An Interdisciplinary Analytical Framework

Abstract

This monograph is a comparative analysis of Portugal and Spain based on the historical examination of their civil-military relations and the application of a refined version of Hood’s (1983) NATO framework. This chapter briefly describes the historical sources that were investigated as well as the comparative and explanatory frameworks utilised. Then, it presents Hood’s original NATO resource-based typology for the classification of tools of government (1983) and some adaptations made to operationalise it in the context of civil-military relations. This chapter also introduces as an explanatory framework two alternative neo-institutionalist approaches to the evolution of civil-military relations and control tools: one based on the legacies of past historical events and the other based on the continuing action of environmental factors such as ideas, the political institutional structure, and the international environment.