Critics of Finer have pointed out that this sounds tautological. A low level
of political culture is defined as a lack of consensus. It is defined by refer-
ence to what it is supposed to explain. Rather than offering an explanation
of a lack of political consensus, the concept of political culture offers a
statement that is true by definition. There is further circularity in the argu-
ment, in that military intervention is taken to be evidence of a low political
culture because it is evidence of the breakdown of consensus. So military
intervention is being explained by reference to conditions which are repre-
sented by that intervention itself. Insofar as there is explanatory value in
the theory of political culture, it is more about how civilian governments fail
than why the military should be the inevitable successor. Furthermore, the
theory does not explain why coupsoccur in some states with minimal polit-
ical cultures but not others (First, 1972, p. 14). The only solution to this
problem is to make intervention itself an indicator of the level of political
culture, but this makes the explanation even more tautologous.
Organizational factors
Knowledge of why the military have usurped power in so many states may
depend more on observations of the military itself than the socio-economic
context in which Third World governments find themselves. There has been
a long-standing debate between the supporters of an ‘environmental’
approach to military intervention, emphasizing the influence of social and
economic factors on the propensity for intervention, and the ‘organization-
alists’ (Charlton, 1981, pp. 51–6). The organizational characteristics of the
military may be crucial to understanding military intervention, especially
when the socio-economic conditions of different countries, such as India
and Pakistan, look similar, yet their experience of military intervention has
been so markedly different.
The military appears to have many political advantages over other organ-
izations involved in politics. It has a clear chain of command, with a well-
understood and rigorously observed set of superior–subordinate
relationships. Decisions are obeyed, not debated until some consensus is
reached. The military is well-organized for striking at civilian institutions.
When the military intervenes, the leadership of the coupis often drawn not
from the top-ranking officers but from the middle echelons of younger offi-
cers, perhaps because their senior officers are too closely associated with
the civilian regime; or because that particular stratum of the officer corps is
drawn from an ethnic group that is concerned about the way political power
186 Understanding Third World Politics