The Responsibility to Be Reasonable: Conceptualizing Executive Shirking in Civil–Military Relations
2025-10-28
Although civil–military relations scholarship has rightly prioritized establishing policies that subordinate the military to civilian political control, there has been less focus on how lawfully elected executives may abuse their military authorities to undermine democracy. However, recent history shows that executives can and have critically shirked their responsibilities as commanders-in-chief. In doing so, they contribute to democratic backsliding. Some executive mismanagement of the military is harmless and routine, but other types of executive mismanagement are dangerous and exceptional. Although executives have the right to be wrong regarding security policy making, they also have a responsibility to be a reasonable commander-in-chief who upholds the nonpartisan character of the military and keeps it within democratic constraints. In this article I build on a principal-agent (P-A) framework of civil–military relations by importing a concept from the P-A literature, “principal shirking,” to establish a new concept, “executive shirking.” This conceptualization lays out a framework for scholars of civil–military relations and democratic backsliding and provides a typology of executive misbehavior based on the degree of potential democratic harm. In doing so, it provides a valuable tool to detect and analyze executive shirking and offers steps to take when executives abuse their military powers.