Military Origins and Military Coups

• In Event: Military Coups and Autocracies

Abstract

The literature on military coups has identified a variety of factors that make military coups more likely – including weak institutions, economic crisis, and government threats to the military’s corporate interests. We argue that military origins are also an important factor shaping the likelihood of military coups. Levitsky and Way (forthcoming) argue that social revolution results in authoritarian regimes that face few coup threats. Revolutionary efforts to overthrow the existing state and social system force revolutionaries to build new armies from scratch that are deeply intertwined with the revolutionary ruling party. Overlapping political and military leadership and ruling party penetration of the military (via party cells and political police) create significant obstacles to coups. We argue that similar types of coup proofing can be found in some non-revolutionary authoritarian regimes. Regimes backed by militaries founded and staffed by the regime elite tend to be too tightly intertwined with the ruling elite to overthrow that elite. Specifically, we argue that many stable monarchies – such as Saudi Arabia – have been able to avoid coup threats because their militaries were created by regime elites in the period before the regime took power. We explore this argument through a comparison of regime origins and coup threats in the PRC, Saudi Arabia, and Sukarno’s Indonesia that all emerged out of significant violent struggle. We argue that the PRC (revolutionary) and Saudi Arabia (non-revolutionary) were able to create coup resistant because regime elites created militaries prior to the seizure of power. By contrast, Sukarno fell to a coup in part because his regime inherited a military created under Japanese colonial rule.

Authors

• Jean Lachapelle, University of Gothenburg

• Dan Slater, University of Michigan

• Lucan A. Way, University of Toronto