Coup d’État Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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A coup d’état involves the sudden, often violent, overthrow of an existing government by a small group. In contrast, revolutions are achieved by large numbers of people working for basic social economic and political change. In almost all cases, a coup d’état is essentially identical to military coup because it either replaces a civilian government with the military or one military group with another.

There are three kinds of coups. The first is a breakthrough coup d’état that occurs when a revolutionary group overthrows a civilian government and creates a new elite. Examples of this type of coup include China (1911), Egypt (1952), Greece (1967), and Liberia (1980). A guardian coup d’état takes place when a group comes to power to ostensibly improve public order, as occurred in Pakistan with Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s overthrow by Chief of Army Staff Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in 1979. Finally, a veto coup d’état occurs when the army vetoes democracy. The most famous example took place in Chile in 1973 when the military overthrew the elected socialist President Salvador Allende Gossens.

There is a question whether attempted plots and failed coups should be included in a study of the causes and effects of coups. Failed coups may have as large an effect as a successful coup. For instance, if a group were to attempt a coup and fail, the response of the regime that survived the attempt would likely not be much different from the actions of a group that succeeded; political repression is the common outcome. This, in turn, ferments resentful out-groups prone to violence that often lead to countercoups or civil war.

By way of illustration, Patrick McGowan breaks down the analysis of coups in sub-Saharan Africa into two periods, from 1958 to 1979 and 1980 to 2001. The causes of these coups across both periods are clustered along four explanations: the characteristic of the military, the level of political development, social mobilization, and the national political economy. But, there is disagreement on how these various causes positively or negatively affect change. For instance, does pluralism abate or accelerate coup d’états?

The centrality of the military is almost always a key cause, and related to this is the characteristic of the military, such as its ethnic composition. Countries with large militaries, particularly where they have strong ethic affinities, are strong candidates for a coup d’état. There is also broad agreement that poor economic performance is a powerful catalyst. Coups, of course, in turn have a negative impact on gross domestic product, which creates a viscous circle. In both cases, the causes of coups can be associated with the hollowing out of the state that eventually cripples it—a process that always precedes state collapse.

There is more debate on the association between pluralism and coups, and there are two important points here. First, whatever impact the level of pluralism has on coups, once a coup occurs, the possibility of a subsequent coup is high, and therefore the lack of political development and coups will have a high correlation. The relationship between pluralism and coups may also depend on the time period. For example, in Africa, the coups that took place between 1958 and 1975 occurred mostly in civilian regimes and those between 1976 and 1984 occurred mostly in military regimes. The effect here is key. A coup d’état that overthrows a military regime is much more likely to lead to military factionalism, which not only predicts further coups, but also plants the seeds for competing militias that characterize state collapse. The possibility of further violence heightens if the military splits after a coup, with each side supporting a different faction of elites. One way back to power is a countercoup.

Finally, one of the most commonly accepted effects of coup d’états is the contagion effect—it spreads to contiguous states. However, there is no conclusive explanation for this. Nonetheless, in Africa—and elsewhere—there is a geographic pattern to coups. Of the five major regions, west and central Africa seem to have been most prone to coups, while southern Africa has been remarkably free of coups.

Bibliography:

Decalo, Samuel. Coups and Army Rule in Africa: Studies in Military Style. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Gershoni, Yekutiel. “The Changing Pattern of Military Takeovers in SubSaharan Africa.” Armed Forces and Society 23, no. 2 (1996): 234–248.
Kandeh, Jimmy. Coups from Below Armed Subalterns and State Power in West Africa. New York: Palgrave, 2004.
Mbaku, John. “Military Coups as Rent-Seeking Behavior.” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 22 (1994): 241–284.
McGowan, Patrick. “African Military Coups d’État, 1965–2001: Frequency, Trends, and Distributions.” Journal of Modern African Studies 41, no. 3 (2003): 339–370.
McGowan, Patrick, and Thomas Johnson. “Sixty Coups in Thirty Years— Further Evidence Regarding African Military Coups d’État.” Journal of Modern African Studies 24, no. 3 (1986): 539–546.