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Original Articles

Spatial Rivalry and Coups Against Dictators

Pages 1-26 | Published online: 18 Aug 2017
 

ABSTRACT

Dictators' survival depends on the effectiveness of their coup-proofing tactics. Yet coup-proofing strategies can become ineffective in the presence of certain structural conditions that enhance the resources, organizational power, and coordination capacity of the army. One such structural condition is the presence of spatial rivalry, international rivalry over disputed territory. Autocratic incumbents invested in spatial rivalries need to strengthen the military in order to compete with a foreign adversary. The imperative of developing a strong army puts dictators in a paradoxical situation: to compete with a rival state, they must empower the very agency—the military—that is most likely to threaten their own survival in office. This logic suggests that authoritarian regimes engaged in spatial rivalries will be more vulnerable to coups. Indeed, relying on the most comprehensive coup dataset to date, this article reveals that rivalry over territory is a robust predictor of coups against autocrats. The findings carry implications for research on civil–military relations, international rivalries, and organizational dynamics within authoritarian regimes.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Carla Martinez Machain, Hicham Bou Nassif, Scott Wolford, and the anonymous reviewers at Security Studies for detailed comments and suggestions. The author would also like to thank Bill Thompson for providing the updated rivalry data and Tobias Böhmelt and Ulrich Pilster for sharing their coup-proofing data.

Notes

1 Military coups are the most frequent form of irregular exit from office for dictators. See Giacomo Chiozza and Hein E. Goemans, Leaders and International Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Hein E. Goemans, “Which Way Out? The Manner and Consequences of Losing Office,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 6 (December 2008): 771–94.

2 Structural conditions typically encompass situations that facilitate collective action. See Aaron Belkin and Evan Schofer, “Toward a Structural Understanding of Coup Risk,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 5 (October 2003): 594–620; Sidney Tarrow, Strangers at the Gates: Movements and States in Contentious Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

3 Curtis Bell and Jun Koga Sudduth, “The Causes and Outcomes of Coup during Civil War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (forthcoming); Abel Escribà-Folch, “Repression, Political Threats, and Survival under Autocracy,” International Political Science Review 34, no. 5 (July 2013): 543–60; Sharon E. Nepstad, “Mutiny and Nonviolence in the Arab Spring: Exploring Military Defections and Loyalty in Egypt, Bahrain, and Syria,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 3 (May 2013): 337–49; Philip Roessler, “The Enemy Within: Personal Rule, Coups, and Civil Wars in Africa,” World Politics 63, no. 2 (April 2011): 300–346; Milan W. Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Thorin Wright, “Territorial Revision and State Repression,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 3 (May 2014): 375–87.

4 Milan W. Svolik, “Contracting on Violence: The Moral Hazard in Authoritarian Repression and Military Intervention in Politics,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 57, no. 5 (October 2013): 765–94.

5 The dispute started before Morocco and Algeria became independent. The two countries remain locked in a strategic rivalry over border territories and the status of Western Sahara.

6 David Ottaway and Marina Ottaway, Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Philip C. Naylor, Historical Dictionary of Algeria, 3rd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

7 Ottaway and Ottaway, Algeria, 123; Naylor, Historical Dictionary, 183.

8 Anthony H. Cordesman, A Tragedy of Arms: Military and Security Developments in the Maghreb (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 151.

9 Officially, Boumediene declared that Ben Bella's poor management of the economy was the major reason behind the latter's removal. In a revelatory radio address, however, Boumediene stated that Ben Bella's “government by the whim” pushed the military to act. “Map Treason Case Against Ben Bella,” Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1965, page 2.

10 Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups from 1950 to 2010: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 48, no. 2 (March 2011): 249–59.

11 Michael N. Desch, “War and Strong States, Peace and Weak States?,” International Organization 50, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 237–68; Douglas M. Gibler, “Outside-In: The Effects of External Threat on State Centralization,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54, no. 4 (August 2010): 519–42; Douglas M. Gibler and Steven V. Miller, “External Territorial Threat, State Capacity, and Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 5 (September 2014): 634–46; Karen Rasler and William R. Thompson, War and State Making: The Shaping of Global Powers (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Cameron Thies, “War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (July 2005): 451–65; Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990).

