MILITARY CORPORATE INTERESTS AND THE MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT'S INVOLVEMENT IN POLITICS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF CIVILIAN AND MILITARY JOURNALS IN PAKISTAN, FRANCE AND ISRAEL

Military corporate interests are defined here as the concerns which military personnel have in common. This study examines the relationship of these interests to civilian interests in order to explain the military establishment's involvement in politics.;By analyzing threats to and enhancements of interests engendered by the study of relationships we develop several hypotheses to explain: (1) the combined effect of military corporate interests and civilian interests on the military's involvement in politics; and (2) the combined effect of substantive types of military corporate interests and civilian interests on the military's involvement in politics.;We test the hypotheses with content analysis data from civilian and military journals published in Pakistan and France between 1956 and 1965 and in Israel between 1967 and 1976. The findings show that civilian interests relate more strongly than military interests to the military's involvement in politics, that conflicts about the legitimacy of interests relate only moderately to the military's involvement in politics, and that interests about military corporateness relate strongly to the military's involvement in politics. The findings also point to ways of improving the model.;This dissertation develops the concept of military corporate interests and a typology for classifying them. The typology consists of three categories: interests about corporateness, about organizational needs, and about other matters. Corporateness is further divided into substantive, associative, structural, and ideological types. We first use these concepts to review the civil-military literature. Then we use them, in combination with the relationships between civil and military interests, to construct a model of the military's involvement in politics.