrowly conceived.

The remainder of this article proceeds as follows: we

first discuss the theoretical background of our inquiry. We

then briefly examine politics in contemporary Tunisia to

develop testable hypotheses on variance in popular per-

ceptions of military role expansion. A third section out-

lines our research design and introduces the survey data

upon which our findings are based. A fourth section

reports our empirical findings before we conclude by

summarizing our argument and suggesting implications

for further research.

Perceptions of the Military

Existing public opinion research across the globe empha-

sizes overwhelmingly positive perceptions of the mili-

tary. Scholars of public attitudes in Western countries

have reported high levels of trust in the military gener-

ally (Burbach 2017; Hines et al. 2015; King and Karabell

2003) but also in specific policies associated with the

military, including defense spending (Simon and Lovrich

2010) and veteran affairs (Kleykamp, Hipes, and

MacLean 2017). Surveys report very high levels of pop-

ular trust in the military across time and different coun-

tries, regions, cultures, and political regime types.

Relying on available data, the inevitable conclusion is

that the military is among the most trusted institutions in

the world.

Take the Arab Barometer as an example.1 As Figure 1

shows, the surveys report values between 76 and 82 per-

cent for all countries included and even higher levels of

trust when focusing only on Tunisia. Alternative data

sources produce a similar picture. According to the Pew

Global Attitudes surveys, the percentage of respondents

who insisted that the Tunisian military had a good or very

good influence on how things were going in the country

stood well above 90 in 2012, 2013, and 2014 (Holmes

and Koehler 2020, 21). The World Values Survey suggests

that almost two out of three people worldwide trust the

armed forces. Popular trust in the armed forces is near-

universal and much higher than trust in civilian political

institutions.

Despite these seemingly robust findings, we remain

interested in variance among social and political constitu-

encies regarding their perceptions of the military as well

as their preferences for more specific dimensions of mili-

tary activity in politics and the economy. Hines et al.

(2015), for instance, lament that public support for the

military in the United Kingdom is high even though

respondents had a limited understanding of what the mili-

tary was doing. Neither have respondents offered support

for the conflicts in which the military was engaged,

namely, in Iraq and Afghanistan. With regard to the

United States, scholars report significant differences

along partisan divides with respect to people’s percep-

tions of the military (Krebs and Ralston 2020).

The question of what people exactly like about the

military is particularly salient outside of the universe of

consolidated democracies. Civil–military relations theory

in consolidated democracies is based on the idea that sov-

ereign democratic states create standing armies under

civilian control to protect the polity against external ene-

mies (Huntington 1957; Janowitz 1960). In many parts of

the developing world, the military has not always acted in

accordance with this Huntingtonian role model. Instead,

many countries of the developing world have experi-

enced what Alfred Stepan (1973) called military “role

expansion”: the assumption of tasks in politics, the econ-

omy, and society writ large beyond the mere provision of

external security. While Alfred Stepan, in his formative

contribution, has been primarily interested in the conse-

quences of military role expansion—for instance, mili-

tary autonomy from civilian oversight, military

effectiveness, and human rights—we remain inspired to

study popular preferences regardless of whether the mili-

tary does in fact assume a greater role in politics.

To begin with, we set out to explore attitudes toward

military role expansion and therefore reintroduce a

research topic that has largely been ignored since the work

conducted in the guise of modernization theory a half