When Do Election Announcements Trigger Coup Attempts?

• In Event: Autocratic Decision-Making

Abstract

Since 2000, around one in three coup attempts has occurred within six months of a scheduled election. Yet despite the apparent frequency with which elections trigger coups, the relationship between election cycles and coup attempts remains poorly understood. We argue that the primary reason for this gap in our knowledge is that widely used election datasets do not include information about when an upcoming election was first announced, nor do they include elections that were announced but cancelled pre-emptively by political violence. Using REIGN, a new dataset that codes the precise announcement dates for more than 2,500 global elections (1950-2016), we explore linkages between election announcements and coup activity for the first time. The findings reveal the conditions under which election announcements are most likely to trigger coup attempts, both before and after the election date. By including information about announced upcoming elections in coup forecasting models, we can demonstrably improve our ability to model coup risk and the likelihood of irregular leader change. The findings are especially relevant, as an increasing share of coup attempts are occurring in transitional democracies.


Authors

• Clayton Besaw, University of Central Florida

• Jun Koga Sudduth, University of Strathclyde

• Curtis Bell, University of Tennessee at Knoxville

• Jonathan M. Powell, University of Central Florida