Coups, Elections and the Predatory State

Anjali Thomas Bohlken
Additional contact information
Anjali Thomas Bohlken: New York University, Department of Politics, 19 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012, USA, at697@nyu.edu

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2010, vol. 22, issue 2, 169-215

Abstract: Even in the absence of elections, incumbents face threats to their survival which could induce them to reduce self-interested rent-seeking behavior. I compare the differences in incentives for incumbents to reduce rent extraction when they face a threat of being overthrown as opposed to when they face competitive elections. The key difference between the situations is that while voters do not gain office as a result of removing the incumbent, groups which overthrow the government assume power as a result of their actions. The results show that the threat of a coup sometimes leads incumbents to extract less than they do under elections. When the value of holding office in the future is sufficiently high, however, the threat of a coup cannot discipline the incumbent at all. I also find that incumbents facing both electoral and coup threats are either as likely, or under certain conditions, less likely to be overthrown than incumbents facing just a coup threat. The results are consistent with existing empirical evidence on the influence of regimes on economic performance and on the occurrence of coups.

Keywords: accountability; coups; predatory state; regimes; rent-seeking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0951629809359034 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:22:y:2010:i:2:p:169-215

DOI: 10.1177/0951629809359034

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Theoretical Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().