Purging militaries: Introducing the Military Purges in Dictatorships (MPD) dataset

The principal threat most autocratic leaders face stems from within the regime. To control militaries and mitigate the risk of coups d’état, many autocratic leaders repeatedly purge strong officers from the military. What are the causes and consequences of such purges? Despite its importance, scholars rarely have studied the question, as they have lacked a systematic and comprehensive dataset. The Military Purges in Dictatorships (MPD) dataset contains information on the dates and characteristics of 1,007 military purges, and covers 566 political leaders in 116 authoritarian countries over the period 1965 to 2005. In this article, I describe MPD, compare it with other datasets, present descriptive statistics on the data, and suggest its applications. By coding the timing and various characteristics of military purges, MPD facilitates empirical study of the relationships between autocratic leaders and their militaries, and thus is useful for researchers studying political violence, repression, civil-military relations, coup-proofing, leader survival, and regime transition.

Conquering and coercing: Nonviolent anti-regime protests and the pathways to democracy

Recent research finds an association between nonviolent protests and democratic transitions. However, existing scholarship either does not specify the pathways through which nonviolent protests bring about democratization or conduct systematic empirical analyses demonstrating that the specified pathways are operative. This article proposes four pathways through which nonviolent anti-regime protests encourage democratic transitions, emphasizing their ability to directly conquer or indirectly coerce such transitions. Most simply, they can conquer democratic reforms by directly overthrowing authoritarian regimes and installing democracies. They can also coerce democratic reforms through three additional pathways. Nonviolent anti-regime protests can coerce incumbent elites into democratic reforms by threatening the survival of authoritarian regimes. They also increase the likelihood of elite splits, which promote negotiated democratic reforms. Finally, they encourage leadership change within the existing authoritarian regime. Following leadership change, nonviolent movements remain mobilized and are able to coerce democratic concessions from the regime’s new leaders. Our within-regime analyses provide robust empirical support for each pathway. We show that nonviolent anti-regime protests conquer democratic reforms by ousting autocratic regimes and replacing them with democracies. Nonviolent anti-regime protests also coerce elites into democratic reforms by threatening regime and leader survival. These findings highlight the importance of protest goals and tactics and also that nonviolent anti-regime protests have both direct and indirect effects on democratization.

Economic Crisis, Natural Resources, and Irregular Leader Removal in Autocracies

Why do autocratic leaders escape revolution, coups, and assassination during times of economic crisis? I argue that the spike in natural resource revenues since the 1960s has increased autocratic crisis resilience. The availability of this alternative revenue stream provides autocratic leaders with a constant inflow of money, increases their ability to repress dissent, and improves their access to international credit. Extending the analysis back to 1875, I show that the relationship between economic crisis and irregular leader removal in autocracies is strong and robust before the 1960s, but disappears in more recent periods. Interaction analyses confirm that the effects of economic crisis are moderated by natural resource income. These findings are robust to an array of alternative specifications, including analyses that address endogeneity concerns via instrumental variable (IV) estimation. A more particular examination of the theoretical mechanisms also supports the argument. These findings challenge widely held beliefs in the literature of a strong, direct effect of economic crisis on autocratic leader survival; they explain why economic crisis seems to destabilize some autocrats, but not others.

Leader Survival, Sources of Political Insecurity, and International Conflict

Recent research identifies the risk and consequences of losing office as important factors in leaders’ decisions to initiate international conflicts. This paper argues that the institutional source of a domestic threat to a leader should condition the relationship between political insecurity and international conflict. Specifically, existing theoretical mechanisms linking international conflict to security in office should not apply to threats that come from outside a leader’s selectorate. Natural disasters provide a convenient opportunity to test this argument since others have argued that disasters not only affect the risk that all types of leaders lose office but that they do so by creating threats that operate through different mechanisms in different domestic institutional contexts. I find that deaths from disasters are positively associated with conflict initiation among large-coalition leaders throughout the period of 1950 to 2007. I also find that neither disaster deaths nor events are related to conflict behavior for small-coalition leaders. In arguing that not all threats to leader survival matter for international conflict, the paper offers an important qualification to theories of leader survival and international conflict.

Leader survival and purges after a failed coup d’état

What factors explain variation in the tenure of political leaders who survive a coup d’état? Our main hypothesis is that leaders who survive a coup attempt take the opportunity to purge known and potential rivals while also deterring future coup conspirators. The severity of the purge is also hypothesized to be positively associated with longer post-coup tenures, as potential rivals are eliminated or deterred from future coup attempts. After introducing the topic of the failed coup, and presenting the dataset we developed to measure the level of punishment associated with a failed coup attempt, we offer an analysis of the effect of purges on the survival time of leaders who survive a coup attempt. We find that, conditional on regime type, purging has an effect on lengthening leader tenure, with more severe purges being associated with longer authoritarian tenures. Democratic leaders gain no advantage. Changes in military expenditures do not increase subsequent tenure. We conclude with a discussion of the results as well as what a broader dataset might reveal.