  MAXI J1836-194 is a Galactic black hole candidate X-ray binary that was
discovered in 2011 when it went into outburst. In this paper, we present the
full radio monitoring of this system during its `failed' outburst, in which the
source did not complete a full set of state changes, only transitioning as far
as the hard intermediate state. Observations with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large
Array (VLA) and Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) show that the jet
properties changed significantly during the outburst. The VLA observations
detected linearly polarised emission at a level of ~1% early in the outburst,
increasing to ~3% as the outburst peaked. High-resolution images with the Very
Long Baseline Array (VLBA) show a ~15 mas jet along the position angle $-21 \pm
2^\circ$, in agreement with the electric vector position angle found from our
polarisation results ($-21 \pm 4^\circ$), implying that the magnetic field is
perpendicular to the jet. Astrometric observations suggest that the system
required an asymmetric natal kick to explain its observed space velocity.
Comparing quasi-simultaneous X-ray monitoring with the 5 GHz VLA observations
from the 2011 outburst shows an unusually steep hard-state radio/X-ray
correlation of $L_{\rm R} \propto L_{\rm X}^{1.8\pm0.2}$, where $L_{\rm R}$ and
$L_{\rm X}$ denote the radio and X-ray luminosities, respectively. With ATCA
and Swift monitoring of the source during a period of re-brightening in 2012,
we show that the system lay on the same steep correlation. Due to the low
inclination of this system, we then investigate the possibility that the
observed correlation may have been steepened by variable Doppler boosting.
