Coup Risk Research Articles

Grist to the mill of subversion: strikes and coups in counterinsurgencies

Why are acts of organized resistance associated with coups? Inspired by the Arab Spring, a large literature suggests that militaries confronted with civil resistance tend to side with protesters and oust their government. In the historically most coup-prone environment of insurgencies, however, alliances between the military and protesters are implausible because soldiers suspect insurgents behind social dissent. Disentangling different types of resistance, this article analyzes whether and how strikes, demonstrations, riots, and guerrilla attacks affect the military’s disposition and ability to stage a coup during counterinsurgencies. We argue that only strikes trigger coup attempts. Soldiers interpret strikes as manifestations of a strengthening subversive enemy that threatens their victory over insurgents, while economic elites support a coup in the hope that the military will terminate costly walkouts. This interest alignment fosters military takeovers. We provide case-study evidence from Cold War Argentina and Venezuela to show our suggested mechanism at work. Demonstrating the scope of our argument, we quantitatively analyze coup attempts in counterinsurgency worldwide (1950–2005). Results show that strikes increase wartime coup risk, whereas demonstrations, riots, and guerrilla attacks do not. The findings highlight the backfiring potential of nonviolent resistance with important implications for post-coup political orders and democratization prospects.

Avoiding the Coup-Proofing Dilemma: Consolidating Political Control While Maximizing Military Power

AbstractCivil-military relations scholarship forecasts that governments fearing coups d’état and facing belligerent external and internal adversaries face a dilemma. Governments can coup-proof to reduce coup risk, but such measures reduce military effectiveness. Conversely, if they eschew coup-proofing to maintain military effectiveness, they risk coups. This paper explains how governments facing coup threats and belligerent adversaries can alleviate this dilemma. It first describes five coup-proofing measures that generally reduce military effectiveness, such as politicized promotion and reduced training, and two other coup-proofing measures that do not reduce effectiveness, bribery and indoctrination. Because leaders can pick and choose which coup-proofing measures to employ, leaders facing coup and belligerent adversary threats can reduce the coup-proofing dilemma by adopting those coup-proofing measures that do not reduce effectiveness and avoiding those measures that reduce effectiveness, within availability and dependence constraints. The paper presents a case study of coup-proofing in Nazi Germany, a deviant case for coup-proofing theory and democratic victory theory because Adolf Hitler avoided being overthrown in a coup and fielded an effective military. The case study demonstrates support for the theory that a leader can simultaneously reduce coup risk and optimize military effectiveness by employing some coup-proofing tactics but not others.

The Two-sided Effect of Elections on Coup Attempts

In this article, we investigate the relationship between elections and coup attempts. We argue that elections have opposing effects on the risk of coup attempts, depending on the state of the economy in which they are held. Elections occurring in conditions of economic crisis spur anti-government mobilization and high levels of state repression. This increases the subsequent risk of coup attempts. Conversely, elections held during economic expansion induce pro-government mobilization and waning repression, which reduces the subsequent risk of coups. We find strong support for these propositions in a statistical analysis of 130 countries that conducted contested elections in the period 1952 to 2013. The results are robust to an array of model specifications, including when we account for election outcome, postelection economic performance, and the possibility that both elections and economic performance are endogenous to coup attempts.

Power-Sharing Coalitions and Ethnic Armed Conflict

How do multiethnic coalitions affect the risk of violent conflict? We argue that government leaders form larger ruling coalitions as the uncertainty over violent threats from radical sub-groups increases. We formalize this argument in a novel multi-actor model. Our game-theoretic approach illustrates how power-maximizing government leaders reduce the risk of rebellion by sharing power with radical subgroup leaders, while only slightly increasing the risk of coups. Empirically, we rely on a novel selection estimator and data on ethnic coalitions to investigate the predictions from our theoretical model. Our findings show that the conflict-reducing effect of power sharing increases once we consider the endogeneity of coalition formation and conflict. Our results also demonstrate that power-sharing coalitions are most effective when including radical sub-groups. Our study has important implications for research on coalition formation, authoritarian politics, and armed conflict.

