Regime Durability in the Face of Coups

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Military interventions into politics remain the most frequent cause of regime collapse in democracies and autocracies alike. Each paper in this panel leverages new data from varying levels of analysis to better understand how state security forces might preserve or threaten the lives of political regimes. Scharpf and Glassel take up this issue at the individual level. The authors challenge organizational theories of coup behavior by leveraging data from the Argentinian officer corps to show that an individual’s decision to partake in a coup is powerfully driven by their personal professional interests. Yet, Ore Koren shows that organizational factors still matter. Turning to the question of how states prevent coups, Koren leverages new data on domestic security organizations to explain how their structure and function affects regime resilience in both democracies and autocracies. These coup-proofing behaviors might have unintended consequences. Falkner et al. show that attempts to coup-proof a regime might paradoxically increase the risk of military mutinies. Last, taking an integrative approach, Dahl et al. evaluate how state security forces respond to public or elite-level defections in the struggle for democratization. These papers provide a pluralistic account for how individual, organizational, and societal factors intertwine in shaping the complex dynamics linking security forces to the life and death of political institutions.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Domestic Security Capacity and Regime Resilience in Autocracies and Democracies - Ore Koren, Indiana University Bloomington

• Missteps and Mutinies: A New Coup-Proofing Paradox - Christopher Michael Faulkner, United States Naval War College; Jaclyn m Johnson, University of Kentucky; Jonathan M. Powell, University of Central Florida; Rebecca Eileen Schiel

• Defection, Campaign Strategy and Democratization - Marianne Dahl, PRIO / NTNU; Mauricio Alejandro Rivera Celestino; Håvard Mokleiv Nygård, The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)

• Buying Repressive Capacity - Roya Izadi, University of Rhode Island; Skip Mark, University of Rhode Island

Chair

• Michael Kenwick Rutgers University

Discussant

• Jun Koga Sudduth University of Strathclyde