Fait accompli, or live to fight another day? Deterring and surviving coups in authoritarian regimes

Abstract

Current explanations of coup activity focus on the regime factors that makes them more likely to be successful rather than what them more likely to occur. While 60% of all coups succeed in autocracies, there has been less attention to the 40% that do not. Current empirical approaches testing the effect of legislatures on coup success implicitly treat the decision to attempt a coup as random and relegates it into the model’s residuals. This article discusses why this empirical approach is theoretically unrealistic and shows that the selection effect of coup attempt and success should be empirically accounted for. The analysis replicates and extends Bove and Rivera’s (2015) study on autocrats’ strategies to prevent coups, and it demonstrates that (a) institutionalisation reduces the risk of coup onset by 50%, (b) after accounting for the factors influencing coup attempt, an elected legislature does not by itself, help autocrats survive coups, and (c) purges increase the likelihood of coup attempts, but reduce their likelihood of success.