No Easy Way Out: The Effect of Military Coups on State Repression

Abstract

Military coups are often advocated as solutions for ending state-sponsored atrocities. Yet, we know little about coups' precise consequences. This article estimates the effect of coups on state repression by exploiting the element of chance in whether an attempted succeeds or fails. Contrary to popular views of coups as remedies against repressive autocrats, I find no evidence that coups have a pacifying effect on state repression. Rather, coups appear to make matters worse, even when targeting leaders that commit large-scale human rights violations. This article contributes to studies of political violence, authoritarianism, and civil-military relations, by resolving a longstanding good vs. bad coup debate. It also advances literature on coups and their consequences through an innovative empirical design that leverages exogenous variation in outcomes, combined with an extreme bounds analysis, overcoming conventional challenges of causal inference using observational data.