Pulling the Strings? The Strategic Use of Pro-Government Mobilization in Authoritarian Regimes

Protest against authoritarian rule is a well-studied phenomenon in the social sciences, but mass rallies in favor of authoritarian regimes have received only limited scholarly attention. While previous work has portrayed authoritarian regimes as characterized by mass apathy and political demobilization, we show that this is only partially true today. We argue that autocrats mobilize their supporters selectively as a strategic response to political threats. Rallies increase collective action costs for rivaling elites, opposition movements, and bystanders because they signal regime strength (deterrence) and curb mobilization efforts against the regime (repression). Nevertheless, the mobilization of supporters is costly, as autocrats have only imperfect information about current levels of support, rallies require organizational capacity and clashes between supporters and opponents can get out of control. Drawing on the first global data set with information about pro-government rally events in all authoritarian regimes from 2003 to 2015, our quantitative analysis reveals systematic patterns in the occurrence of rallies in line with our theoretical framework. We find systematic increases in pro-government mobilization during episodes of large domestic and regional opposition mobilization, high coup risk, and prior to elections.

Pitfalls of Professionalism? Military Academies and Coup Risk

Military academies tend to be strongly linked to the professionalization of the armed forces. This explains why many countries in the world have created such institutions. The following article studies a potential negative externality stemming from military schools: increased coup risk. We argue that military academies may create, inculcate, and strengthen cohesive views that could conflict with incumbent policies, and that these schools establish networks among military officers that may facilitate coordination necessary for plotting a putsch. We also contend and empirically demonstrate that these negative side effects of military academies are in particular pronounced in nondemocracies, that is, military academies have diverse effects across regime types. This work has significant implications for our understanding civil–military relations. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature on military education and professionalization, as we suggest that military academies are important vehicles through which coups can emerge predominantly in authoritarian states.

석유무역이 쿠데타 발발에 미치는 영향

기존 연구들은 석유가 정권획득의 가치를 증가시키기 때문에 쿠데타위험을 증가시킨다고 주장했다. 그러나, 적도기니의 정치 안정화 사례는 석유수출이 석유수출국 정부에 대한 석유수입국의 지지를 이끌어 내기 때문에 쿠데타위험이 감소할 수 있음을 보여준다. 석유의 쿠데타 위험에 대한 이 두 가지 대조적인 영향력을 분석하기 위해, 본 연구는 어떻게 석유수출이 쿠데타위험을 줄이는지에 대한 이론을 국제석유시장의 특성을 통해 제시한다. 국제석유시장에서 대부분의 국가는 석유를 핵심 에너지 자원으로서 필요로 하지만 매우 적은 수의 국가만 석유수출을 하고 있다. 이는 만약 석유 생산 및 수출 시설을 파괴할 수 있는 쿠데타가 석유수출국에서 발발하게 되면, 석유수입국의 경제에 악영향을 미칠 수 있음을 의미한다. 따라서 석유수입국은 석유수출국에서의 쿠데타위험을 줄이기 위해 석유수출국 정부를 지지하는 경향이 있으며, 이는 쿠데타를 계획하려는 행위자의 쿠데타 성공 기대확률을 낮춰 쿠데타 발발확률을 감소시킨다.

International Conflict, International Security Environment, and Military Coups

ABSTRACTWhy do some countries repeatedly experience military coups while others seem immune? Are countries more prone to military coups when faced with external threats? The answers to these questions still remain contested: While several scholars hold that countries facing external threats are more vulnerable to coups, others argue that such countries are actually more secure from coups. I argue that by failing to distinguish between immediate and acute threats, caused by wars and militarized conflicts, and chronic threats from a state’s international security environment, the existing literature ignores the possibility that these two types of external threats differently affect the likelihood of coups. I propose that wars and militarized conflicts, infrequent and often short lived, decrease coup propensity, while a threatening security environment increases coup risk. I find strong supporting evidence that the presence of chronic international threats increases the likelihood of coups while acute international conflicts lower that likelihood.

Self-Enforcing Power Sharing in Weak States

AbstractPower sharing, in which elites from rival societal groups agree to share control of the central government, is a key source of domestic peace, enabling states to escape devastating cycles of exclusion and civil war. Yet the conditions giving rise to inclusive governance are not well understood. In contrast to existing scholarship that emphasizes the importance of external third-party mediation or strong formal institutions, we point to the structural roots of power sharing in which political inclusion stems from the distribution of societal power and the balance of threat capabilities it produces. Only when both the ruling group and a given rival group possess strong mobilizational capabilities, such that each could credibly threaten to recapture state power if excluded from the central government, does self-enforcing power sharing emerge. A strong rival induces the ruler to commit to power sharing and to reluctantly accept coup risk over civil war risk. The ruling group's own threat capabilities, in turn, constrain rivals from trying to convert their share of power into absolute power. Supported by extensive quantitative and qualitative evidence with particular reference to weak states in sub-Saharan Africa, we shed light on the conditions under which the distribution of violence within a state underwrites a peaceful and productive equilibrium. In doing so, we rethink how scholars approach the study of civil war. Rather than conceiving of it in terms of effective resistance, we model civil war as a contest for state power shaped by groups’ capabilities to project force in the capital.

