Toward a Structural Understanding of Coup Risk
Abstract
Although coup risk plays an important role in theories of war, revolution, and democratization, scholars have not developed a rigorous conceptualization and valid measure of the concept. We develop a structural understanding of coup risk as distinct from proximate causes of coups as well as coup-proofing strategies that regimes implement to avert coups. Theoretical insights into factors that predispose regimes toward coup vulnerability provide the groundwork for an improved measure based on strength of civil society, legitimacy, and past coups. Cross-national statistical analyses are used to significantly improve on previous coupincidence models and highlight deficiencies of the common approach to measuring coup risk. The structural conceptualization of coup risk enhances understanding of broader civil-military dynamics, in particular the well-known distinction between motives and opportunities for launching coups. This distinction is shown to be insensitive to an important observational equivalence: that coups may be rare in both high-and low-risk cases.
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1.
1. Coup risk refers to the probability of a coup attempt (whether or not successful), not to the probability of a successful coup. We do not explain the success rates of coups.
2.
2. There is a debate in the philosophy of science literature as to whether a factor must be positively associated with an outcome to be thought of as its cause (Skyrms 1988). We side with the part of the literature, well summarized by Dawes (1996), that argues that a factor must be positively associated with an outcome to be thought of as its cause.
3.
3. Three of the variables that make up Hibbs's (1973, 99) measure of institutionalization partially reflect the strength of nonstate organizations: union membership as a percentage of the nonagricultural work force, age of the largest political party divided by the number of parties, and age of the largest political party.
4.
4. N = 5,463, minimum = 0, maximum = 3,523, mean = 532.72, standard deviation = 583.3. Data were compiled by Ann Hironaka from the Union of International Associations (1984-2000). We used linear interpolation and extrapolation to fill in missing values for international nongovernmental organization (INGO) membership, which is the only variable in our coup risk index for which we did not rely exclusively on actual data. The INGO membership variable is available yearly beginning in 1982 for every country in the world. Prior to that date, it is available roughly in 5-year intervals going back to 1966. We interpolated between available data points for the period between 1966 and 1982 and extrapolated backwards between 1960 and 1966. Other studies using this approach for missing INGO data include Boli and Thomas (1999); Hironaka (2002); Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer (2000); and Meyer et al. (1997). INGOs do not tend to fluctuate, and our results were not sensitive to the method of interpolation or extrapolation. In the final analyses, we used linear interpolation and extrapolation. Our coup risk measure is based on 21,852 data points, of which 2,567 (11.7%) consist of interpolated or extrapolated (as opposed to actual) data. Finally, we computed the natural logarithm of the number of INGOs to correct for its highly skewed distribution because we feared the variable's extreme skew would lead to nonnormality in the conditional error distribution.
5.
5. Regime type refers to whether the regime is military or civilian. See Banks (2001).
6.
6. N = 5,463, minimum = 1, maximum = 5, mean = 2.65, standard deviation = 1.57.
7.
7. N = 5,463, minimum = 2, maximum = 5, mean = 3.75, standard deviation = 0.97.
8.
8. Also see Thompson (1973) and Janowitz (1977). In addition, we collected data on attempted coups, although data on attempted coups may be somewhat unreliable because regimes sometimes fabricate plots to justify repressing domestic adversaries.
9.
9. We also employed factor analyses to develop our indicator. Results in analyses below are nearly identical. Given the near equivalence of the indicators, we present the simpler measure based on z-scores to avoid a lengthy discussion of factor analysis.
10.
10. The Cronbach's α for our three measures is .597. Countries with the five lowest and highest average coup risk scores, 1960 to 2000, follow. After each country, we present the average coup risk score, the number of coups and coup attempts, and the number of years the country appears in our data set: France (-4/0/41), West Germany/Germany (-3.97/0/41), United Kingdom (-3.93/0/41), Belgium (-3.92/0/41), Italy (-3.92/0/41), Burundi (2.99/8/39), Azerbaijan (3.08/2/10), Guinea-Bissau (3.16/2/19), Tajikistan (3.7/1/10), North Yemen (4.11/6/31). The U.S. results were (-3.72/0/41).
11.
11. However, the model is not fully specified because we did not include triggering factors. Some triggers, such as officers' grievances, cannot be measured on a large-n basis. Other triggers such as protests can be measured on a large-n basis, but available data sometimes specify the year but not the date of the event. So it is not always possible to determine if an event was a cause or an effect of a given coup. Underspecification is a problem to the extent that triggers are correlated with our coup risk measure. If not, our estimates of coup risk coefficients will not be severely biased.
12.
12. The one difference is that we omitted Londregan and Poole's (1990) “Oceania” variable from our models. Due to missing values of our “Domestic Unrest” variable, few cases from Oceania remained in our analysis. We did not feel that we could accurately generalize to the entire region based on a few cases and thus chose not to include a regional dummy variable for Oceania. In models not presented here, the Oceania variable was not significant (consistent with the findings of Londregan and Poole) and did not change the sign or significance of other variables in the models.
13.
13. See World Bank (2001) for data on wealth, measured by the natural logarithm of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in constant U.S. dollars. See Banks (2001) for domestic unrest; an annual count of strikes, riots, assassinations, revolutionary actions, purges, antigovernment protests, and acts of guerilla warfare; and regime type, a dichotomous measure coded 0 for civilian regimes and 1 for military or combined civilian-military regimes. For regional conflict, a 5-year moving average of the proportional level of regional interstate hostility, and recent war, a dichotomous variable set to 1 if a regime went to war in the past 10 years and 0 otherwise, see Sarkees (2000). We created several measures of regional conflict and recent war using different data sources. All yielded similar results.
14.
14. We used a consistent sample (N = 4,250 regime-years) when comparing Londregan and Poole (1990) with our model to ensure an accurate comparison in the likelihood ratio test.
15.
15. We constructed two variants of the Bueno de Mesquita, Siverson, and Woller (1992) measure, a dummy coded 1 if a country experienced a coup in the past 10 years and a running count of the number of coups in the past 10 years. Both yielded nearly identical results, but because the second performed slightly better in our models, we include it in Tables 4 and 5.
16.
16. See Brooks (1998), Farcau (1994), Feaver (1995, 1996), Finer (1988), Frazer (1994), Janowitz (1964), Luttwak (1968), Nordlinger (1977), Perlmutter (1977), Pion-Berlin (1989, 1992), Quinlivan (1999), Rouquie (1987), Stepan (1986), Welch (1976).
17.
17. We used International Institute for Strategic Studies (1966-1986) data to count the number of military and paramilitary organizations and compare the relative size of the paramilitary to the total armed forces. We combined these two variables into an index by computing z-scores for each and summing them. Summary statistics for the index (1966-1986) are N = 1,908, minimum = -4.04, maximum = 5.92, mean = 0.012, standard deviation = 1.70.
18.
18. Our data set included 124 countries between 1966 and 1986. For military size, a logged count of the number of troops in the regular armed forces, see Singer and Small (1999). For ethnolinguistic fragmentation, the diversity of ethnolinguistic groups residing within a given country, see Taylor and Hudson (1972).
19.
19. For the 1966 to 1986 data set in these models, coup risk ranges from -4.16 to 4.38.
20.
20. A referee helpfully noted that other accounts of the negative relationship are plausible.
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