Elite Co-optation, Repression, and Coups in Autocracies

Abstract

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.

KEYWORDS:

• autocratic regimes
• coups
• elite co-optation
• elite repression
• survival strategies

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are listed in alphabetical order on the title page of this article; equal authorship is implied. A previous version of this manuscript was presented at the 2013 annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, and the 2013 annual conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL. We are grateful to Tobias Böhmelt, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Pat James, Bethany Lacina, Petros Sekeris, Bárbara Zárate, three anonymous reviewers, and the editor, Michael Colaresi, for very helpful comments and suggestions. Vincenzo Bove acknowledges the support of the British Academy.

Notes

¹ We calculated these figures using data from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (2014) and Goemans et al. (2009).

² Other arguments suggest that repression against opposition may lead to conflict escalation and trigger the use of violent methods by the opposition (Lichbach 1987; Moore 1998).

³ Wright (2008) suggests that legislatures serve different purposes, depending on the regime type. Whereas leaders in military and single-party regimes build legislatures as a credible constraint on the leader’s confiscatory power, monarchies and personal dictators use legislatures to “split and pay off” potential opposition.

⁴ We use him/his here consistently instead of gender-neutral language as dictators tend to be men.

⁵ It is important to note that foreign actors play a minor role in these instances. As Goemans et al. (2009:273) note, “We do not code cases where another country is perceived or known to have orchestrated the removal of a leader through a coup carried out by domestic forces (for example, Allende in Chile or Mossadeq in Iran) as foreign removal, but simply as an irregular loss of office.”

⁶ To be clear, a “closed legislature” indicates that no legislature exists and “includes cases in which there is a constituent assembly without ordinary legislative powers.” An “appointed” or nonelective legislature refers to cases where “the selection of legislators by the effective executive, or on the basis of heredity or ascription.” Finally, “elected legislatures” refer to cases where “legislators, or members of the lower house in a bicameral system, are selected by means of either direct or indirect popular election” (see Cheibub et al.’s [2010] codebook).

⁷ Political leaders under authoritarianism often provide private benefits among insiders to reduce the probability of elite conflict, that is, monetary rewards, luxury cars, mansions, Swiss bank accounts, etc. (see, for example, Gandhi and Przeworski 2007; Wintrobe 1990).

⁸ General strikes are defined as any strike of 1,000 or more industrial or service workers that involves more than one employer and that is aimed at national government policies or authority. Antigovernment demonstrations account for any peaceful public gathering of at least 100 people for the primary purpose of displaying or voicing their opposition to government policies or authority, excluding demonstrations of a distinctly anti-foreign nature. Riots refer to any violent demonstration or clash of more than 100 citizens involving the use of physical force.

⁹ Following Chamberlain et al. (1984), the correlation between the random intercept α_i and the observed characteristics x_it can be allowed by assuming a relationship of the form with α_i independent of . The unobserved heterogeneity is divided into within and between components, which weakens the assumption that random effects must be uncorrelated with the covariates. In fact, by controlling for the means of the covariates, we remove by construction the correlation between the covariates and the random effect and hence restore the validity of the random effect estimation (Mundlak 1978). See Gupte, Justino, and Tranchant (2014) for a recent application.

¹⁰ We have also replicated Table 1 using a restricted sample including only those countries that have experienced at least one coup over the period 1950–2004. Results are robust to this restriction and are available upon request.

¹¹ These results are available on Dataverse (http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5BOJQQ).

¹² We observe this in 18% of the total number of coups.