 Coup risk, coup-proofing and leader survivalJun Koga Sudduth
Journal of Peace Research, 2017, vol. 54, issue 1, 3-15 Abstract: Under what conditions do political leaders enact ‘coup-proofing’ strategies? There is a broad consensus in the literature that political leaders who face a higher risk of a coup will employ coup-proofing strategies that reduce the military’s capabilities to organize a coup. A closer look at the theory and empirical analyses of earlier studies, however, suggests that the presumed relationship between coup risk and coup-proofing should be re-examined. Drawing on insights from formal studies of authoritarian power-sharing, this article proposes that political leaders become less likely to initiate coup-proofing efforts as the coup risk increases. The reason is that leaders’ coup-proofing actions in themselves could prompt the military to launch a coup and thus political leaders will hesitate to offend officers when they face a high risk of a coup. The statistical models in this article estimate a latent coup risk by aggregating multiple indicators that capture the military’s willingness and ability to organize a coup. The empirical results strongly support the proposition that coup-proofing efforts taken by leaders decrease as coup risk increases. Keywords: civil-military relation; coups; coup-proofing; leader survival (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:joupea:v:54:y:2017:i:1:p:3-15 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo |
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