From ballot-boxes to barracks: Votes, institutions, and post-election coups
| Author | Sean M Zeigler,Arturas Rozenas |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0022343318779423 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
From ballot-boxes to barracks: Votes,
institutions, and post-election coups
Arturas Rozenas
Department of Politics, New York University
Sean M Zeigler
Defense and Political Sciences Department, RAND Corporation
Abstract
The military often intervenesin politics shortly after elections. This mightbe because election results reveal information
about the ease with which a coup can succeed. Would-be coup perpetrators use this information to infer whether the
incumbent can be removed from office without provoking popular unrest. We argue that the informational content of
elections depends on the electoral rules that translate votes into outcomes. In electoral systems that incentivize strategic
voting, election returns are less informative about the distribution of political support than in electoral systems that
incentivize sincere voting. An extensive battery of statistical tests shows that vote-shares of election winners do not
predict coup attempts in plurality systems, which encouragestrategic voting, but they do predictcoup attempts in non-
plurality electoral systems, which do not encourage strategic voting. Thus, incumbents who have performed well in
elections face a lower risk of coup attempts, but only in institutional environments where voting results are highly
informative about the distributionof political support. We apply this logic to illuminate the decisions of the military to
intervene into politics during the famous failed 1936 coup in Spain and the successful 1973 coup in Chile.
Keywords
civil-military relations, coup, elections, institutions, military
If war is too important to be left to the generals, politics
may be too contentious to be left to the civilians. At least
this is what frequent military forays into the political
arena suggest. But when and why does the military
actively intervene in politics? In his landmark work,
Finer (1975) argued that the military must have both
opportunity and motive to intervene. There are multiple
reasons why a clique of regime insiders or military offi-
cers may want to depose the government, but it is less
clear what precisely constitutes an opportune moment
for them to do so. A common refrain is that the military
finds it easiest to challenge a government when the latter
lacks ‘legitimacy’ (Nordlinger, 1977).
1
While this answer
is plausible, it is fundamentally vague because it is ‘dif-
ficult to prove empirically whether deposed governments
were legitimate or not’ (Wiking, 1983: 31).
Perhaps the most direct way to empirically operatio-
nalize the notion of legitimacy is by assessing a govern-
ment’s endorsement by citizens in elections. Figure 1
(left panel) displays the frequency of coups from 1946
to 2009 broken down by the number of months since
the closest preceding election. Strikingly, the largest
number of coups occur in the immediate aftermath of
elections. One could object that we observe this relation-
ship only because there are but a few countries with long
time intervals between elections. The right panel of Fig-
ure 1 rules out this interpretation. It depicts the average
Corresponding author:
szeigler@rand.org
1
Popular legitimacy is certainly not the only plausible explanation for
a coup opportunity. For example, Svolik (2009) argues that a leader’s
breach of a power-sharing agreement is a focal point for elites to wage
a coup. We focus on a complementary mechanism.
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(2) 175–189
ªThe Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0022343318779423
journals.sagepub.com/home/jpr
To continue reading
Request your trial