Coup with Adjectives: Conceptual Stretching or Innovation in Comparative Research?
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719888857 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Author | Leiv Marsteintredet,Andrés Malamud |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
888857PSX0010.1177/0032321719888857Political StudiesMarsteintredet and Malamud
research-article2019
Article
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(4) 1014 –1035
Coup with Adjectives:
© The Author(s) 2019
Conceptual Stretching or
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719888857
DOI: 10.1177/0032321719888857
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Research?
Leiv Marsteintredet1 and Andrés Malamud2
Abstract
Was Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff victim of a coup or removed through a legal process of
impeachment? The heated debate on the 2016 ousting of Brazil’s president testifies to the growing
controversy around the definition of coups. Focusing on Latin America, we show that the use of
coups with adjectives have become more frequent in public and scholarly debates. Occurring at
a time when coups are becoming rarer, we argue that this development is linked to prevalence-
induced concept change, meaning that when instances of a concept become less prevalent, the
understanding of the concept expands. The meaning of coups has expanded through a proliferation
of adjectives. Coups with adjectives are not new, but recent usage changes the concept from a
classic to a family resemblance structure. Although this strategy can avoid stretching and increase
differentiation, we urge caution and warn against harmful consequences, whether conceptual,
theoretical, or practical.
Keywords
coup d’état, impeachment, concept formation, conceptual stretching, Latin America
Accepted: 25 October 2019
“In Europe, with its more limited experiences of such matters, the expression
coup d’état is not specifically distinguished from say, a coup de force, and we use the
expressions, ‘military revolt’, ‘mutiny’, ‘rebellion’, ‘coup’, ‘revolution’
interchangeably without asking what precisely has happened. Latin Americans,
with their closer acquaintanceship with the phenomenon, distinguish.”
S.E. Finer (1962: 154)
1University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
2Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Corresponding author:
Leiv Marsteintredet, University of Bergen, Christies gate 15, Bergen 5020, Norway.
Email: leiv.marsteintredet@uib.no
Marsteintredet and Malamud
1015
Introduction
Coups d’état —however defined—have traditionally been regarded as the greatest
threat to the survival of democracy. The sudden, often military-backed removal of the
government customarily meant the end of a democratic regime. Today, however, despite
a broad consensus that there is a global democratic recession and that liberal demo-
cratic values are threatened (Diamond, 2015a; Inglehart and Norris, 2016; Lührmann
and Lindberg, 2019; Mechokva et al., 2017), there are fewer classical coups than ever,
whether globally or in Latin America (Belkin and Schofer, 2005; Derpanopoulos et al.,
2016; Djuve et al., 2019; McGowan, 2003; Marinov and Goemans, 2014; Powell and
Thyne, 2011; Singh, 2014). In fact, consolidated democracies have grown almost
immune to them (Svolik, 2015). Yet, we witness a puzzling increase in the use of the
term (whether coup d’état or golpe de estado, as in Spanish and Portuguese), frequently
combined with a qualifying adjective, in both academic and non-academic texts.1 In
this article, we analyze why coup with adjectives are on the rise at a time that coups
occur less frequently, and what the analytical and conceptual consequences of this
development are.
“Coups with adjectives” are not a new phenomenon. Terms like “military coup” or
“self-coup” (autogolpe) have been in regular use within and outside academia for decades
(Cameron, 1998; Fitch, 1977). However, their use has mushroomed in recent decades,
particularly in Latin America. We found evidence of the recent invention or adaptation of
qualifiers such as “soft” (Pitts et al., 2016), “parliamentary” (Santos and Guarneri, 2016),
“presidential” or “democratic” (Varol, 2017), “constitutional” (Helmke, 2017; Yarwood,
2016), “market” or “neo-liberal” (Mauceri, 1995), “electoral” (Hellinger, 2005), “slow-
motion” (Polga Hecimovich et al., 2017), “civil society” (Encarnación, 2002), and “judi-
cial” (Yavuz and Koç, 2016). Many of these terms are piled together in Gentili’s (2016)
volume on the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Although Bello
(2016) and Keating (2012) register the use of coups with adjectives outside academia, the
list above shows that their usage is not restricted to politicians or activists who have
incentives to use real or invented coup-plots to implement emergency rule, arrest opposi-
tion leaders, clean out the bureaucracy, or brand the opposition as undemocratic.
