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ABSTRACT
This article examines Egyptian military behaviour in 2011 and 2013 to address the question of why officers remain in power following some successful coups, and allow for a transition to civilian rule after others. My evidence suggests that in post-1970 cases where international factors fail to exert sufficient pressure, outcome variation is influenced by levels of corporate opportunity, defined here as the ease with which the army can use control of the state to expand its corporate interests. Drawing on the existing literature, I posit consensus against military rule, high popular support for democracy, strong civil society, the presence of a strong opposition party, and low levels of cohesion among officers as factors which constrain opportunity. Prior research suggests that when the level of opportunity is high, controlling the state becomes a high-risk/low-reward endeavour, making it likely that officers will allow for a transition to civilian rule. My study contributes to the existing scholarship by using original data gathered through interviews with Egyptian officers, as well as other experts on the Egyptian military, to argue that low consensus against military rule, low support for democracy, and high organizational cohesion are jointly sufficient to produce governing intervention.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Nancy Masood, Michael Bernhard, Sebastian Elischer, Jeffrey Hoyle, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. The author would also like to thank all those interviewed for this project for their generosity and time.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The event of 2011 is operationalized as a coup because it meets Thyne and Powell’s (2011) definition of a coup as an “illegal and overt attempt by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive” (252).
2. While it would be misleading to characterize the current government as a military regime, Sisi is deeply connected to the military, and has allowed officers a large degree of control over state affairs.
3. Finer, The Man on Horseback; Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics.
4. Hoffman, “Temporary Democracy in Pakistan.”
5. Kuehn, “Democratization and Civilian Control.”
6. My adoption of a corporatist approach is not intended as a refutation of scholars such as Bou Nassif who suggest that officers’ perceptions of the Brotherhood as an “ideological nemesis” were part of the coup calculous in 2013. That being said, Geddes, Franz, and Wright’s finding that officers frequently negotiate a return to the barracks when governing begins to jeopardize their corporate interests leads me to suggest that Egyptian officers would have likely allowed for civilian rule if governing interventions were too costly. Whether or not the effect of ideational factors on post-coup outcomes is stronger in cases where ideological concerns are particularly salient (that is, coups in colonial settings) falls outside the scope of this article.
7. Thompson, “Corporate Coup-Maker Grievances,” 488.
8. Finer, Man on Horseback.
9. Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics.
10. Powell, “Determinants of Coups”; Powell, “Give Them Toys.”
11. This date follows the work of (among others) Ahmed and Capoccia, “Democratization and the Arab Spring,” which suggests that post-1970 transitional cases have occurred “in contexts where the structural factors emphasized by previous literature were not always present,” 4.
12. In cases where linkage and/or leverage are high this could theoretically create a situation in which international factors have a particularly strong effect on the outcome. Where linkage and/or leverage levels are moderate, I contend that my theory can work in conjunction with international explanations (see Thyne et al.).
13. Similar to Levitsky and Way, “Beyond Patronage,” I posit my hypothesis test as a test of my theory’s initial plausibility, not as proof of its range.
14. Thyne and Powell, “Coup D’état Or Coup D’Autocracy?” 197.
15. Croissant, “Coup and Post-Coup Politics,” 276.
16. Bou Nassif, “Coups and Nascent Democracies”; Barracca, “Post-Cold War Coups”; Thyne et al.
17. Rouquiê, “Democratization and Military Polities.”
18. Kuehn et al., “Civilian Control in New Democracies”; Tusalem, “Boon or a Bane?”
19. Mainwaring, “Political Parties and Democratization.”
20. Singh, Seizing Power.
21. Barracca, “Post-Cold War Coups.”
22. Varol, “Military as Guardian.”
23. Varol notes that armies which allow a transition to civilian rule generally do so following a period of interim rule in which officers take steps to ease many of the opportunity constraints mentioned in this article. That being said, I do not believe this necessarily means my findings are undermined by issues of endogeneity. I argue that the causal mechanism, which links the events of 2011 to the outcome of 2013, is officers’ use of interim rule to ease opportunity constraints. That is, I suggest that had the Egyptian military not sought to ease opportunity constraints following the 2011 coup, governing intervention would not have been inherently more likely in 2013 simply because the military ruled briefly between 2011 and 2012.
24. Hassan et al., “Between Scylla and Charybdis.”
25. Marinov and Goemans, “Coups and Democracy”; Chacha and Powell “Economic Interdependence”; Chacha and Powell “Investing in Stability”; Thyne et al., “Reactions to Coups.”
