Purging militaries: Introducing the Military Purges in Dictatorships (MPD) dataset

AuthorJun Koga Sudduth
DOI10.1177/0022343320966375
Published date01 July 2021
Date01 July 2021
Purging militaries: Introducing the Military
Purges in Dictatorships (MPD) dataset
Jun Koga Sudduth
School of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde
Abstract
The principal threat most autocratic leaders face stems from within the regime. To control militaries and mitigate the
risk of coups d’e
´tat, many autocratic leaders repeatedly purge strong officers from the military. What are the causes
and consequences of such purges? Despite its importance, scholars rarely have studied the question, as they have
lacked a systematic and comprehensive dataset. The Military Purges in Dictatorships (MPD) dataset contains
information on the dates and characteristics of 1,007 military purges, and covers 566 political leaders in 116
authoritarian countries over the period 1965 to 2005. In this article, I describe MPD, compare it with other datasets,
present descriptive statistics on the data, and suggest its applications. By coding the timing and various characteristics
of military purges, MPD facilitates empirical study of the relationships between autocratic leaders and their militaries,
and thus is useful for researchers studying political violence, repression, civil-military relations, coup-proofing, leader
survival, and regime transition.
Keywords
authoritarianism, civil-military relations, coup, event data, purges, repression
Introduction
The principal threat most autocratic leaders face comes
from within the regime rather than from outside.
Approximately three-quarters of dictators who lose
powerdosoastheresultofacoupde
´tat (Svolik,
2009). To address such threa ts to their power, many
dictators attempt to control their militaries by eliminat-
ing strong potential rivals from key positions and repla-
cing them with those who are loyal. Prominent examples
include Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad
and Uganda’s Idi Amin. More recently, Turkey’s Recep
Erdogan and China’s Xi Jinping have increased their
political control by purging opponents in their militaries.
An emerging literature on comparative authoritarianism
points out that the repeated elimination of rival elites
allows dictators to consolidate their personal power and
diminishes the ability of those elites to hold the dictator
accountable (Svolik, 2009; Sudduth, 2017). In fact, the
number of authoritarian regimes where political power is
highly concentrated in the hands of a single individual –
typically called personalist dictatorships – has steadily
increased since the end of the Cold War (e.g. Kendall-
Taylor, Frantz & Wright, 2017; Frantz & Kendall-
Taylor, 2017).
What are the causes and consequences of purging the
military in autocracies? Despite its importance, a lack of
comprehensive data has impeded systematic research on
this topic. The Military Purges in Dictatorships (MPD)
dataset contains systematic human-coded data on mili-
tary purges, defined as events in which a political leader
within a dictatorial regime eliminates individuals from
their positions in the military or other elements of the
security apparatus. The MPD dataset contains coded
information on the dates and characteristics of military
purges covering 566 political leaders in 116 countries
under authoritarian regimes from 1965 to 2005. MPD
codes, for example, whether a purge is primarily peace-
ful, or involves arresting, jailing or killing military offi-
cers, the positions of purged officers, the size of the
Corresponding author:
jun.koga@strath.ac.uk
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(4) 870–880
ªThe Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0022343320966375
journals.sagepub.com/home/jpr

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