Institutionalizing civilian control over the military is a crucial challenge for newly democratized nations. This paper aims to answer the question under which conditions civilian control can be established after the transition to democracy, and under which conditions civilian control fails. To answer this question, we draw on original data on civil–military relations in 28 new democracies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America and run a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. We find that no single explanatory factor can be considered necessary for the success or failure of civilian control in new democracies, but identify a number of sufficient variable combinations to explain the development of civil–military relations after the transition to democracy.

If decisions are made in democracies in open procedures, the rhetoric of There is no alternative (TINA) raises certain questions. Tracing back the idea of necessity to symptomatic discourses, this article analyzes TINA as a political strategy in contexts such as Thatcherism, Third Way politics, and European crisis management, and sheds light on the specific characteristics of politics in the name of TINA. The analysis identifies distinct models of ‘one way’ discourses, reflecting political cultures and institutional settings and providing discursive trajectories. We examine the motivation for invoking necessity to justify unpalatable and normatively intricate policy decisions, and understand TINA politics in its double effect: as facilitating certain policies yet obstructing democratic and deliberative procedures. This allows us to address the question of whether the politics of our time shows a disposition to TINA as a means of responding to the rise and fall of political steering optimism.

Prior work suggests that government funding can encourage non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to engage in political advocacy and public policy. We challenge this finding and examine two theoretical explanations for the dampening effect of government funding on NGO lobbying. First, donors are known to discipline NGO activity via an implicit or explicit threat to withdraw funding should the organization become too radical or political. Second, NGOs with more radical political agendas are less willing to seek or accept government funding for fear this will limit or delegitimize their activities. Using data from the European Union’s Transparency Register, we find that the share of government funding in NGO budgets is negatively associated with lobbying expenditure. This effect is statistically significant and substantial, which provides a reason for concern about NGO resource dependence. Even when governments are motivated by honorable intentions, their financial assistance has the (unintended) effect of dampening NGOs’ political activity.