12 Cemal Eren Arbatli and Ekim Arbatli, “External Threats and Political Survival: Can Dispute Involvement Deter Coup Attempts?,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 33, no. 2 (April 2016): 115–52; Aaron Belkin and Evan Schofer, “Coup Risk, Counterbalancing, and International Conflict,” Security Studies 14, no. 1 (January-March 2005): 140–77; R. Blake McMahon and Branislav L. Slantchev, “The Guardianship Dilemma: Regime Security through and from the Armed Forces,” American Political Science Review 109, no. 2 (May 2015): 297–313; Ulrich Pilster and Tobias Böhmelt, “Do Democracies Engage Less in Coup-Proofing? On the Relationship between Regime Type and Civil–Military Relations,” Foreign Policy Analysis 8, no. 4 (October 2012): 355–71; Varun Piplani and Caitlin Talmadge, “When War Helps Civil–military Relations: Prolonged Interstate Conflict and the Reduced Risk of Coups,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (forthcoming).

13 Desch, “War and Strong States,” 241.

14 McMahon and Slantchev, “Guardianship Dilemma,” 307. According to McMahon and Slantchev, the military's willingness to remain loyal to the leader is complicated by uncertainty about the external threat environment. In their view, rulers are able to strengthen their militaries without triggering a coup only when there is common knowledge about threat severity. McMahon and Slantchev embrace a broader understanding of external threats as threats originating from outside the government; hence, external threats can be domestic or foreign.

15 Belkin and Schofer, “Coup Risk,” 151; Chiozza and Goemans, Leaders and International Conflict; Goemans, “Which Way Out?,” 775.

16 Piplani and Talmadge, “When War Helps,” 18.

17 On leaders' diversionary incentives, see Amy Oakes, Diversionary War: Domestic Unrest and International Conflict (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

18 Arbatli and Arbatli, “External Threats.” As discussed below, the credible commitment mechanism can also produce an expectation in the opposite direction: during times of external hostility, leaders can commit to resource disbursements toward the military, but the substantial resources allocated can also be used to topple a dictator.

19 Pilster and Böhmelt, “Do Democracies Engage,” 363.

20 R. Blake McMahon, “Circling the Wagons: Civil–Military Relations and International Disputes,” (working paper, 2015, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2592711), 3.

21 See the discussion in Caitlin Talmadge, “Different Threats, Different Militaries: Explaining Organizational Practices in Authoritarian Armies,” Security Studies 25, no. 1 (January-March 2016): 111–41.

22 Caitlin Talmadge, The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

23 Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright, “Dealing with Tyranny: International Sanctions and the Survival of Authoritarian Rulers,” International Studies Quarterly 54, no. 2 (June 2010): 335–59; Nikolay Marinov, “Do Sanctions Destabilize Country Leaders?,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (July 2005): 564–76.

24 Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37, no. 4 (Spring 2013): 90–131.

25 Arbatli and Arbatli, “External Threats”; Belkin and Schofer, “Coup Risk.”

26 Nam Kyu Kim, “Revisiting Economic Shocks and Coups,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 60, no. 1 (February 2016): 3–31.

27 Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Jeff Goodwin, No Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Nepstad, “Mutiny and Nonviolence.”

28 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

29 This study does not focus on when autocrats are more likely to lose power but, rather, on when coups are more likely to be executed. A coup d’état is just one possible type of irregular exit in authoritarian regimes. See Goemans, “Which Way Out?”

30 James T. Quinlivan, “Coup-proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East,” International Security 24, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 131–65.