We link the rise of “coup with adjectives” to the phenomenon of “prevalence-induced
concept change” (Levari et al., 2018): when instances of a concept become less prevalent,
the understanding of the concept expands to cover cases it previously excluded. Following
Collier and Levitsky (1997), we argue that while earlier uses of coup with adjectives went
down the ladder of generality or abstraction (increasing differentiation), new adjectives
make up diminished or dismissive subtypes in which some constitutive elements of the
concept are missing or only partially present. The examples of contemporary coups with
adjectives mentioned earlier have in common that they do not satisfy all the criteria for
the commonly accepted definition of a coup: the illegal overthrow of the government by
other state actors. As a consequence, whereas a coup was formerly understood as a clas-
sical concept, the new usage approaches it as a family resemblance concept (Collier and
Mahon, 1993; Goertz, 2006).
The choice of how to conceptualize a coup is not to be taken lightly since it carries
normative, analytical, and political implications. In particular, in today’s democracies
there is a conceptual peril of conflating a coup with legal tactics for government replace-
ment. Identifying a phenomenon as an “impeachment” as opposed to a “coup” involves
widely different interpretations, moral judgments, and consequences, as the latter could
trigger international sanctions whereas the former should not. Therefore, academics as
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Political Studies 68(4)
well as politicians and pundits should proceed with care when choosing concepts to
define as consequential an event as the removal of a president.
The qualitative material for this article is based on a review of the academic literature
on coups in general and in Latin America in particular, and on close reading of social
media and news related to Latin American politics, our area of research. To substantiate
our claim of an increased use of coups with adjectives, we use quantitative evidence from
Google Books’ English and Spanish corpora for the period 1800–2008 with the Ngram
Viewer (2013) tool.2 Furthermore, we mapped the academic use of coups using the Social
Science Citation Index for English terms, and SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library
Online) citation index for Spanish and Portuguese terms.3 We compare the use of the coup
concept with coup data from Powell and Thyne (2011) and Przeworski et al. (2013).
In the next section, we present empirical evidence to sustain our argument about the
proliferation of the term accompanied by a variety of adjectives, and substantiate our puz-
zle: why does this occur during a period when actual coups in the world decline? In order
to disentangle the puzzle, we then discuss the coup concept, its constitutive elements and
structure, before we discuss strategies to avoid conceptual stretching, and show through
examples that the current usage of coups with adjectives is shifting the concept structure
from a classical to a family resemblance type. We argue that this shift can be understood
as special form of prevalence-induced concept change. Finally, we discuss the implica-
tions and whether conceptual innovation has resulted in conceptual stretching or improved
the utility of the term. Although we draw our examples mostly from Latin America, the
discussion is expected to hold general validity.
The Fall of Coups and Rise of “Coups With Adjectives”
Globally, coup attempts have been declining since the latter half of the 1960s, and have
been particularly rare after the Cold War. Based on data from Powell and Thyne (2011),
Figure 1 displays the trend of coup attempts since 1950. The downward trend is uncon-
troversial and supported by several recent studies (Belkin and Schofer, 2003;
Derpanopoulos et al., 2016; Djuve et al., 2019; Marinov and Goemans, 2014; Marshall
and Marshall, 2018; Singh, 2014). In Latin America, with some exceptions such as in
Honduras in 2009, coups have almost vanished.
At the same time, the use of the term coup has seen a puzzling revival with recent
developments in Latin America. Reading the news, registering conversations on social
media, and searching the literature, we observed that academics, politicians, and the
media increasingly use the Spanish term golpe connected with an adjective to describe
events that would not fall under the classical conceptualization. A non-exhaustive list of
the most prominent and prevalent new adjectives includes “soft,” “parliamentary,” “con-
stitutional,” “neo-liberal,” “market,” “electoral,” “slow,” “civil society,” and “judicial.”
While often these terms are used by presidents to taint their opponents, they are also used
in academic works, and thus should be analyzed rigorously. First, however, we need...
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