A PRELIMINARY MATHEMATICAL TEST FOR DEPENDENCY THEORY: AN OPERATIONAL DEFINITION, A MEASURING INDEX, AND AN ANALYTICAL METHOD FOR MILITARY DEPENDENCY (IRANIAN - UNITED STATES RELATIONS)

This study reports some empirical results from examining data on the Iranian military establishment during the Shah's rule, 1953-1979. The preliminary findings suggest an operational definition, a measuring index, and an analytical method for explaining the military component of Dependency Theory.;Second, the quest for an index to measure the extent of military dependence has been equally expounded. For this study the index NEED is being proposed. NEED is a composite vector index, having both magnitude and direction. It is the algebraic difference between the granted military aids (from the center to the periphery) and the purchased military programs (by the periphery from the center). While positive NEED implies military dependence, its negative values indicate periphery's non-dependence.;Finally, the methodological framework is causal modeling. Through this method, the extent of association between military dependence, measured by NEED, and four of its predictors has been explained. That is, the individual, partial, and collective impacts of time, military advisors, gross domestic product, and military expenditure on NEED have been assessed through Path Analyses--a family of ways of analyzing data such as the Regression Method and the Partial Correlation Analysis.;First, qualitative attempts have been explored to compile theoretical response(s) to a central research question: What is military dependence? To this end, it has been hypothesized that military dependence may be a situation in which a periphery's military foundation gets conditioned to a center's strategic interest expansion and development. Having tested this theoretical proposal on the Iranian military data set, it has been found that there exists a robust relationship between periphery's index of dependence, the index NEED, and the center's number of military advisors. This relationship is not direct; that is, the periphery's structural military dependence is engineered by the center's military advisors but through periphery's index of economic growth, the gross domestic product.