31 Belkin and Schofer, “Coup Risk,” 596.

32 Peter D. Feaver, “Civil–Military Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 211–41.

33 Holger Albrecht and Dorothy Ohl, “Exit, Resistance, Loyalty: Military Behavior During Unrest in Authoritarian Regimes,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (March 2016): 38–52; Belkin and Schofer, “Coup Risk,” 596; Hicham Bou Nassif, “Generals and Autocrats: How Coup-proofing Predetermined the Military Elite's Behavior in the Arab Spring,” Political Science Quarterly 130, no. 2 (June 2015): 245–75; Erica De Bruin, “Preventing Coups d’état: How Counterbalancing Works,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (forthcoming).

34 Notably, there was no separate Libyan defense ministry under Gaddafi.

35 Kristen A. Harkness, “The Ethnic Army and the State: Explaining Coup Traps and the Difficulties of Democratization in Africa,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 60, no. 4 (June 2016): 587–616; Michael A. Makara, “Coup-proofing, Military Defection, and the Arab Spring,” Democracy and Security 9, no. 4 (October 2013): 334–59.

36 Theodore McLauchlin, “Loyalty Strategies and Military Defection in Rebellion,” Comparative Politics 42, no. 3 (April 2010): 333–50; Idean Salehyan, “The Delegation of War to Rebel Organizations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54, no. 3 (June 2010): 493–515.

37 Roessler, “Enemy Within,” 309.

38 Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule, 10.

39 David Pion-Berlin, Diego Esparza, and Kevin Grisham, “Staying Quartered: Civilian Uprisings and Military Disobedience in the Twenty-First Century,” Comparative Political Studies 47, no. 2 (February 2014): 230–59.

40 Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule, 125.

41 Bell and Koga Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes”; Jonathan Powell, “Leader Survival Strategies and the Onset of Civil Conflict: The Paradox of Coup-proofing,” (working paper, 15 February 2015, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2443741).

42 Roessler, “Enemy Within,” 315.

43 Belkin and Schofer, “Coup Risk.” Other works suggest that, wary of conflict improving the army's standing, autocrats are more willing to make concessions to an adversary in order to keep the military weak, or that autocrats are more open to concessions after being in power for some time because they are no longer constrained by domestic audiences. See Giacomo Chiozza and Ajin Choi, “Guess Who Did What: Political Leaders and the Management of Territorial Disputes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 3 (June 2003): 251–78; Scott Wolford, “Threats at Home, Threats Abroad: Bargaining and War in the Shadow of Coups and Revolutions,” International Interactions 40, no. 4 (October 2014): 506–32.

44 Lewis A. Coser, The Function of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1956).

45 Tilly, Coercion.

46 Gibler, “Outside-in”; Thies, “War, Rivalry, and State Building.”

47 William R. Thompson, “Identifying Rivals and Rivalries in World Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 4 (December 2001): 557–86. According to Thompson, rivalries exist independently of conflict. This conceptualization of rivalry avoids the tautology inherent in the alternative, dispute density approach which requires a certain number of militarized interstate disputes (six) to occur over a certain period (twenty years). See James P. Klein, Gary Goertz, and Paul F. Diehl, “The New Rivalry Dataset: Procedures and Patterns,” Journal of Peace Research 43, no. 3 (May 2006): 331–48.

48 Michael Colaresi, Karen Rasler, and William R. Thompson, Strategic Rivalries in World Politics: Position, Space, and Conflict Escalation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

49 For experimental evidence of the impact of coup-proofing on military effectiveness, see Andrew W. Bausch, “Coup-proofing and Military Inefficiencies: An Experiment,” International Interactions (forthcoming).

50 Eric A. Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics: Military Coups and Governments (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977).

51 Retired Egyptian general quoted in Hicham Bou Nassif, “Coups and Nascent Democracies: The Military and Egypt's Failed Consolidation,” Democratization 24, no. 1 (January 2017): 157–74.

