Dictatorships and Survival: Explaining Variation in Military Regimes Instability

• In Event: The Military as a Political Actor

Abstract

The literature on authoritarian regimes holds that military regimes are inherently fragile compared to other types of dictatorships: their average durability is considerable shorter and they face higher leadership turnover rates. However, we still know little on why we observe substantive variation in the performance of military regimes and their leaders. For instance, while the military junta that was inaugurated in 1976 governed Argentina for only seven years, Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile for 17 years. Furthermore, officers presided over Brazil for 21 years. Why do some military regimes last longer than others? What accounts for this intra-regime type variation? Why do some military regimes have more stable leadership than others? We argue that the institutional design of this type of autocracy and the internal distribution of power between factions help explain this puzzle. We test our theoretical framework by using different datasets that contain all types of dictatorships between 1945 and 2010 in Latin America. To further explore the causal mechanisms, we conduct several case studies. By analyzing one of the notable unsolved questions in political science, our paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on authoritarianism.

Authors

• Natan Skigin

• Benjamin Armando Luis Garcia Holgado