Armed forces and airwaves: media control and military coups in autocracies

ABSTRACT

Media play a key role in military coups. Yet, there is little research on information environments and coups. Therefore, this article asks whether the extent of media control affects coup attempts and coup success in dictatorships. It argues that autocracies with extensive media control offer an opaque decision environment for plotters, thus decreasing the likelihood of coup attempts. On the outcome stage, extensive media control is expected to lower the prospects of success as conspirators struggle to control public information. Additionally, coups are disaggregated, arguing that the effect of media control varies between regime change and leader reshuffling coups. The arguments are tested by employing regression analyses. As expected, strong media control renders coup attempts and success less likely. While I do not find robust evidence for a varying effect of media control on different types of coup attempts, its influence on coup success is driven by regime change coups.

KEYWORDS:

• Media
• civil-military-relations
• autocracy
• coups
• military

Acknowledgement

I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful, constructive comments and the editorial team of Contemporary Politics for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author.

Notes

1 I use the term dictatorship, autocracy, and non-democracy interchangeably.

2 Boleslavsky and coauthors (2021), for instance, develop a formal model dealing with media freedom and coups.

3 I take up Singh’s general idea that characteristics of the media/information environment might be related to coup outcomes. In contrast to Singh, however, I do not focus on media monopolisation/liberalisation as, to my knowledge, global data on this topic are still not available for extended time periods. For this reason, I develop own arguments that are based on his basic idea that the information environment is relevant for coup outcomes.

4 Singh’s ideas suggest that monopolised media can be conductive to a coup’s success as monopolisation facilitates to take control over public information once the media outlets have been conquered. A possible counter-argument could be that highly monopolised media in the hands of an autocratic regime bear a high risk of failure for coup plotters. While it is surely right that controlling information is easier once a highly monopolised information environment is brought under control, it may be particularly challenging for coup plotters to conquer a media landscape, where the autocratic regime holds a media monopoly. Therefore, coup success could also be less likely in the most monopolised information environments. Based on this reasoning, I test whether extensive control of the regime over the media is associated with a higher probability of coup failure.

5 Geddes and coauthors (2014) only provide data for independent countries with a population of at least one million.

6 The levels of the ordinal scale of the government censorship variable are: (0) direct and routine attempts, (1) indirect but nevertheless routine attempts; (2) direct attempts but limited to especially sensitive issues; (3) indirect attempts limited to especially sensitive issues, and (4) rare attempts (see in detail Coppedge et al., 2022b, p. 202).

7 All models including the protest variable only comprise years until 2007 for reasons of data availability.

8 Exceptions are the indicator for military regime and Cold War.

9 For models on regime change coups and reshuffling coups, I integrate variables measuring the time since the last regime change/reshuffling coup and associated time polynomials.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tanja Eschenauer-Engler

Tanja Eschenauer-Engler is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Political Science at Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on the political role of the military and military reactions to mass mobilization in autocratic regimes.