52 Some argue that leaders who coup-proof their militaries can strategically resort to substitution policies in order to offset their military weakness when faced with external threats. See Cameron S. Brown, Christopher J. Fariss, and R. Blake McMahon, “Recouping after Coup-Proofing: Compromised Military Effectiveness and Strategic Substitution,” International Interactions 42, no. 1 (February 2016): 1–30. According to Brown, Farris, and McMahon, regimes contemplate two strategic substitutes to compensate for military weakness induced by coup-proofing measures: development of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and alliances. Neither of these tools are readily available to autocrats. Pursuing WMDs is a costly undertaking, materially and strategically, as it can increase the number of rivals (thus inflaming the external threat environment) or raise the prospect of foreign intervention. Dictators are walking a fine line with regard to alliances as well, because autocratic states tend to democratize within alliance systems. See Douglas M. Gibler and Scott Wolford, “Alliances, then Democracy: An Examination of the Relationship between Regime Type and Alliance Formation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 1 (February 2006): 129–53.

53 This rationale is elegantly laid out in R. Blake McMahon, “Circling the Wagons.” See also Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil–Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

54 Jessica L. Weeks, “Strongmen and Straw Men: Authoritarian Regimes and the Initiation of International Conflict,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 2 (May 2012): 326–47.

55 Regimes with coup-proofed armies tend to be less effective in interstate conflicts. See Ulrich Pilster and Tobias Böhmelt, “Coup-proofing and Military Effectiveness in Interstate Wars, 1967–99,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 28, no. 4 (September 2011): 331–50.

56 Michael Colaresi and William R. Thompson, “Strategic Rivalries, Protracted Conflict, and Crisis Escalation,” Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 3 (May 2002): 263–87. The four types of rivalries are not mutually exclusive; a dyad can experience more than one type of rivalry at the same time. For example, the Russo–Chinese strategic rivalry between 1958 and 1989 was simultaneously positional, spatial, and ideological.

57 On the symbolic, strategic, and material value of territory, see, inter alia, Stacie E. Goddard, “Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy,” International Organization, 60, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 35–68; Friederike L. Kelle, “To Claim or Not to Claim? How Territorial Value Shapes Demands for Self-Determination,” Comparative Political Studies (forthcoming); David S. Siroky and John Cuffe, “Lost Autonomy, Nationalism and Separatism,” Comparative Political Studies 48, no. 1 (January 2015): 3–34.

58 Vincenzo Bove and Roberto Nisticò, “Military in Politics and Budgetary Allocations,” Journal of Comparative Economics 42, no. 4 (December 2014): 1065–78.

59 Bell and Koga Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes,” 7.

60 Amelia H. Green, “The Commander's Dilemma: Creating and Controlling Armed Group Violence Against Civilians,” Journal of Peace Research 53, no. 5 (September 2016): 619–32.

61 Gibler and Miller, “External Territorial Threat.”

62 Andrew T. Little, “Coordination, Learning, and Coups,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (forthcoming); Naunihal Singh, Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

63 Terence Lee, “The Military's Corporate Interests,” Armed Forces and Society 34, no. 3 (April 2008): 491–502.

64 Daron Acemoglu, Davide Ticchi, and Andrea Vindigni, “A Theory of Military Dictatorships,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2, no. 1 (February 2010): 1–42; Philip Keefer, “Insurgency and Credible Commitment in Autocracies and Democracies,” World Bank Economic Review 22, no. 1 (February 2008): 33–61; McMahon and Slantchev, “Guardianship Dilemma.”

65 Singh, Seizing Power, 55.

66 Jonathan M. Powell, “Regime Vulnerability and the Diversionary Threat of Force,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58, no. 1 (February 2014): 169–96.

67 Acemoglu, Ticchi, and Vindigni, “A Theory of Military Dictatorships”; Curtis Bell, “Coup d’état and Democracy,” Comparative Political Studies 49, no. 9 (August 2016): 1167–1200.

68 Acemoglu, Ticchi, and Vindigni, “Military Dictatorships,” 37.

69 De Bruin, “Preventing Coups.”

70 Harkness, “Ethnic Army,” 6.

71 Belkin and Schofer, “Coup Risk”; Bell and Koga Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes”; Roessler, “Enemy Within”; Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule.

