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ABSTRACT
What is the relation between coups d’etat and civil wars? While a wide set of studies have traced the determinants of internal armed conflicts and coup attempts, the interplay between these contentious processes remains unexplored. Building on different strands of research, this article seeks to explain why, and under what conditions, some regimes experience coup attempts in the midst of civil wars while others do not. Concretely, I posit that coup attempts during internal armed conflicts are more likely to occur when two conditions converge: when insurgents reach a medium-level of strength in situations of intra-elite competition. Key military forces, elite outsiders and coalition insiders interpret this situation as a unique opportunity for changes in the distribution of power and potentially coalesce through the formation of alternative regime coalitions. This argument is tested with a novel dataset on 90 Latin American revolutionary socialist insurgencies active since 1950 and a qualitative case study of the dynamics leading to the 1976 coup d’etat in Argentina, with results supporting the theoretical expectations. These findings contribute to a more detailed understanding of the relation between coups and civil wars, opening the way for further studies on this burgeoning area of research.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Stathis Kalyvas, Andrea Ruggeri, Luis de la Calle, Benoit Siberdt, Luis Schenoni, Joaquín Artés, Klaudia Wegschaider, Raquel Chantó, Sandra León, Inés Pina, members of the T.E. Lawrence Program on the Study of Conflict, and participants in the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, the Conflict and Change Workshop at UCL, the Council for European Studies Annual Conference and the Carlos III Juan March Institute Conference for their feedback. I also thank the editor of Democratization and two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Bell and Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes.”
2 Roessler, Ethnic Politics.
3 Wood, Forging Democracy from Below.
4 Johnson and Thyne, “Squeaky Wheels.”
5 Casper and Tyson, “Popular Protest and Elite Coordination.”
6 Slater, Ordering Power.
7 Paine, “The Dictator's Power-Sharing Dilemma.”
8 de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival.
9 Boix, Democracy and Redistribution; Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic origins.
10 Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins, 15.
11 de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival, 7.
12 de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival, 51. The concept of selectorate is defined as “the set of people whose endowments include the qualities or characteristics institutionally required to choose the government´s leadership and necessary for gaining access to private benefits doled out by the government´s leadership” (Ibid., 42).
13 Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule, 6.
14 The concept of ruling coalition reflects the agreement between the incumbent and the actors that endow it with political power, the winning coalition.
15 The core actors that form the winning coalition are coalition insiders and key military players.
16 Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution, 33.
17 Heger and Salehyan, “Ruthless Rulers,” 387.
18 Kim and Sudduth, “Political Institutions and Coups,” 7.
19 Staniland, Networks of Rebellion, 5.
20 See Pérez-Liñán and Polga-Hecimovich, “Explaining Military Coups.”
21 Higley and Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation, 10–13.
22 Slater, Ordering Power.
23 Powell, “Determinants of the Attempting.”
24 Higley and Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation, 13.
25 Future studies should deepen into the impact on this relation of size of the winning coalition. See Table A30 in the Appendix.
26 Higley and Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation, 11.
27 Singh, Seizing Power.
28 Bell and Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes,” 1435–7.
29 de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival, 8.
30 Though insurgent strength is certainly a linear variable, I distinguish between three ideal categories. See Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan, “Non-State Actors.”
31 Lewis, How Insurgency Begins.
32 Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.
33 Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule, 125–9.
34 Della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence.
35 Wood, Insurgent Collective Action.
36 Roessler, Ethnic Politics; Sudduth, “Coup-Proofing.”
37 Casper and Tyson, “Popular Protest and Elite Coordination.”
38 Lewis, How Insurgency Begins.
39 Arjona, Rebelocracy.
40 Leventoglu and Metternich, “Born Weak, Growing Strong.”
41 Two mechanisms could explain elite convergence: the instrumental exploitation of the presence of a subversive force; and the fear of successful revolution.
42 Powell, “Determinants of the Attempting,” 1019.
43 Bell and Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes,”1436.
44 Nilsson, “Turning Weakness into Strength”; Clayton, “Relative Rebel Strength.”
45 Wood, Forging Democracy From Below.
46 Leventoglu and Metternich, “Born Weak, Growing Strong.”
47 An alternative mechanism could be that coup plotters face a credible threat of countercoups by insurgents and other forces.
48 Balcells and Kalyvas, Revolution in Civil War, 5.
49 Among others, the Center for Systemic Peace dataset on coups d’etat (Marshall and Marshall, Coup D’état Events), the database on Latin American coups from Lehoucq and Pérez Liñán (“Breaking Out of the Coup Trap”) or the Dataset on Global Instances of Coups (Powell and Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups”).
50 Powell and Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups,” 252.
51 This is similar to the percentage of coups during civil war found in prior studies.
52 Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution.
53 Ibid., 148–9.
54 See Subsection C3 in the Appendix.
55 Wood, Forging Democracy from Below.
56 Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan, “It Takes Two.”
57 Clayton, “Relative Rebel Strength.”
58 Leventoglu and Metternich, “Born Weak, Growing Strong.”
59 Holtermann, “Relative Capacity.”
60 Kreiman 2023.
61 Clayton, “Relative Strength,” 611.
62 Bell and Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes,”1442.
63 Maddison Project Database.
64 Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency.”
65 Ibid.
66 Higley and Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation; Roessler, Ethnic Politics.
67 Leventoglu & Metternich, “Born Weak, Growing Strong”; Paine, “The Dictator's Power-Sharing Dilemma.”
68 Bell and Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes.”
69 Stanley, The Protection Racket State.
70 Romero, Breve historia contemporánea de la Argentina.
71 Gudat, La insurrección anhelada.
72 Data comes from the Banks CNTS Dataset.
73 Gläßel, González, and Scharpf, “Grist to the Mill of Subversion.”
74 Powell, “Determinants of the Attempting”; Johnson and Thyne, “Squeaky Wheels.”
75 Table A29 of the Appendix shows an analysis of the determinants of coups in non-war periods.
76 Stanley, The Protection Racket State, 148–9.
77 Higley and Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation, 10–11.
78 This complements the theory of bureaucratic-authoritarianism, specifying how and under what conditions the level of threat of the activation of the popular sector could lead to the implementation of a bureaucratic-authoritarian state (O´Donnell, “Reflections”).
79 The other rebel forces active were either short-lived or absorbed by these groups.
80 Moyano, Argentina’s Lost Patrol, 90.
81 Alianza Anticomunista Argentina.
82 de Riz, 54.
83 This polarization had a direct impact on the preferences of civilians.
84 Verbitsky and Bohoslavsky, The Economic Accomplices.
85 This also includes actors as the Church.
86 APEGE, “Declaración de la APEGE”; Cited in Wermus, 231.
87 Schorr, “Industrial Economic Power,” 237–9.
88 Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals, 124.
89 Ibid., 124.
90 Franco, Un enemigo para la nación, 144.
91 Muleiro, 1976: El golpe civil, 21.
92 Romero, Breve historia contemporánea de la Argentina, 21.
93 Schorr, “Industrial Economic Power,” 235.
94 Rapoport and Zaiat, “The Complicity of Agricultural Business Chambers.”
Additional information
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Guillermo Kreiman
Guillermo Kreiman postdoctoral researcher at Carlos III University (Madrid), works on political violence, political philosophy and comparative political economy. He has published, or will publish soon, articles in journals such as Latin American Politics and Society, the Journal of Peace Research, or Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, among others. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Oxford.