Strategies of Dictatorship and Military Disloyalty during Anti-Authoritarian Protests: Explaining Defections and Coups

Abstract

AbstractMilitaries often respond to major anti-authoritarian protests with disloyalty. While militaries may defect, refusing to support the dictator, they may also seize power. Defections and coups are distinct forms of disloyalty with important implications for regime change and democratization. The existing scholarship on defections tends to aggregate them, while that on coups does not explain why, during protests, a military seizes power rather than defects. In this article, I draw on these bodies of work as well as new research on autocratic civil–military relations to argue that the strategies dictators use vis-à-vis their militaries to consolidate and secure their personal power affect military disposition and ability for disloyalty in different ways that matter for the likelihood of the two behaviors. Dictators who civilianize their regimes undermine their power-sharing agreements with the military, increasing the likelihood of coups. Dictators who personalize their security apparatuses generate military grievances, including by causing divisions, which reduces the ability of militaries to seize power and increases the likelihood of defections. I find support for this argument—for the relationship between dictator strategies and forms of military disloyalty during protests—using statistical analysis and case studies of civilianization and a 1991 coup during protests in Mali and personal control and a 1990 defection during protests in Benin.