72 Belkin and Schofer, “Structural Understanding”; Timur Kuran, “Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolution,” Public Choice 61, no. 1 (April 1989): 41–74. Proximate or triggering factors can be more idiosyncratic than structural drivers of coup d’état like protest, civil war, interstate conflict, or spatial rivalry.

73 On the acrimony between Ben Bella and Boumediene, see Ottaway and Ottaway, Algeria. After assuming power, Boumediene banned the use of Ben Bella's name in state-controlled media outlets.

74 The latter three events are conventionally described as revolutions but are more accurately understood as popular coups—military coups executed in the background of mass unrest. See Natasha Ezrow and Erica Frantz, Dictators and Dictatorships (New York: Continuum, 2011); Goodwin, No Way Out. In Romania, the military refused to repress the uprising and summarily executed Ceaușescu along with his wife on December 25, 1989. In February 2011, the Egyptian army swiftly changed its strategy away from repression, remained quartered, and finally forced Mubarak out of office.

75 Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 2 (June 2014): 313–31. Geddes, Wright, and Frantz code for autocratic regime onset when any of the following occurs: a government assumes power through non-competitive elections; a government assumes power through competitive elections but subsequently changes the formal or informal rules such that competition in subsequent elections is limited; or a government assumes power through competitive elections, but the military either prevents one or more parties that substantial numbers of citizens would be expected to vote for from competing, or dictates policy choice in important policy areas. The Polity IV index includes a category of extreme factionalism, characterized by domestic competition that is “intense, hostile, and frequently violent.” This is particularly problematic for coup- and civil war-prone countries because the Polity IV regime measure is not independent of the outcome of interest. See the discussion in James R. Vreeland, “The Effect of Political Regime on Civil War: Unpacking Anocracy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 3 (June 2008): 401–25.

76 James J. Heckman. “Sample Selection Bias as a Specification Error,” Econometrica 47, no. 1 (January 1979): 153–61.

77 This is also known as the bivariate probit model with selection or the censored probit model. Censored probit is equivalent to running two probit models with correlated errors.

78 Nathaniel Beck, Jonathan N. Katz, and Richard Tucker, “Taking Time Seriously: Time-Series-Cross-Section Analysis with a Binary Dependent Variable,” American Journal of Political Science 42, no. 4 (October 1998): 1260–88. Past coup is one of the most robust predictors of future coup. See McLauchlin, “Loyalty Strategies”; Powell, “Regime Vulnerability.”

79 Powell and Thyne, “Global Instances.”

80 Ibid., 252.

81 Thompson, “Identifying Rivals.”

82 Ibid.,” 563–66.

83 Erica Chenoweth and Orion A. Lewis, “Unpacking Nonviolent Campaigns: Introducing the NAVCO 2.0 Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 3 (May 2013): 415–23. I use the NAVCO 2.0 indicator for the size of anti-government campaigns which I recode according to the following categories: 1 < 1,000 protestors; 2 < 10,000 protestors; 3 < 100,000 protestors; 4 < 500,000 protestors; 5 < 1 million protestors; 6 > 1 million protestors.

84 Bell and Koga Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes”; Powell, “Leader Survival Strategies”; Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule.

85 The COW civil war variable is more appropriate than alternative categorizations (such as UCDP) because it captures high-intensity conflict—episodes of civil strife characterized by full involvement of the armed forces. See Pion-Berlin, Esparza, and Grisham, “Staying Quartered.” Low-intensity insurgencies (captured by the UCDP categorization, which requires at least twenty-five battle-related deaths) often involve the security services rather than the military; by contrast, high-intensity civil wars typically require the army's involvement, which may have important implications for an autocrat's survival. Another problem with the UCDP twenty-five battle-casualty threshold is that it may capture forms of political contention other than civil war. See Adrian Florea, “Where Do We Go From Here: Conceptual, Theoretical, and Methodological Gaps in the Large-N Civil War Research Program,” International Studies Review 14, no. 1 (March 2012): 78–98. It is worth noting that models with the UCDP civil war variable produce comparable results.

