International organizations (IOs) are instances of international governance, i.e., places where international (normative) power is exercised. As such, they are subject to requirements for democratization, among which is the need for democratic representation. The meaning of democratic representation varies. When applied to IOs in the context of globalization, democratic representation is understood as the set of mechanisms and techniques that make individuals present in their functioning, particularly in the making of international norms, including soft norms. Among these mechanisms and techniques, parliamentarization is supposed to involve national parliaments to a greater extent, either as such, through their members, or through the institutions that brings them together: the international parliamentary institutions. Notwithstanding their diversity, these institutions appear to be the preferred vehicle for the parliamentarization of IOs because they institutionalize international parliamentary representation. Yet, the extent to which this parliamentarization effectively serves democratic representation in IOs is open to discussion. First, representation within international parliamentary institutions reveals that the parliamentary representative can be a false friend of IOs as democratic representatives. Moreover, representation by international parliamentary institutions or their members is often a false pretence of democratic representation within IOs, despite clear democratic virtues for their functioning.

This chapter first presents an ideal type of a hybrid regime. This account sees a hybrid regime as a regime that presents itself as a functioning democracy, but in which the incumbent has disproportionate control over the rules of the game. The chapter then identifies points of tension between a hybrid regime’s constitution and the constitution of a good state. It shows that three constitutional features tend to be found in a hybrid regime: rivaling constitutional ideologies of democracy and guardianship; a trifurcated dual state legal order; and two levels of constitutional battle. Along the way, the chapter suggests how these features might impact a constitutional court in a hybrid regime.

The chapter presents three models of what courts how courts operate in hybrid regimes. The first two are what this book calls the Pessimistic Model and the Optimistic Model. They represent two different bodies of literature and two contrasting views of constitutional courts in hybrid regimes. Under the Pessimistic Model, a court can do very little to resist an authoritarian, let alone promote democratic norms. On the other hand, the Optimistic Model views a constitutional court as the guardian of liberal democratic norms, possessing the capacity to bring democratic change to a hybrid regime. This chapter argues that while each model captures distinct elements and raises important issues regarding constitutional courts in hybrid regimes, each has gone too far. Drawing on the lessons learnt from the analyses of these two models, the chapter presents a third – and what it argues to be a more attractive – model, namely, the Realistic Model, under which the constitutional court can play a meaningful, if limited, role within the hybrid regime.

This chapter first situates the book’s argument in the context of two global phenomena: The proliferation of hybrid regimes and the diffusion of court-centric constitutionalism. It then shows why a normative look at constitutional courts in hybrid regimes is an important but overlooked topic in the literature. Next, the operating assumptions of the book are specified, and basic terms are defined, including constitutional courts and democracy. The chapter concludes by offering a roadmap of the book.

This chapter summarizes the arguments of the book. It highlights that for judges who are democratically committed, the book has offered the theories and tools to help them build institutional resilience and contribute to democratic values. These tools cannot guarantee these democractic outcomes, as there is a limit as to what judges have control over in authoritarian environments. Nevertheless, constitutional courts are often heavily involved in the shaping of constitutional norms and structures. By pushing beyond the boundaries set by conventional conceptions of the judicial role, this book hopes to have instilled optimism in politically challenging environments and demonstrate how judges who are committed to the democratic cause can improve the chances of survival and success of constitutional courts.

This chapter argues that courts should play a role in protecting and promoting democratic values in a hybrid regime and lays out how that can be done. The chapter opens with the argument that the counter-majoritarian objection is singificantly less relevant in a hybrid regime context, contending that its reduced relevance permits the constitutional court greater latitude in its support of democratic ideals in a hybrid regime. Five different democracy-enhancing roles of a constitutional court are then proposed, alongside tools that would help facilitate the realization of these roles. The five democratic roles include: (1) The referee role, (2) the interpretative role, (3) the participatory role, (4) the quasi-representative role, and (5) the educative role. The chapter then addresses how competency concerns impact the democratic roles proposed. It argues that the democratic roles are justifiable because there is a lack of better alternatives in a hybrid regime. Courts are a second-best solution: They may not normally be the best institution to tackle certain political failures, but the inadequacies of the political process in a hybrid regime offer reasons for a constitutional court to act.

This chapter sets the scene for later analyses, providing a historical overview of African RIOs. I trace the evolution of African RIOs, and discuss how leaders developed RIO policies in response to domestic and transnational threats against their political stability, as well as changing international norms.

