Anti-populist coups d’état in the twenty-first century: reasons, dynamics and consequences

Abstract

There is a burgeoning literature on how to deal with populism in advanced liberal democracies, which puts a strong emphasis on legalist and pluralist methods. There is also a new and expanding literature that looks at the consequences of coups d’état for democracies by employing large-N data sets. These two recent literatures, however, do not speak to one another, based on the underlying assumption that coups against populists were a distinctly twentieth-century Latin American phenomenon. Yet the cases of Venezuela in 2002, Thailand in 2006 and Turkey in 2016 show that anti-populist coups have also occurred in the twenty-first century. Focussing on these cases, the article enquires about the extent to which military coups succeed against populists. The main finding is that although anti-populist coups may initially take over the government, populism survives in the long run. Thus, anti-populist coups fail in their own terms and they do not succeed in eradicating populism. In fact, in the aftermath of a coup, populism gains further legitimacy against what it calls repressive elites, while possibilities for democratisation are further eroded. This is because populists tap into existing socio-cultural divides and politically mobilise the hitherto underrepresented sectors in their societies that endure military interventions.

Keywords:

• Venezuela
• Turkey
• Thailand
• civil–military relations
• populism

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their several rounds of review and constructive feedback to improve this article’s methodology and contribution to the literature.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Toygar Sinan Baykan

Toygar Sinan Baykan is an Assistant Professor of politics at Kirklareli University, Turkey. He attended the Middle East Technical University and Universiteit Leiden for his postgraduate studies and has a master’s degree in comparative politics from the LSE. He received his PhD in politics from the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Justice and Development Party in Turkey: Populism, Personalism, Organisation (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and his reviews have appeared in Party Politics, Political Studies Review and Mediterranean Politics. His research interests include party politics, comparative politics, Turkish politics and populism.

Yaprak Gürsoy

Yaprak Gürsoy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Aston University and a research associate at the Centre for International Studies at the University of Oxford. After completing her PhD in politics at the University of Virginia in 2008, she has worked on regime change and consolidation, democratisation, civil–military relations and coups d’état. She is the author of Between Military Rule and Democracy: Regime Consolidation in Greece, Turkey, and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2017) and The Transformation of Civil–Military Relations in Turkey (Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2012; in Turkish). She has published numerous book chapters, and more than 10 peer-reviewed articles in prominent journals such as Democratisation, Political Science Quarterly, South European Society and Politics, Turkish Politics, Journal of Modern Greek Studies and the Journal of Contemporary Asia. She has been the co-convenor of the Political Studies Association (PSA) Turkish Politics Specialist Group since 2018.

Pierre Ostiguy

Pierre Ostiguy is a Professor of politics at Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile. He received his PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and specialises in Latin American politics, populism and social theory. He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford University Press, 2017), Populism in Global Perspective: A Performative and Discursive Approach (Routledge, 2021). His most recent article, published with Ken Roberts, is entitled ‘Putting Trump in Comparative Perspective: Populism and the Politicization of the Sociocultural Low’. He co-authored ‘The Politics of Incorporation: Party Systems, Political Leaders and the State in Argentina and Brazil’, published in Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). He has taught in Argentina, the US and Canada, and has authored publications in Spanish, English and French.