Social Complexity, Economic Development, and Military Coups D'Etat in Latin America and Asia

Abstract

Readers interested in civil-military relations as an aspect of peace research will recall articles in this journal by Egil Fossum and Alaor S. Passos. Fossum 'Factors Influencing the Occurrence of Military Coups d'Etat in Latin America' Vol. 4, No, 3 (1967), pp. 228-251) found that military coups were relatively frequent in Latin American countries which ranked low on measures of what he termed social complexity. My own work on civilmilitary relations (in preparation in a book tentatively entitled Soldiers and politics in Southeast Asia: cases and comparisons) led me to replicate Fossum's analysis using data from sixteen Asian nations. The definition of military coups d'etat was broadened to include all major disturbances of a nation's constitutional and political order caused by or associated with unorthodox behavior of that nation's military officers. In the relatively short time span surveyed from World War II or date of independence to the present only 27 such were recorded in Asia, compared with 105 coups listed for Latin America during the period 1907-1966. As did Fossum, I dichotomized the list of nations according to ordinal rankings on each social complexity indicator and calculated the percentage of total coups that ocurred in each half. Table I summarizes the percentages, first for Latin America, then for Asia. Two observations are worth noting. First, all of the Asian percentages save one are above 50 %, as are those of Latin America. This pattern suggests an association between low social complexity and high frequency of military coups in both regions. Second, the association appears to be strongTable I. Percentage of military coups in Latin American and Asian countries ranking low on social complexity indicators