Coup d’Etat
The specter of an army inspired coup d’etat in Cuba is remote, but perhaps a viable one, if the right variables are in place.
However, the general trend of coups internationally has waned significantly.
Nikolay Marinov of Yale University and Hein Goemans of University of Rochester have recently written a paper addressing the subject of the coups decline, titled: “What Happened to the Coup d’Etat? International Responses to the Seizure of Executive Power.”
The authors use new data to demonstrate the decline of non-constitutional seizure of power since the 1990s. They contend one possible explanation to the dwindling popularity of the coup is based, since the end of the Cold War:
outside pressure has produced a development they characterize as the “electoral norm” - a requirement that binds successful coup-entrepreneurs to hold reasonably prompt and competitive elections upon gaining power.
They model their findings based on cost/benefit analysis with successful coups and utilize Archigos (a data base on Leaders 1875-2004), which identifies all leaders in all countries in the world and information about the manner in which they assumed and left office. The dataset produces 231 distinct coup events between 1960 and 2003.
Marinov and Goemans further add:
Empirically, this model suggests that greater post-coup likelihood of elections (due, for example, to international pressure for democracy) would go together with a decreasing incidence of coups. Using a new, comprehensive dataset of coup-events and elections, we find this to be the case. After the Cold War, the incidence of coups has decreased markedly. At the same time, coups are much more likely to result in competitive elections rather than in the entrenchment of a non-elected government: whereas pre-1990 only 15 % of all coup events lead to elections in 3 years or less, a comparablestatistic for the post-1990 world sets the incidence of elections at 52 %.
[Photo: Napoleon Bonaparte in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire in Saint-Cloud, François Bouchot, 1840.]
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Tags: army, Coup d'Etat
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