Title: Military representation in Uganda's Parliament and its implications for legislative accountability
Authors: Dr. Arinaitwe Julius
Akampulira Sarah
Nabaasa Desire
Volume: 10
Issue: 7
Pages: 601-609
Publication Date: 2026/07/28
Abstract:
Uganda's 1995 Constitution and the Parliamentary Elections Act reserve ten seats in Parliament for representatives of the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF), a provision that is unique within East Africa and that has generated sustained debate about its consequences for democratic oversight. This study investigated military representation in Uganda's Parliament and its implications for legislative accountability, framed within a broader Christian-ethics discourse on stewardship, transparency, and the moral responsibilities of political authority. The study was guided by one main objective and three specific objectives: to assess the level of perceived military representation and its influence on legislative independence, oversight capacity, and legislative accountability; to examine the mediating roles of legislative independence and oversight capacity; and to establish the overall structural relationship linking military representation to legislative accountability. A cross-sectional survey design was adopted, and a simulated dataset of 320 respondents drawn from four strata (civilian Members of Parliament, UPDF representative Members of Parliament, parliamentary staff/technical officers, and civil society/CSO analysts) was generated to illustrate the analytic pipeline that would be applied to primary data. Data were analysed using univariate statistics (frequencies, means, standard deviations, skewness/kurtosis, and Cronbach's alpha), bivariate statistics (Pearson correlation, one-way ANOVA, and independent-samples t-tests), and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) estimated through a maximum-likelihood path-analytic framework. Results indicated that military representation was negatively and significantly associated with legislative independence (? = -0.33, p < .001) and oversight capacity (? = -0.25, p < .001), both of which in turn significantly and positively predicted legislative accountability (? = 0.29 and ? = 0.31 respectively, p < .001). Military representation also exerted a smaller but significant direct negative effect on legislative accountability (? = -0.12, p = .021), and the indirect effects through both mediators were statistically significant, yielding a total standardized effect of -0.30. The hypothesized model achieved acceptable fit (?²/df = 1.79, CFI = .968, TLI = .951, RMSEA = .049, SRMR = .041). The study concluded that military representation is associated with a measurable erosion of legislative independence and oversight capacity, which are the principal channels through which it undermines legislative accountability, and it recommends institutional, procedural, and civic-education reforms to safeguard parliamentary accountability functions.