Rethinking Coup Risk

• Author: Beth Rabinowitz,Paul Jargowsky
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17695514
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Rethinking Coup Risk:

Rural Coalitions and

Coup-Proofing in

Sub-Saharan Africa

Beth Rabinowitz

1

and Paul Jargowsky

2

Abstract

Military interventions continue to be prevalent in Africa. In the 21st century alone,

14 coups have been successfully staged. Whereas most studies of coup risk examine

how militaries are organized or what structural conditions are associated with

coups, we take a novel approach. We explore how coalition politics relate to coup

risk. It has long been observed that regimes try to hold power by buying off urban

consumers. We argue that focusing on urban consumers actually makes regimes

more prone to military intervention. Instead, leaders who ally with established rural

elites are more effective at thwarting coups. To test our hypothesis, we develop a

unique data set of rural political strategies, coding regimes in 44 sub-Saharan

countries from 1960 to 2000. Using a continuous-time Cox proportional hazards

regression model, we find a robust correlation between policies supportive of rural

elites and lower coup risk.

Keywords

coup d’e

´tat, coup-proofing, sub-Saharan African, rural, coalitions

1

Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, USA

2

Department of Public Policy Administration, Center for Urban Research, Rutgers University,

Camden, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Beth Rabinowitz, Department of Political Sc ience, Rutgers University, 401 Cooper Str eet, Camden,

NJ 08102, USA.

Email: br274@rutgers.edu

Armed Forces & Society

2018, Vol. 44(2) 322-346

ªThe Author(s) 2017

Reprints and permission:

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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17695514

journals.sagepub.com/home/afs

With the democratic “Third Wave” across Africa, it appeared that the study of coups,

like Soviet studies, might soon be relegated to something of a distant age. However,

recent events in Burkina Faso, Burundi, and Central African Republic suggest this

may not be so. In fact, since the turn of the 21st century, 13 coups have been

successfully staged in sub-Saharan Africa.

1

Although scholarship indicates compet-

itive elections are likely to be restored after a coup (Marinov & Goemans, 2014), this

does not help us anticipate which regimes are more likely to succumb to a coup or

how some leaders manage to avert them.

For a long time, studies of coup-proofing focused primarily on how militaries

were organized (Decalo, 1986; First, 1970; Horowitz, 1985; Kandeh, 2004) or on

the structural conditions associated with coup risk (Bloom, Sachs, Collier, &

Udry, 1998; Decalo, 1986; Londregan & Poole, 1990). But given the similarity

of African military organizations and the shared vulnerabilities sub-Saharan

states face, such structural approaches gave little means to predict which regimes

would be more likely to fall prey to a successful military intervention (Belkin &

Schofer, 2003). In recent years, the trend has been to analyze the utility of

“counterbalancing,” the practice of dividing military command as a means to

protect regimes from coups. Unfortunately, to date, the evidence for the efficacy

of counterbalancing on coup-proofing is quite mixed. While several studies find

a high correlation between counterbalancing and reduced coup risk (Belkin &

Schofer, 2005; Powell, 2012), others do not (Albrecht, 2015; Bo¨hmelt & Pilster,

2015).

Instead of focusing on the way regimes organize their military or what structural

conditions accompany coups, we explore how coalition politics relate to coup-

proofing. The contention of this article is that because of the weakness of African

institutions and the continued predominance of clientelism in politics, how well a

regime handles its military is related to its overall strategic vision. We make the

counterintuitive claim that leaders who ally with established rural elites and develop

multiregional bases of support face lower coup risk than those who cater to urban

interests. This is because for a regime to survive, it has to withstand incessant urban

unrest, curb ethno-regional competitors, and grow the economy so as to prevent the

politicization of the military. These aims are best achieved by fostering rural sup-

port. Therefore, despite the obvious fact that urban unrest can destabilize regimes

and lead to coups, we posit that military intervention is better averted by promoting

local and regional elites.

To test if rural support increases the ability of sub-Saharan regimes to thwart

coups, we develop a unique database of rural political strategies. We code

regimes in 44 sub-Saharan countries on howeffectivelytheypromotedrural

political incorporation. We then employ a continuous-time Cox (1972) propor-

tional hazards regression model to test the effect of rural political incorporation

on the likelihood of a regime suffering a successful coup. We find a strong and

robust correlation between implementing policies supportive of rural elites and

lower coup risk.

Rabinowitz and Jargowsky 323