The conclusions distill the key findings of this book’s encounter with theory, cross-national statistical models, and case studies. A prediction-centered multi-method approach demonstrates how case studies fill in the causal gaps of cross-national statistical models to explain the rise and fall of the Coup Trap. And the conclusions identify the mechanisms that kept most political systems submerged in chronic instability – and allowed half a dozen to consolidate stable democratic or authoritarian political orders.

Chapter 3 statistically tests implications of my theory of the coup trap. I try to disconfirm my hypotheses by using event history or duration models of instability on a database of military coups, economic variables, political system characteristics, and levels of instability for eighteen countries between 1900 and 2014. While controlling for economic and political variables, statistical models show that autocracies are more unstable than democracies and that instability breeds coups. The likelihood of a successful military coup, in other words, remains high in the wake of the overthrow of a president, especially in non-democratic political orders and during election years. Logit models comparing golpes that manage and do not manage to overthrow governments also confirm a key implication of my theory of the coup trap: that military conspiracies are much more likely to prosper if they count upon the support of the opposition. These findings cement my argument that the overthrow of governments is a function of military as well as civil coalitions that reflect the unstable nature of political competition in less institutionalized political systems.

The first of this chapter’s three goals is to unveil a new catalog of more than 320 military coups, slightly less than half of which succeeded in overthrowing the executive. A second goal is to remind ourselves that elections were an integral part of constitutional or quasi-constitutional political orders – regimes best described as electoral autocracies because their incumbents ran the risk of losing regularly scheduled elections. This chapter concludes by combining data on military coups and regimes to produce a typology of political trajectories – and whose origins and persistence the rest of this book explores, documents, and explains.

Chapter 2 provides a political theory of the origins and dynamics of the coup trap. It does not infer the behavior of pro- and anti-forces from their economic interests or their social position but instead argues that structural features of political systems – their competitiveness, how often presidents fall to military coups, and the length of their electoral cycle – explain why instability persists. At its core, the theory argues that the monopolization of power incites the opposition to form coalitions with dissident officers (the “coup coalition”) to oust governments weakened by the recent overthrow of presidents. These structural properties also explain why some coalitions of officers and politicians manage to navigate out of the coup trap, either by forging an autocratic or democratic political order.

Chapter 4 presents and interprets the core results of the prediction-centered multi-method The Coup Trap in Latin America pioneers. It converts the statistical coefficients in Chapter 3 into probability estimates of successful military coups for every country-year, which accurately predict almost 80 percent of the years with such golpes in the region. This chapter reveals that almost 98 percent of its negative predictions – that the armed forces will stay in their barracks – are accurate. Only 2 percent of its negative predictions are false (type 2 errors), which this chapter identifies and begins to analyze. This chapter also begins to explore inaccurate positive predictions of successful golpes (or type 1 errors), showing that the model warns that conditions can be propitious for the unconstitutional seizure of power for years at a time. This chapter uses a key independent variable – T, or time since the last coup – to place political systems in one of three groups, each of which subsequent chapters examine. Chapter 4 is the pivot between the quantitative and qualitative chapters of The Coup Trap in Latin America.

The introduction to The Coup Trap in Latin America outlines this book’s objectives, methods, and key conclusions. My theory, in a nutshell, suggests that the structure of political competition – its formal and informal rules – determines whether a political system sinks into or escapes from the Coup Trap. The introduction discusses the book’s two-pronged multi-method research design, which pioneers the use of statistical predictions to explain when military coups do and do not occur – and uses analytic narratives to assess their plausibility. The introduction also previews the implications of this book’s findings for theories of dictatorship and democracy, for the study of the military coup and instability more generally, and for explanations of regime development in modern Latin America.

During 1917–1918, the trans-European crisis of the war and its ending brought variable patterns of regime instability, popular insurgency, and revolutionary collapse. Most dramatically affected were the defeated countries (Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary), along with Italy, who ended on the winning side disappointingly. After great confrontational divisiveness and civil violence, outcomes varied from successful revolutionary insurrection (Russia), through fraught stabilization within republican-democratic frameworks (Germany, Austria), to violently repressive counter-revolution (Hungary, Italy). In western and northern Europe, victor powers (France, Britain, Belgium) and neutrals (Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia) underwent versions of democratic strengthening and substantial reform. These outcomes produced new political fields of polarized enmities and mostly fragile consensus that vitally shaped the 1930s.