Leader Survival Strategies and the Onset of Civil Conflict: A Coup-Proofing Paradox

It is paradoxical that authoritarian leaders often hold power for long periods of time, despite their states being plagued with rebellion. Scholarship has argued the practice of coup-proofing is potentially responsible for this trend. However, though regular armed forces are often allowed to whither when coup-proofing, states often retain substantial capabilities in the form of well-armed and well-trained coup-proofing units. This article argues that coup-proofing is more likely to contribute to rebellion when leaders are hesitant to deploy their coup-proofing units: when coup risk is high. Using a global sample of authoritarian regimes for the years 1971–2011, tests indicate that heavily coup-proofed regimes do in fact see a considerable increase in civil war likelihood when the risk of a coup is high but see no change in conflict propensity when coup risk is low.

The Politics of Preferential Trade Liberalization in Authoritarian Countries

ABSTRACTWhile autocracies constitute a third of all signatories of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), very little research has explained why some autocrats join PTAs while others do not. We argue that this variation reflects the leader’s degree of vulnerability to elite-led coups during leadership change–whether a leader enters power legally or extralegally. New extralegal leaders are more vulnerable than new legal leaders, which encourages extralegal leaders to use PTAs to both build support from exporters and pressure disloyal importers. We test our hypotheses using a dyadic data set of 120 autocracies from 1960 to 2014. Our results show that extralegal leaders sign more and deeper PTAs than legal leaders. Moreover, we find that extralegal leaders with a high risk of coups are more likely to form deep PTAs than extralegal leaders with a low risk of coups. In line with our argument, we also provide evidence that extralegal leaders sign trade agreements that are likely to be enforced. Our article has implications for the political economy of trade and for development studies.

Rethinking Coup Risk

Military interventions continue to be prevalent in Africa. In the 21st century alone, 14 coups have been successfully staged. Whereas most studies of coup risk examine how militaries are organized or what structural conditions are associated with coups, we take a novel approach. We explore how coalition politics relate to coup risk. It has long been observed that regimes try to hold power by buying off urban consumers. We argue that focusing on urban consumers actually makes regimes more prone to military intervention. Instead, leaders who ally with established rural elites are more effective at thwarting coups. To test our hypothesis, we develop a unique data set of rural political strategies, coding regimes in 44 sub-Saharan countries from 1960 to 2000. Using a continuous-time Cox proportional hazards regression model, we find a robust correlation between policies supportive of rural elites and lower coup risk.

Right “Man” for the Job? The Influence of Gender on Civil–Military Friction

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of women in politics on the risk of a coup d’état. Previous research indicates that the relationship between female political leaders and security is dependent on the office she holds. Subsequently, we expect female legislators to have a different influence than a female chief executive on the likelihood of a coup. We argue that a higher level of female representation reduces the risk of a coup d’état. However, we assert that a female chief executive has a different effect and increases coup risk. Using data covering 160 states over the years 1952 to 2009, our empirical tests provide support for our expectations. All else being equal, increased levels of women in parliament lead to a substantial drop in coup likelihood. However, the argument that a female chief executive will be more coup prone is not fully supported in our findings.

Investing in Violence: Foreign Direct Investment and Coups in Authoritarian Regimes

Why do foreign investors invest in authoritarian regimes despite higher political risks? In this paper, I evaluate the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI), coups, and political risk. I develop a formal model of leadership dynamics in authoritarian regimes and examine how the initial investment decision by foreign investors is affected by expected likelihood of coups. Using the formal model, I discriminate between diverging predictions made by the “greed” and “patronage” models of authoritarian regime dynamics. Accounting for both the “greed” and “patronage” mechanisms, I demonstrate that patronage effects predominate and that increasing FDI reduces the risk of a coup. Investors are more likely to send larger FDI amounts to authoritarian states when coup risk is high to increase the likelihood of a peaceful patronage equilibrium. Using a large-n test, I find that FDI reduces the likelihood of coups, while higher coup risk is associated with increased FDI in less mobile sectors.

Regime Instability, Leader's Affiliation, and Organizational Culture: Why Are Military Dictatorships More Likely to Initiate Militarized Interstate Disputes? An Empirical Analysis, 1975–2006

ABSTRACTPrior studies find that military dictatorships display a high propensity to initiate militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). Yet, there is little agreement on which feature of military regimes can best explain this behavior. This article distinguishes between three potential causes: coup risk, the dictator's affiliation with the military, and the military's influence on politics. Using recent data on authoritarian regimes, I find that, whereas coup risk is a strong predictor of conflict initiation, the dictator's affiliation does not affect his foreign policy. Furthermore, I find tentative evidence that the military's influence on domestic politics has a negative effect on MID initiation. These findings thus challenge the view that military regimes' foreign policy is due to the military's organizational culture: the relationship between military regimes and dispute initiation seems to be due to factors that simply happen to add up in military autocracies but are essentially unrelated to regime type.

