Oust the Leader, Keep the Regime? Autocratic Civil-Military Relations and Coup Behavior in the Tunisian and Egyptian Militaries during the 2011 Arab Spring

Abstract

We present a theory for how variation in autocratic civil-military relations affects the type of coups to which autocratic leaders are vulnerable. Dictators rely on alternative strategies of control that involve tensions across two imperatives—governance and coup prevention. In a “grand bargain,” leaders cede prerogatives to the military and compromise on the governance imperative. This insulates them from regime-change coups but still renders them vulnerable to reshuffling coups that result from bargaining failures. Alternatively, political leaders may rely on “containment,” in which they marginalize the military. Although they make fewer concessions on the governance imperative, the military is more likely to oust the entire regime when the former has the opportunity to engage in a coup, not just reshuffle the leader. We evaluate this theory using within-case process tracing and paired case studies of Tunisia and Egypt, and conduct descriptive quantitative analyses to demonstrate the generalizability of our theory.