86 Meredith R. Sarkees, “The Correlates of War Data on War,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 18, no. 1 (January 2000): 123–44.

87 Data on these four control variables are taken from Jonathan M. Powell, “Determinants of the Attempting and Outcome of Coups d’état,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 6 (December 2012): 1017–40.

88 Scholars have consistently argued that low military spending might encourage coups. See Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics; Vincenzo Bove and Roberto Nisticò, “Coups d’état and Defense Spending: A Counterfactual Analysis,” Public Choice 161, no. 3–4 (December 2014): 321–44; and Gabriel Leon, “Loyalty for Sale? Military Spending and Coups d’état,” Public Choice 159, no. 3–4 (June 2014): 363–83.

89 Powell, “Determinants,” 1027.

90 Belkin and Schofer, “Structural Understanding.”

91 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for suggesting these additional controls.

92 Pilster and Böhmelt, “Coup-proofing and Military Effectiveness.”

93 The construction of the counterbalancing index is described at length in Pilster and Böhmelt, “Do Democracies Engage,” 360–61.

94 Victor Asal, Justin Conrad, and Nathan Toronto, “I Want You! The Determinants of Military Conscription,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (forthcoming).

95 Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown.”

96 Supplementary tests (available from the author) show that the results are robust to the inclusion of additional controls such as the presence of coups in a neighboring country (to account for spatial dependence) or oil revenues, the exclusion of the interstate war and MID variables due to collinearity concerns with the rivalry covariate, the use of alternative coding for the civil war variable, and the substitution of cubic splines with a cubic polynomial of duration.

97 See, for instance, the modeling strategy in Powell, “Determinants.”

98 Beyond their sign and statistical significance, Heckman coefficients do not fully convey substantive effects. Heckman post-estimation commands in Stata 13 were used to derive conditional marginal effects of spatial rivalry on coup success.

99 The baseline probability of coup success with no spatial rivalry stands at 0.09. The probability of a successful putsch increases to 0.13 when the regime is engaged in a territorial dispute with a foreign rival.

100 As can be seen in , GDP per capita (logged) is a consistent inhibitor of coups.

101 Colaresi, Rasler, and Thompson, Strategic Rivalries; Senese and Vasquez, Steps to War.

102 The conventional view holds that ‘happy’ armies—organizationally endowed militaries—are less likely to challenge civilian leaders. See, inter alia, Stanislav Andreski, Military Organization and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Feaver, “Civil–Military Relations”; Samuel E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics (New York: Praeger, 1962); Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil–Military Relations (New York: Vintage, 1975); William R. Thompson, “Regime Vulnerability and the Military Coup,” Comparative Politics 7, no. 4 (July 1975): 459–87.

103 Note that the logic here applies to the presence of external threat, not to the presence of war. Autocrats might use territorial disputes to initiate conflict and rally the population around the war effort.

104 Abel Escribà-Folch and Joseph Wright, Foreign Pressure and the Politics of Autocratic Survival (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

105 Belkin and Schofer, “Structural Understanding”; Powell, “Determinants.”

106 Arbatli and Arbatli, “External Threats and Political Survival”; Piplani and Talmadge, “When War Helps Civil–Military Relations.”

107 These additional tests are available from the author.

108 Recent scholarship suggests that coups can be reversed if the general public is satisfied with the status quo. See Bell and Koga Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes,” 3.

109 Escribà-Folch and Wright, Foreign Pressure, 35.

110 Bell and Koga Sudduth, “Causes and Outcomes”; Roessler, “Enemy Within.”

111 Belkin and Schofer, “Coup Risk,” 151; Chiozza and Goemans, Leaders and International Conflict; Goemans, “Which Way Out?,” 775.

112 Piplani and Talmadge, “When War Helps,” 18.

113 Oakes, Diversionary War.

114 Arbatli and Arbatli, “External Threats.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrian Florea

Adrian Florea is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Glasgow (School of Social and Political Sciences).

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