26. Levitsky and Way, “Linkage Versus Leverage,” 383.
27. Marinov and Goemans, “Coups and Democracy,” 800.
28. Chacha and Powell, “Investing in Stability,” 530.
29. Ibid.
30. Tansey, “Limits of “Democratic Coup” Thesis.”
31. Ibid., 223.
32. Ezrow, “Linkage, Leverage, and Regime Type.”
33. Kuehn, “Military and Democratic Development.”
34. Elischer “Coups and Civilian Rule”; Kuehn et al., “Civilian Control in New Democracies”; Kuehn, “Military and Democratic Development.”
35. Kuehn, “Military and Democratic Development,” 873.
36. Bou Nassif, “Coups and Nascent Democracies.”
37. Ibid., 159.
38. Most recently Grewal and Kureshi’s piece entitled “How to Sell a Coup” discusses the effect of aid on officers’ decisions to hold post-coup elections.
39. Hamid and Mandaville, “Brining the United States Back,” 98.
40. Interview with American officer, July 28, 2017.
41. Isaac, “Arab Regional Institutions,” 153.
42. Baabood, “Gulf Role in Arab Spring,” 44.
43. Trade flow in U.S. millions for Egypt from 2011 to 2014 according to the World Bank was as follows: 2011: $93,864, 2012: $99,283, 2013: $95,445, 2014: $98,150.
44. According to the World Bank, of the years analysed in this article (2011–2014) FDI was lowest in Egypt in 2011.
45. Chams El-Dine, “Military Reform to Military Secularization.”
46. Roll, “Managing Change.”
47. Brown and Dunne, “Egypt’s Draft Constitution.”
48. Ketchley, Egypt in Revolution.
49. Ibid., 144.
50. The shifts in public opinion shown by the Pew data are similar in raw percentages to the shifts presented by Hassan et al., who use similar measures to assess Egyptian attitudes towards democracy and unfettered military intervention in politics from 2011 to 2014.
51. Interview with Egyptian journalist, 17 August 2010.
52. Additionally, the increase in support for stability found in the Pew data and the increase in support for unfettered military rule in the Hassan et al. data are quite similar.
53. Varieties of Democracy, 64–65.
54. Lee, “Military Cohesion and Regime Maintenance,” 84.
55. Abu-Magd, Militarizing the Nation.
56. While Elischer presents a cogent argument for treating Egypt between these years as a single case, the fact that all of the Egyptian (and American) officers interviewed described the events as two separate situations in which the military responded based on particular conditions leads me to suggest that these observations be treated as analytically separate.
57. The sensitivity of this subject matter also necessitated that all subjects remain anonymous.
58. Sayigh, “Above the State,” 3.
59. Interview with Egyptian activist, 5 August 2016.
60. Sayigh, 8.
61. Interview with retired Egyptian officer, July 20, 2016.
62. Interview with Egyptian officer, July 27, 2016.
63. This does not imply that they were willing to exit national politics. On the contrary, the military maintained a strong political role post-2011, they just did so without either ruling directly, or ensuring that a candidate with close military ties won the presidency.
64. Interview with retired Egyptian officer, 10 August 2016.
65. Interview with Egyptian officer, 6 August 2016.
66. Rouquiê, “Democratization and Military Polities,” 112.
67. Interview with American officer, July 18, 2017.
68. All Pew data was retrieved from One Year After Morsi’s Ouster, Divides Persist on El-Sisi, Muslim Brotherhod. http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/05/22/one-year-after-morsis-ouster-divides-persist-on-el-sisi-muslim-brotherhood/.
69. Tusalem, “A Boon Or a Bane?” 379.
70. Beissinger et al., “Who Participated in the Arab Spring?”
71. Trager, “The Unbreakable Muslim Brotherhood,” 114.
72. Interview with Egyptian politician, July 31, 2016.
73. Interview with Egyptian officer, 6 August 2016.
74. Lynch et al., “Online Clustering.”
75. Interview with Egyptian officer, July 24, 2016.
76. Beinin, “Civil Society, NGOs, and Egypt,” 403.
77. Landolt and Kubicek, “Opportunities and Constraints,” 997.
78. Interview with American officer, 3 August 2017.
79. Ibid.
80. This does not imply that there are no differences within the officer corps. The suggestion here is that there is general agreement, and dissenting voices will be unlikely to disrupt the course of action the majority of officers deem appropriate.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Justin A. Hoyle
Justin A. Hoyle is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Florida. His research focuses cross-regionally on civil–military relations and democratization in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. His work has been accepted for presentation at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and the Midwest Political Science Association.