Strategic Logic of Elite Purges in Dictatorships

Why do some leaders eliminate rivals from authoritarian regimes and therefore diminish elites’ capabilities to remove them via coup, while others do not? By examining both dictators’ incentives and opportunities to weaken regime elites, I show that dictators are more likely to eliminate rivals when elites’ capabilities to oust dictators are temporarily low. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, my theory predicts that dictators are more likely to weaken elites’ capabilities as the threat of coup decreases rather than when coup risk is high. Furthermore, I argue that successful coups that put new dictators in power temporarily diminish elites’ capabilities to remove dictators and, thus, provide a window of opportunity for the dictators to take steps to consolidate power. Empirical results using a new dataset on purges of militaries from 1969 to 2003 provide strong evidence for my hypotheses.

Coup risk, coup-proofing and leader survival

Under what conditions do political leaders enact ‘coup-proofing’ strategies? There is a broad consensus in the literature that political leaders who face a higher risk of a coup will employ coup-proofing strategies that reduce the military’s capabilities to organize a coup. A closer look at the theory and empirical analyses of earlier studies, however, suggests that the presumed relationship between coup risk and coup-proofing should be re-examined. Drawing on insights from formal studies of authoritarian power-sharing, this article proposes that political leaders become less likely to initiate coup-proofing efforts as the coup risk increases. The reason is that leaders’ coup-proofing actions in themselves could prompt the military to launch a coup and thus political leaders will hesitate to offend officers when they face a high risk of a coup. The statistical models in this article estimate a latent coup risk by aggregating multiple indicators that capture the military’s willingness and ability to organize a coup. The empirical results strongly support the proposition that coup-proofing efforts taken by leaders decrease as coup risk increases.

When War Helps Civil–military Relations

Coups remain a widespread and consequential political phenomenon, but it remains unclear whether interstate conflict protects leaders from the risk of coups or increases this risk. We theorize that interstate conflict—especially when it is prolonged—should protect domestic regimes from military overthrow by foreclosing many of the key pathways by which elites plot and execute coups. We test this argument using event history modeling. The evidence provides support for our claim that coup risk declines in the presence of enduring interstate conflict. Just as important, we detect no evidence that war increases coup risk.

Elite Co-optation, Repression, and Coups in Autocracies

This article provides an explanation for the significant variation in coups in autocracies. The existing theoretical literature focuses on the strategies that leaders use to thwart mass mobilization and survive in power. However, most autocratic leaders lose power through a coup, indicating that the main threats to political survival in autocracies emerge from insiders and not from outside the incumbent coalition. This article focuses on leaders’ strategies to mitigate elite threats and argues that autocrats’ strategies of co-optation and repression within the ruling elite and the armed forces affect the risk of coups in opposite ways. Elected authoritarian legislatures are instruments that leaders employ to co-opt members of the incumbent coalition and are expected to decrease the likelihood of coups. In contrast, purges of insider actors constitute a repressive strategy that depletes bases of support and increases the risk of coups. We find empirical support for these hypotheses from a sample of all authoritarian regimes from 1950 to 2004.

The Impact of Institutional Coup-Proofing on Coup Attempts and Coup Outcomes

Coup-proofing pertains to political leaders’ strategies that will prevent groups inside or outside the state apparatus from seizing power via a coup d’état. One particular form of these strategies divides a country’s military into rivaling organizations, thereby creating an artificial balance between and structural obstacles for the armed forces. Despite the general claim that this institutional coup-proofing is indeed effective, a recent empirical study does not obtain evidence for a negative impact on the risk of coup attempts or coup outcomes. The authors take this finding as a motivation for their re-evaluation of the effect of institutional coup-proofing on coup risk and outcomes. By developing an argument that rests on the concepts of collective action and polarization, it is contended that institutional coup-proofing and coups are characterized by a U-shaped relationship: Institutional coup-proofing is likely to lower the likelihood of coup onsets and successful outcomes, yet only until a tipping point of about two equally strong military organizations. After this turning point, the risk of coup onset as well as coup success may increase again. Using time-series cross-section data for 1975–1999, the authors find strong and robust support for their claims in terms of coup onset, but not coup outcomes.